Helena Ivanovna Roerich (1879–1955) was the Russian philosopher and writer who recorded the Agni Yoga teaching. Among her students she is remembered as "the Mother of Agni Yoga."
In 1901 she married the painter Nicholas Roerich. Their lifelong union was also a collaboration: many of the powerful female figures in Nicholas's paintings are seen as connected with the inspiration Helena gave him. In the 1920s the family set out on a long expedition across Central Asia and the Himalayas, and then settled in the Kullu valley in India.
Helena Roerich gathered the teachings she said she received from the Master Morya into the fourteen-book Agni Yoga series. She translated H. P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine into Russian; the letters she wrote to her students were published in two volumes. In her letters she gave a special place to the creative feminine principle, and to the equal education and cooperation of women and men.
Together with H. P. Blavatsky and Alice A. Bailey, she is regarded as one of the three women who carried the Ageless Wisdom into the twentieth century.
Agni Yoga is a teaching introduced to the West in the 1920s by Nicholas and Helena Roerich. Its name means "the path of union with the sacred fire" in Sanskrit. Although its roots reach back to ancient Indian philosophy, it is in essence a way of life practiced in daily life, founded on conscious thought, love, creativity and spiritual energy.
Agni Yoga page →In Our Publications
- Helena – Nicholas RoerichThe life and legacy of the Roerichs.
Other Pages
Master Morya
Master of the first ray; Helena Roerich's teacher and the source of the Agni Yoga books.
Introduction to Agni Yoga
The relation of Agni Yoga to the other yogas and its practice in daily life.
Nicholas Roerich
Painter, scientist, traveler and thinker; his art and his Central Asian expeditions.
Lord Agni
The Lord of Fire of the Vedas and the symbol of the mental plane.
Agni Yoga Series
Our translations of Leaves of Morya's Garden and New Era Community.