About Lumina
Lumina Institute takes its name from the plural of the Latin lumen: light, illumination, an opening.
For us, the name speaks to the Light at the heart of the Alchemical Work, the animating principle that alchemists have approached through many names and forms: Prima Materia, Mercurius, Spiritus Mundi. Alchemy seeks to understand and work with this Light as it is carried through matter: through plants, minerals, metals, animal substances, and the living world itself. The plurality of lumina feels important to us. The Light may be universal, but its expressions and physical carriers are many.
There is another meaning held within the name. Lumen carries the sense of an opening, and much of the Alchemical and Spagyric Art is concerned precisely with opening the materia: separating, refining, and recombining it in ways that make what is held within more available. In medicine making, this may mean liberating compounds from the structures that contain them, increasing their bioavailability, or concentrating and recombining what has been separated into another form.
And as we open the materia, we inevitably enter into a process of opening ourselves. The longer we spend with the Work, with the plants, the vessels, the operations, the failures, the unexpected transformations...the more Alchemy becomes something beyond a series of laboratory procedures. It becomes a living orientation toward life: a way of attending to transformation as it moves through matter, psyche, and the world around us.
We find a beautiful material correspondence of the name within plant biology itself. Inside the chloroplasts of plant cells are thylakoids, whose interior space is called the thylakoid lumen. Here, light participates in a remarkable sequence of transformations: water is split and oxygen released, while a proton gradient across the thylakoid membrane helps generate the chemical energy that ultimately supports the fixation of atmospheric carbon into organic matter. Here, quite literally, light enters into the processes through which life becomes matter.
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Lumina Institute was founded from a desire to bring dimensions of the Alchemical tradition that have become increasingly separated back into relationship. Laboratory and psyche. Philosophy and natural science. Matter and meaning. Logos and eros. We approach these as interwoven expressions of the Work.
Veritas in Materia est
The Truth is in the Materia
In our current collective paradigm of the Great Work, sentiment about modern chemistry/science is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is outright rejection of it, particularly due to the fact that modern chemistry in its inception essentially divorced the deeper philosophy of Alchemy and Spagyrics. The risk of continuing to reduce the subject to the mundane, to the merely physical bits and bites, is just as much, if not more of a risk today as it was when Alchemy and chemistry both went their separate ways. On the other hand, it can be argued that during the past 2000 years+ of the history of this subject, the greatest practitioners of this Art were indeed approaching it with a scientific mind to the best of their ability, albeit guided centrally by a philosophy rather than materiality.
It is precisely our position that there is an important intersection between matter and meaning in Alchemy, there always was, and always will be. This is the holistic nature of this natural art, science and philosophy, and indeed of life itself. Our understanding is that the perfect congruency of materiality and philosophy is actually the mark of Truth. What is life itself, if not the almost infinite individualized physical encasement of the universal animating spark? Is this not what allows for the unshaped and undisturbed spirit of all, to actuate itself? To express, experience, and find its way back home, via countless pathways leading back to the same single source?
So, our project seeks to take full advantage of our contemporary advances of modern chemistry, physics, biology, ecology, psychology, laboratory technique and equipment and whatever other modern materialistic gifts we have at our fingertips...all in the name of understanding, working with, amplifying and liberating the full potential of life in matter; the Light of all. These fields offer further ways of looking into the materia, asking what is happening there, and deepening our participation in the Work. The laboratory becomes a place of encounter, where inherited knowledge meets matter, observation, experience, and the unexpected. We believe the Work must ultimately be worked.
Through education, research, and direct laboratory practice, we approach Alchemy as a living tradition, one that continues to unfold through study, experimentation, and direct engagement with materia. We begin with what has been handed down, work it through our own hands and lives, and remain attentive to what the materia itself has to teach us.
Lumina Institute grows from this ongoing inquiry. It is a place to share what we have learned, continue asking questions, and participate in the further understanding of an Art that has been worked, questioned, and transformed for thousands of years.
Daniel Wiseman
Co-Founder, Director of Laboratory Education & Research
Founder of Secret Fire Spagyria and registered clinical herbalist, Daniel Wiseman has devoted his life to the study and practice of natural medicine. Initiated into the alchemical tradition in 2011, he has spent the past decade+ critically examining ancient alchemical texts and laboratory methods alongside modern chemistry and the natural sciences. Guided by an insatiable curiosity, he seeks to unite alchemy with contemporary clinical herbalism, scientific inquiry, and the arts, recovering its relevance for modern practice.
Ash Alexandria Sierra
Co-Founder, Depth-Psychology, Distillation & Aromatic Medicine
Ash Alexandria Sierra is an artist and plant devotee whose work explores the convergence of psyche, plants, and the imaginal dimensions of life. Ash has two decades of exploration in the occult and herbal medicine. Drawing from herbalism, farming, botanical distillation, contemplative traditions, years in clinical medical astrology, and a master's degree in Depth Psychology and Creativity, she brings these disciplines into conversation through Hermetic philosophy and alchemical thought.
She approaches aromatic medicine as a participatory practice through which the symbolic life of the psyche becomes perceptible and relationships with the living world are strengthened.
Ash's study of depth psychology began in 2012 with an encounter of Jung's Red Book. Around that same time, she became captivated by botanical distillation and the Hermetic alchemical tradition, discovering in both a shared language of psyche and transformation.
Since 2014, Ash has stewarded Ritual Botanica, an apothecary devoted to botanical medicine, distillation, and community education. Her newest project, Light on Water, explores mythopoetic perfumery and aromatic medicine through fragrances that invite deeper relationship with psyche.
Her graduate research centered on alchemy, fermentatio, aromatic medicine, and the ancient use of scent as a language capable of carrying and creating image, myth, and transformation. Drawing upon depth psychology, she understands imagination as a necessary bridge through which symbolic experience participates in the work of individuation.
Ash has devoted her work to Hermetic herbalism, with botanical distillation at the center of her practice, exploring both its practical applications and its rich alchemical and philosophical lineage. She has taught botanical distillation, herbal medicine, and medical astrology since 2017. She is Artist-in-Residence at Pacifica Graduate Institute and is dedicated to sharing this work with those seeking to mend the false divide between humanity and the living world.
