The Red Goddess Rising: Jean Gebser, Consciousness Mutation, and the Feminine Reawakening

by Cordula Frei

The Red Goddess Rising: Jean Gebser, Consciousness Mutation, and the Feminine Reawakening

In a world where the future seems simultaneously accelerated and collapsing, a more primal question re-emerges beneath progress narratives and social change: Who is the woman becoming? Not just the woman of contemporary society, but the woman who remembers — not only history, but deep time. Who is she in an era of consciousness mutation, and how might she embody a future not yet fully born?

Rather than searching for static archetypes or essentialist roles, we are invited to consider the feminine as a field of emergence—a multidimensional presence unfolding alongside the evolution of consciousness itself. This path is illuminated in the work of Jean Gebser, the German-Swiss cultural philosopher whose integral theory of consciousness offers not only a map of psychic evolution, but a gateway to remembering our full human inheritance.

Gebser’s vision has found profound contemporary expression in the work of Jeremy D. Johnson, whose ongoing course at Parallax Media, titled Integral Time: Intimations of an Emerging Worldview, reanimates Gebser’s ideas for a time of climate crisis, digital dissolution, and cultural mutation. Johnson's inquiry asks: What happens when we reclaim time from the machinery of progress? And how can the we—in a mythic and posthuman sense, evolutionary in the sense of always becoming “the planetary”—serve as both guardian and embodiment of this new temporality?

This essay explores how Gebser’s notion of consciousness mutations provides a vital language also for the becoming of the post-postmodern woman—not as a fixed identity, but as a living invocation of integral presence.

In this moment of planetary unraveling and renewal, a new figure is emerging — not merely as an evolution of the feminine, but as a mutation of consciousness itself. She is not a revival of old archetypes, not a return to the goddess as romanticized icon, nor a reaction against patriarchy cast in mirrored terms. Rather, she is a remembering — a somatic and psychic reactivation of what Jean Gebser called the "ever-present origin"—that which was never lost, only buried beneath the sediment of linear time, abstraction, and forgetfulness.

The post-postmodern woman does not inherit her identity from the categories of modernity or from the oppositional stances of postmodernity. She is not defined by what she resists. She emerges from a place deeper than critique or progress. She rises from the groundless ground of being, where the archaic, magical, mythic, and mental structures of consciousness coexist, flickering together in layered simultaneity. She is the embodiment of what Gebser named the integral structure—not as concept or aspiration, but as a living, breathing form of time-awareness, soul-memory, and creative presence.

To become this woman is not to reclaim a fixed role, but to become the ground in which all roles dissolve. She remembers the archaic not as primitive, but as primordial; the magical not as superstition, but as relational participation; the mythic not as illusion, but as symbolic coherence; and the mental not as the pinnacle, but as one pattern among many. She is able to hold contradiction without collapse, paradox without panic, and complexity without fragmentation. She does not strive to transcend embodiment, but deepens into it, letting flesh become the medium of memory, vision, and transformation.

Her emergence is not a trend or identity; it is a necessity. In a time marked by polycrisis, climate grief, and the unraveling of mechanistic paradigms, her presence brings a counter-current: not a solution in the technocratic sense, but a shift in the very perception of what it means to be human, to care, to hold time differently. She is the feminine not as gendered essence, but as ontological orientation—a way of relating to the world that values interiority, radical interconnection, gestation, slowness, and unseen coherence.

She is not here to mimic masculine models of power. She is here to hold the space in which those models dissolve. She is not here to lead in conventional terms, but to become the field through which true presence becomes possible again. Her leadership is gravitational, not directive; it gathers, constellates, and deepens. In this sense she does not seek dominion, but resonance and does not build empires, but sanctuaries—living architectures of soul and soil, time and tenderness.

Gebser's vision of mutation is crucial here. The structures of consciousness do not replace one another, but irrupt, layer, and integrate. The post-postmodern woman is a being in whom these structures move freely, no longer bound to historical sequence.

She is temporal multiplicity embodied.

In her, the archaic night and the digital dawn are not in conflict, but woven. She remembers myth in the age of AI, ritual in the rhythm of networks, stillness in the storm of speed.

And she does not walk alone, she arrives in chorus with others: not as a mass movement or brandable moment, but as a subtle shift, a slow return of something long suppressed. She may be scholar, artist, mystic, mother, childless wanderer, initiator, or recluse. And for this reason, she is not one figure but many, not a type but a turning that unites not form, but presence—the way time gathers differently around them, the way they listen to the earth, speak in symbol, rest in paradox.

To call her the "Red Goddess" is not to reduce her to a title, but to name the energy that pulses through her becoming.

Red: for blood, for root, for eros, for revolt.

Goddess: not as divine feminine cliché, but as force of coherence in a fractured age. She is the guardian of thresholds, not to protect the past, but to make possible the future.

Her task is not to fix the world, but to re-weave it and to hold the subtle threads of being in her hands and midwife a civilization that remembers how to feel, to belong, to breathe with the cosmos. She is the feminine presence as remembrance of wholeness. And in that remembering, the future finds its shape.

