In his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, John Dee describes Archemastrie as the “sovereign science.” Of the disciplines of Archemastrie, which bridge the emerging experimental sciences and the worldview of hermetic natural philosophy, Dee considered a kind of esoteric optics—whereby immanent experiential effects were brought about through experimentation with optical interfaces—to be central, making light itself the paradigmatic ontological intermediary of his methods.
Dee proposed that by using light as his primary medium, he could co-implicate Nature and Psyche through resonant reciprocity, thereby transforming ‘passive vision’ into ‘active vision’. The experimental methods of Archemastrie generated experiences that were simultaneously ‘natural’ and psycho-spiritual. Materiality, when apprehended through these experimental conditions, revealed its immanent potential for transfiguration. This syncretism merged the proto-scientific method of experimental observation (Baconian optics, after Alhazen and Alkindi) with the medieval metaphysics of light (Grosseteste) to creatively reconcile extramissionist and intramissionist theories of vision through a dual-aspect conception of light, considered as the principle mediator between realms.
Dee envisioned two ‘cones of vision’ to articulate the duality of Nature and Psyche: one governed by natural light, perceived by the physical eye, and the other by the inner light of imagination, corresponding to the ‘I’ of the psyche. Archemastrie sought to creatively intervene with this duality through a third principle: the optical interface. This interface functioned as a spectral mediator, corresponding to the psycho-physical embodiment of the practitioner. As light bridged the material and immaterial realms, the practitioner underwent a phenomenological transformation, experienced in the immanent transfiguration of light as consciousness.
Dee represented this interplay between dynamic psycho-physical thresholds and optical-dimensional effects using the symbol of the equilateral triangle, which he used as his signature, with the triangle often inscribed with radiating light. Such geometric ‘hieroglyphs’, which proliferate Dee’s private diaries, mapped the correspondences between the experimental processes and the immanent transformations and should be understood as talismans— underscoring the simultaneously poetic and cryptographic nature of the methods of correspondences.
Archemastrie, then, was a practice of resonance—an attunement to the spectral sonorities of light through an art of the interface, which generated correspondences that were cryptopoetically encoded. Through improvisational assemblages, experimental compositions of heterogeneous elements were entered into relation with the practitioner, through the interfacing of light. By bridging material content and immaterial expression, the transformation of perception was thereby an echoing co-transmutation, a reverberation.
“If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation (retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with sonority… filling it to its limits, into a vibrating sonorous world… What is secondary [in this image], what makes [this image only an image], are the sonorous well-spring… the sealed vase, the echo, the reflection of sonorous waves against the sides—in a word, all that belongs to the material and palpable world.” (Minkowski)
Techniques employing optical devices to establish correspondences include scrying (catoptromancy, crystallomancy, cyclicomancy, hydromancy) and catoptrics. Scrying involves gazing into reflective, translucent, or luminescent substances—crystals, stones, glass, mirrors, water, fire, or smoke—to produce oracular or cryptesthetic visions; catoptrics, the study of reflected light and image-forming optical systems using materials like mirrors or glass.
“If you were skilled in catoptrics, you would be able, by art, to imprint the rays of any star much more strongly upon any matter subjected to it than nature does itself.” (Dee)
Dee theorised that the effects of Archemastrie would naturally transcend the laboratory with implications extending into the societal and macrocosmic spheres. Through this work, he articulated a transversal ontology, applying Archemastrie to cosmogonic Architecture. If matter arises through reverberations in a microcosmic-macrocosmic network of correspondences, then the Archemaster’s role was to harmonise these relations through optical experiment, orienting the co-transmutation of Nature and Psyche.
This progression—from personal immanent perception in laboratory practice to societal application and macrocosmic resonance—traces a passage through successive ontological planes, cryptopoetically extrapolated through the discipline’s immanent, transcendental function.