Imagination, Optics, and Mediations: John Dee and the Art of Skrying

by Noah Gardiner

Noah Gardiner

This paper examines the sixteenth-century English natural philosopher John Dee's theory and practice of "skrying" – communicating with spirits through a visual medium such as a mirror or a crystal ball. While Dee (1527-1608/9) is famous for his many contributions to early modern science in the realms of optics, mathematics and navigation, the fact that he spent much of the last thirty years of his life speaking to a variety of angels and other spirits with the help of human mediums, "skryers," who saw and spoke to the spirits through crystal balls, has long puzzled those trying to place Dee in the history of science. Contrary to those historians who have regarded these practices as a reversion to irrational occultism on the part of the otherwise forward-looking Dee, I argue that these activities were a logical outgrowth of Dee's earlier interests, and that they were entirely in keeping with the intellectual, political and religious ferment of his time.

Dee stated explicitly that human imagination was central to the process of how skrying worked. Taking this as a starting point, I examine the interweaving of optics and imagination in the classical, medieval and early modern thought in which Dee was immersed. I argue that, beginning from his early work in optics, Dee's skrying practices grew out of discourses on the divine nature of light and the workings of the imaginative faculty. Working on the basis Dee's library catalogue and his hundreds of pages of transcriptions of conversations with angels, I attempt to demonstrate a light-based epistemology at the center of Dee's occult practices, one in which the imaginative faculty served as a natural intermediary between the divine and the terrestrial.