Sister Ray

"The Monas is discussed as a "stella hieroglyphica," as Yates points out, in the promise of more secret philosophy... Lunar Mercury, with a cross transformed on its ends into Jupiter and Saturn and topped with an arrow for Sagittarius, as in the great conjunction in Sagittarius of December/ January 1603/4, the year of the reopening of Christian Rosenkreutz's grave. "

"Dee... shows by geometry how a cross flows from a single point creating four arms, thus at the crossing point of two lines. Dee joins the cross (and Mercury) to the sign for Aries, the Ram, in itself formed by a conjunction of the shifted signs for Jupiter and Saturn. Taken in this way the Monas speaks of the new entry of the conjunctions into the fiery trigon, marked by the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the celestial sign of Aries in 1583. The "fiery trigon" is the pattern of passage of the planets in the zodiacal signs of Aries in 1583, to that of Sagittarius in December-January of 1603/4, and, significantly, to that of Leo in 1623."

"Dee's Monas was intended to be an index and, in this function, it was probably unique among Renaissance emblems, since it not only symbolised the process of transmutation, but displayed that process in its very form. In other words, Dee believed that the form of his Monas was identical to its physical referent, for, as the alchemist worked through the geometrical proofs of his Monas, he simultaneously engaged in "real" alchemy in a very special way.
Through the Monas, in fact, the alchemist operated the occult powers of the heavens themselves, forcing the stars to enact transmutation without involving himself in practical toil.
Dee explained the difference between the indexical function of the Monas and his earlier practical methods, stating these had been crude in comparison of his new system in which the Monas replaced the mirrors of conventional catoptrics. The Monas, effectively,could be used to make a perfect mirror, without the previous mental and mechanical tedium. In this concept, Dee may have been influenced by Ficino's account of the manner in which the Magus could turn his own spirit into a theurgical "mirror" through the esoteric application of optical geometry and Pythagorean ratios."

"... part of the Monad suggests that “the subject which is to be transmuted in the process symbolized by the monad is the artist, or magus, himself, and that it is his soul which, in a mystical sense, has to be separated from its body: When the terrestrial centre of the monad (which centre may here well mean the human body) has been united in a perpetual marriage to a certain supernal influence of solar and lunar quality, the monad can no longer ‘be fed or watered on its native soil’, and he who fed it will himself undergo a metamorphosis as a result of which he will henceforth only rarely be beheld by mortal eye.” Yet Josten also notes that “in Dee's view, the chances of alchemical success in the external world are diminishing as that world, by progressing in time, descends into spiritually darker ages, and that any palpable success in the transmutation of metals may, if at all, be hoped for only after the successful completion of a most unusual and dangerous work.”[59]

This writer suggests that the “unusual and dangerous work” Dee and his circle start attempting in 1580, and continue from 1583-1588 on the continent, is the transmutation of an Age, to perform what Kabbalists might call a cosmic restoration of the Sephiroth via Tikkun haolom (the repair and restoration of the world). Bridges argues that the three-fold transmutation of some alchemical works is 1) the inner transformation of the body’s energies, 2) the external transmutation of using those energies to effect physical states, and 3) the transmutation of time itself, “from the darkness of the Iron Age to the Splendour of the Golden Age.”"