Nina Pavlovna Roudnikova (1890-1940) has created a work which radiates with all the fullness of the Nineteenth Arcanum, traditionally called The Sun and also known as The Great Work, The Philosopher’s Gold – or Stone – and Synthetic Philosophy. The rays of this light illuminate some of the most heavily veiled aspects of earlier related works, including that of her initiatory master and Superior Incognuu of the legendary St Petersburg school of pre-Revolutionary Russian Occultism, G.O. Mebes.As a prominent Theosophist and the first inner circle pupil of Mebes – himself at the pinnacle of Russian Freemasonry, Rosicrucian, Templar and Kabbalistic occult schools – Nina escaped the motherland with the retreating Imperial army, carrying with her meticulous notes from the lectures Mebes gave to both his outer circle of initiates and the veiled inner circles to which she belonged. These were the only works of the master which would survive the ruthless intellectual purges of the OGPU, the secret police of the Bolshevik regime.Doctor, Poet, Teacher and even a Spy for the White Russian cause, Nina helped ensure the survival of the greatest occult teachings of the modern era, which through her would find their way across Western Europe – where having escaped Lenin and Stalin they then survived Hitler – to England and then across the Atlantic to South America.The Russian community in Estonia was the starting point of all this activity and it is here that Nina and others working with her encountered the young Christian Hermeticist, Valentin Tomberg and initiated him into all they knew of The Great Work. Nina Roudnikova’s Solar Way treads a roughly middle path through the metaphysical and philosophic teachings of Vladimir Shmakov on the one hand and the astral occultism of G.O. Mebes on the other. Her text includes some rather surprising historical information and hitherto unknown details gleaned from mystical societies and secret orders, including the Templars. Like both Shmakov and Mebes she is a disciple of the wisdom of ancient Egypt, which she sets against a background of new spiritual revelations which came to the world through the Theosophy of HP Blavatsky and Agni Yoga of the Roerichs. Like all masterworks of this school her Solar Way has a decidedly ‘synthetic’ character, which sublimates and synthesises knowledge of key teachings from within the tradition and develops them further with her own unique insights.