Valentin Tomberg

Valentin Arnoldevitch Tomberg (February 27, 1900 – February 24, 1973) was an Estonian-Russian Christian mystic, polyglot scholar and hermetic magician. T. H. Meyer and other Anthroposophists claimed that Tomberg was the 20th Century incarnation of the boddhisattva who will in time incarnate as the Maitreya Buddha.

Valentin Tomberg was born on March 11, 1900 (February 27 in the Old Russian Julian calendar) in St. Petersburg, Russia. His parents were Lutheran, the mother was a Russian and the father an Estonian of German origin, he was an official in the Tsarist government. As an adolescent, Tomberg was drawn to Theosophy and the mystical practices of Eastern Orthodoxy. In 1917 he was initiated into Hermetic Martinism by Prof. G. O. Mebes. He also discovered the works of Rudolf Steiner. In 1920, Tomberg fled with his family to Tallinn in Estonia, where, searching for his mother who had left the house, he discovered her with her dog tied to a tree, both shot by revolutionaries. Tomberg worked as a nurse at a hospital, in a pharmacy, on a farm and in the Tallinn Central Post Office. He studied languages and comparative religion at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

In 1925, Tomberg joined Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society. He married Maria Demski, a Polish Catholic, in the early 1930s; they had a son, Alexis. During the 1930s, Tomberg, then in his 30s, published his original occult research in a number of articles and lectures, which made him a controversial figure in Anthroposophical circles. As a result of the controversies, in 1938 the Tombergs were invited to move to Amsterdam. In 1940, however, he was asked to withdraw from the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands as well, by its chairman Zeylmans van Emmichhoven, due to his being too controversial.

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