From Maine to the California courts
Hatch was born at Dresden, Maine, in 1846. He studied at Maine Wesleyan Seminary and the University of Michigan Law School before entering legal practice in Minnesota in 1872. He was elected district attorney of Otter Tail County in 1874, the year he married Ida Stilphin. The following year he moved to California.
He became a judge in Santa Barbara County in 1880 and was re-elected before resigning during a later term to practise law in Los Angeles. His writing developed alongside that professional career. A contemporary legal history names Scientific Occultism among his books. He died in Los Angeles in 1912. Barker subsequently presented her Letters from a Living Dead Man series as communications from Hatch; that attribution is her claim about the origin of the messages.
A philosophy built around force and will
Scientific Occultism appeared in Los Angeles in 1905 with the subtitle A Hypothetical Basis of Life. Hatch begins by defining the distinction between a fundamental Law and the particular laws through which it operates. He then proposes enduring units of force whose interactions produce the variety of living experience. Mind, matter, rhythm, immortality and will become parts of the same argument.
The title’s appeal to science expresses Hatch’s ambition to make a comprehensive philosophy; his definitions and deductions remain his proposed system. Some Philosophy of the Hermetics, published in 1898 and credited to Hatch in bibliographical records, uses a different manner. Its preface deliberately contrasts plain exposition with rhapsody and concealment. Together the books show his interest in how an idea might be reasoned out or communicated through symbols.
