Valentin Arnoldevitch Tomberg (St. Petersburg, 1900 – Majorca, 1973) was a Russian-Baltic of Lutheran faith who began frequenting the esoteric circles of St. Petersburg in his youth. In 1917, he joined the Theosophical Society, which was founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
In 1918, following the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled to Tallinn, Estonia, where he got married in 1922. In 1920, he encountered members of the Mebes group, which was dedicated to studying Tarot as an occult system. In 1924, he began studying Comparative Languages and Religions at the prestigious University of Tartu in Estonia. By 1925, he was elected vice president of the Estonian Anthroposophical Society, inspired by the teachings of 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 increasingly distanced himself 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’s work and to the numerous conflicts that broke out in the anthroposophical circle after the founder’s death in 1925.
In 1938, Tomberg moved to Rotterdam, Holland, where he delivered lectures on the Second Coming of Christ in an etheric form. He later relocated to Amsterdam, where he worked as a translator and teacher while evading Nazi roundups.
After the war, he converted to Catholicism and studied at the University of Cologne in Germany, earning a doctorate in International Law. In 1948, he left Germany for good and moved to Reading, near London. Due to his exceptional language skills, he secured a prominent position at the BBC as a Russian translator. He retired in 1960, and from 1963 to 1967, he focused on writing numerous works, including “Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism”, which he published posthumously and anonymously at his request.
He passed away in 1973 during a vacation in Majorca, Spain, due to a stroke. Shortly after, his wife and collaborator, Marie Demski Tomberg, followed him.