Insights to the Occult Arts

William Quan Judge · Black versus White Magic Series · 18 pages

A three-part series published in The Path across October, November and December of 1893, and one of Judge's more technical performances. It opens where a Victorian reader would have found solid ground: the word precipitation means to throw upon or within, and is used in chemistry for a substance suspended in fluid being made to disengage itself and fall to the bottom of the vessel, and in applied electricity for particles of metal thrown onto a plate from an electric bath.

Photography, he adds, describes the same effect by the word develop — the appearance on the sensitised gelatine plate of an image the camera has already caught. Having established that precipitation is an ordinary process performed daily in nearly every city in the world, he turns to the occult sense of the term, and the argument he wants is already half made: that the production of a letter or an image by occult means is not a suspension of natural law but the same operation conducted on another plane. It is a good example of how the Theosophical writers of the period reached for the science of their own day.

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