Born in St. Petersburg, Nina Roudnikova graduated from a women's university, where she received a degree in medicine, becoming a physician.

She passionately believed in women's rights, equality & the Divine Feminine, a belief that's reflected in her tarot teaching.

In The Solar Way she writes that the so-called "masculine" & "feminine" principles are totally equal. Neither is absolutely active or passive, but each must play an equal part in magical practice.

She was interested in the occult from an early age, especially Egyptian Hermeticism, kabbalah, tarot, astrology, yoga & theosophy.

Like Valentin Tomberg, author of the famed Meditations on the Tarot (MotT), she too was a student of GOM, whose books I've previously discussed.

As such, Roudnikova served as the High Priestess who personally gave Tomberg his first magical initiation.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communists persecuted her as a witch for her yoga & tarot teaching, destroying many of her writings.

In 1919 she was forced to flee to Estonia, and later to Germany, where she got stuck when WWII broke out.

What few writings had survived largely perished in WWII. This book exists only due to a copy she sent to friends in Latin America.

The Solar Way - documenting her unique intellectual advances on GOM's core Hermetic, kabbalistic & alchemical tarot teaching - is one of less than a handful of her works to survive the tumults of history.

Besides extending GOM, her teaching here incorporates ideas from the work of another magician & tarot author, Shmakov, likewise mentioned by Tomberg in MotT.

Etteilla, Levi & Wirth were also foundational for her tarot ideas; she illustrates her book with an Etteilla deck.

Diverse & multiple influences like these inspired her to crystallize all she knew into a uniquely comprehensive tarot framework.

Roudnikova died in Konigsberg, then part of Germany, in 1940.

#tarot #witchy #occulture #divination #roudnikova #womenofthefrenchmagicalrevival #tomberg