Jean Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin, outlines five major structures of consciousness:

Archaic – The undifferentiated unity of pure being.

Magical – Preverbal participation with nature, characterized by affect and immediacy.

Mythical – The rise of polarity, symbolism, cyclical time, and story.

Mental – The linear, rational, perspectival structure that underpins modernity.

Integral – A newly dawning structure of transparency and atemporality, capable of integrating all previous modes without collapsing into them.

Gebser insists that these structures are not simply evolutionary stages to transcend. Each one still lives within us, accessible to those who can hold them in aperceptive awareness, what he called diaphaneity, a transparency to origin.

In this light, the postmodern woman’s path is not to choose between the archaic goddess or the mental-rational achiever, but to live as a simultaneity—a mutation in herself.

She is not a return to “the feminine” as historically defined, but a threshold being, one whose body, mind, and field of presence becomes a carrier of multi-structured awareness.

As Gebser writes:

“What is required is not a return to an earlier structure, but a breakthrough to a structure which can encompass and integrate all previous ones.”

— Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin

This is not self-improvement but rather ontological metamorphosis.

Writer, philosopher, and editor-in-chief of Mutations Journal, Jeremy D. Johnson brings Gebser’s vision into contemporary relevance with rare intellectual intimacy. In his course, Integral Time: Intimations of an Emerging Worldview (Parallax, 2025), Jeremy presents Gebser’s schema not as a linear developmental ladder, but as a resonant field where multiple temporalities and structures co-exist.

This is where the Red Goddess enters—not as a deity to worship, but as an emergent figure of integral temporality. She arises where myth, mind, and matter conspire toward coherence. To speak of the Red Goddess is not to project a new role model. It is to name the field of resonance within which the integral woman appears. She is not a character, a Jungian archetype, or a revival of matriarchal religion. She is the self-aware mutation—a woman becoming herself across dimensions, across time.

She does not regress to mythic goddess cults, nor does she shatter herself in mental abstraction. Instead, she becomes the spaceholder for a full-spectrum ontology, one who is capable of holding paradox and presence, grief and gnosis.

As Jeremy Johnson writes in his forthcoming book, Fragments of an Integral Future (2025):

“The integral is not what comes next in a linear sequence, but what reveals itself when all time becomes available in the present.”

The feminine principle, in this sense, is not what men lack or women possess. It is a way of holding time differently—less as sequence, more as frequency. Women—especially those attuned to inner thresholds—are among the most sensitive carriers of this frequency, not because of gender, but because of their historical relationship with cyclical time, birth, and embodied mystery.

We are living in a moment of profound cultural mutation, one in which the old frames are collapsing and the new has not yet arrived. Gebser called this the irruption of origin. Johnson names it a kind of temporal alchemy, where the past resurfaces—not to trap us, but to fuel emergence.

The integral woman is the priestess of this alchemy. She is not bound by the ideology of progress, nor trapped in the trauma of history. Instead, she remembers what it means to see through the world—to hold the visible and invisible, the archaic and the posthuman, in a single gesture of presence.

To reclaim time from progress is to become capable of presence as power. This is not merely contemplative stillness, it is active, erotic, mythic, intellectual, and political all at once. The woman who moves in this field does not copy masculine models or return to mythic femininity. She mutates into her own integral frequency.

And in doing so, she invites the world to change.

As Jeremy D. Johnson suggests, our moment is not just one of crisis—it is one of kairos, the sacred rupture in linear time through which the future can begin again. And through the feminine—no longer role but resonance—it already has.

ANDREW SWEENY: 108 SONGS FOR THE RED GODDESS

108 Songs for the Red Goddess is a raw and devotional collection of poems that defy convention, offend modern sensibilities, and challenge the pillar saints' religiosity with their bold, erotic message. Andrew Sweeny’s work is part rebellion, part reverence, and a spontaneous exploration of longing, crisis, and illumination. Who is the Red Goddess? She has been worshipped for centuries under many names—exalted in hidden shrines of the East, condemned as a pagan or witch in the West. She is the tantric consort, the sky dancer, the union of emptiness and luminosity, form and formlessness.

ISBN 978-84-129484-5-5, 170 Pages, 13 x 20 cm, Paperback

GET THE BOOK HERE

About: Andrew Sweeny

A writer, poet, musician, and teacher, Andrew Sweeny has authored numerous music albums and poetry collections. With a rich background in music, literature, and personal development, Andrew brings a surprising and provocative energy to his work.

For over 25 years, Andrew has been deeply engaged in Zen and Vajrayana practices, which infuse his artistic and intellectual endeavours with depth and mindfulness. He is the founder of a vibrant poetry salon, the host of a popular podcast, and a key contributor to Parallax Academy, where he designs and delivers thought-provoking courses.

In addition to co-running Parallax magazine, Andrew teaches at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris and actively participates in long-form discussions with some of the most brilliant minds on the internet.

Andrew lives in Avon, near the resting place of spiritual luminary George Gurdjieff, with his wife Amelia, their two children, and their pug, Walt Whitman.

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