Valentin Arnoldevitch Tomberg (St. Petersburg 1900 – Majorca 1973), a Russian-Baltic of Lutheran faith, began to frequent the esoteric circles of St. Petersburg from his youth. In 1917 he joined the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
In 1918, due to the Bolshevik revolution, he fled to Tallinn in Estonia, where he married in 1922. In 1920 he met some members of the Mebes group, which was dedicated to the Tarot study as an occult system. In 1924 he began studying Comparative Languages and Religions at the prestigious Estonian University of Tartu. In 1925 he was elected to
the vice-presidency of the Estonian Anthroposophical Society inspired by Rudolf Steiner.
Beginning in 1930, he held numerous anthroposophical conferences and contributed to the movement’s publications. In 1932 he became Secretary-General of the Baltic Anthroposophical Society. In 1933 he married for the second time. In the following years, he detached himself more and more from the Anthroposophical Society until, in 1937, he resigned. This change of direction was mainly due to a different understanding of the Christocentric concept already present in Rudolf Steiner and the numerous conflicts that had broken out in the anthroposophical circle after the founder’s death in 1925.
In 1938 Tomberg settled in Rotterdam in Holland, where he gave some lectures on the second coming of Christ in etheric guise. He then moved to Amsterdam, where he worked as a translator and teacher while hiding from the Nazi roundups.
At the end of the war, he converted to Catholicism, and after studying at the University of Cologne in Germany, he obtained a doctorate in International Law. In 1948 he left Germany permanently and moved to Reading, near London. Thanks to his outstanding linguistic skills, he got a prominent professional position at the BBC as a Russian translator. In 1960 he retired, and from 1963 to 1967, he devoted himself to composing numerous writings, including Meditations on the Tarot, a Journey into Christian Hermeticism, published posthumously and anonymously at his request.
He died in 1973 during a vacation in Majorca due to a stroke. A short time later, Marie Demski Tomberg, wife and collaborator, followed him.