Warning to Phenomena Seekers

William Quan Judge · Black versus White Magic Series · 5 pages

The shortest document in the section, and one of the most practical. An excerpt from Judge's Conversations on Occultism, serialised in The Path through 1888, it answers a question that must have been put to him constantly: why those who can produce phenomena so rarely will. The answer is mechanical rather than moral. No phenomenon is possible without the aid or disturbance of elementals; each entails a great expenditure of force and a correspondingly great disturbance in the elemental world, beyond the limit natural to ordinary human life.

What happens next is the warning. As soon as the phenomenon is complete the disturbance begins to be compensated for, and the excited elementals precipitate themselves in various directions. They cannot affect the protected. They can enter the sphere of the unprotected — and especially of those studying occultism — where they act as agents concentrating that person's karma, bringing on troubles and disasters that might otherwise have been spread thinly enough to pass as the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Hence the rule that an adept will not produce a phenomenon unless he sees the desire in another's mind, since that establishes a sympathetic relation and a tacit acceptance of the consequences. Five pages, and it explains more of the Society's history than its length suggests.

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