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 engage both material Nature and Psyche, transforming ‘passive vision’ into ‘active vision’. Immanent experiential effects, therefore, refer to experiences that are simultaneously ‘natural’ (perceptual or material) and psycho-spiritual. The cause, materially perceived, also contains an immanent quality capable of transfiguration. This syncretism merges the proto-scientific method of experimental observation (especially vis-à-vis Baconian optics, after Alhazen and Alkindi) with medieval metaphysics of light (Grosseteste). Such metaphysics creatively reconciled extramissionist and intramissionist theories of vision through the dual capacity of Light, considered as the principle mediator between realms.
Dee envisioned two ‘cones of vision’ embodying the duality of Nature and Psyche: one representing natural light perceived by the physical eye, and the other representing the light of the imagination, corresponding to the ‘I’ of the psyche and the immaterial dimension of being. Archemastrie sought to creatively intervene with this duality through a third principle: the optical interface. This interface functioned as a spectral mediator, corresponding directly to the embodied practitioner. As light bridged the material and immaterial realms, the practitioner underwent a phenomenological transformation, experienced as an immanent transfiguration of light as consciousness itself.
Dee represented this interplay dynamic thresholds optical-dimensional effects using the symbol of the equilateral triangle, often depicted emitting rays of light, which he used as his signature. Such geometric ‘figuratives’, which Dee’s private diaries, mapped the correspondences between experimental processes and immanent transformations and should be understood as geometric hieroglyphs, cryptographic talismans, or ‘diagrams of immanence’— underscoring the simultaneously poetic and cryptographic nature of the methods of correspondences.
The practice of Archemastrie, then, involved generating reverberations between the perceptual and the immanent, interfacing with an ontological plane of being through the spectral nature of light. The interplay was achieved via improvisational assemblages that were cryptopoetically encoded, which is to say experimental compositions of heterogeneous elements that entered into relations through experiential correspondences with the practitioner. These assemblages enacted a transformation of perception, bridging material content and immaterial expression, enabling the a transmutation, which we can understand in the terms of the kind of reverberation Minkowski had in mind:
“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 these correspondences include scrying (catoptromancy, crystallomancy, cyclicomancy, and 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 these assemblages would transcend the laboratory and operate on a higher plane of being, 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, guiding the co-transmutation between Nature and Psyche.
The progression—from personal immanent perception in laboratory practice, through to societal application and macrocosmic resonance—marks a passage through successive ontological planes that were extrapolated cryptopoetically extrapolated through the immanent, transcendental function of the discipline itself.