Zeitfreiheit in Paris: A Pilgrimage Through Surrealism, Sacred Science, and the Feminine Flame

by Cordula Frei

by Cordula Frei, for Parallax Media

The Train from Basel to Paris

It began with a message — from Aaron Cheak, a good friend and scholar of alchemy and initiator of hidden lineages — that arrived like a cipher just as the train crossed through Alsace. The winter mist curled over the fields, and I watched the landscape unfurl outside the train window, haunted by the names of René Schwaller de Lubicz and his sacred science. Aaron had written to me about the writings of Schwaller, whose visionary work explored the union of the masculine and the feminine in pharaonic Egypt — and this letter would be the first spark of a pilgrimage that changed me.

I was on my way to give a Rilke reading in Paris. Or so I thought.

When I arrived at Gare de Lyon, the city greeted me like a living text — full of thresholds and thresholds within thresholds. My Airbnb was tucked in the university quarter, filled with the dusty books, half-written poems, and lingering soul of its absent host, a Canadian poet. It felt more like a shrine than an apartment.

That night, I stood in the stone wine cellar in the heart of Paris, surrounded by shadows and wine and poetry were i was to do my lecture. I had planned to speak on Rilke — on his meditations, his mysticism. But something shifted. I found myself instead invoking Camille Claudel, her musehood, her exile, her fire. The words took their own shape. And as I spoke, a large man stepped up beside me — Andrew Sweeny, whom I had not met before, but who years later would become my co-visionary friend in the team of Parallax Media. David had vanished into the Parisian dusk. In his place, Andrew and I stood, sharing poems into the thick air, as if held in some subterranean rite.

That night, gunshots echoed in the streets once again. Paris was in one of its terrors. My daughter and David, my host, who magically had turned up again inmidst sirenes and police cars, sang Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluja” while we waited for the streets to quiet and occasionally opening his wine bottle that was tucked in his guitar case. The walls of the Airbnb pulsed with the tension of history, of art, of longing. And above it all, Aaron Cheak sent messages — transmissions, really — of Schwaller’s texts on sacred union and the archaic feminine.

Schwaller de Lubicz wrote:

“There is no consciousness without duality, and the return to unity — the true spiritual act — comes only through a conscious, living marriage of the feminine and the masculine. This is the alchemy.” - Le Temple de l’Homme

I understood then that this was not a reading. It was a rite or a transmission instead a living fusion of voices — past and present, male and female, visible and hidden.

Seven Years Later: Again in Paris - in the Rain

Seven years passed. The seasons of the soul turned. I returned to Paris once again, this time not as a speaker, but as a pilgrim of perception — with my partner, in the wet hush of a December night.

We waited in a long queue outside the Centre Pompidou, rain lacing our coats, umbrellas dripping onto the concrete. Inside was the surrealists’ realm: an exhibition that felt like stepping into the unconscious of the 20th century. Despite the hundreds of people present, the atmosphere was holy — a church of dream-images, erotic hauntings, and luminous disobedience.

Each painting transmitted. I saw Camille Claudel in every twisted figure. I heard Rilke’s angels muttering behind mirrored glass. I felt Schwaller’s Egyptian geometry encoded into Dali’s endless staircases and Carrington’s cosmic gardens. The surrealists were not merely artists. They were mediums and conduits but most of all oracles.

That night, we stumbled upon a hidden Chinese café not far from the Pompidou — exquisite and humble, full of fogged windows and delicate spice. The duck melted on the tongue like memory. In that place, everything folded together: Paris, prophecy, surrealism, and soup. Aaron’s letters. Leonard Cohen’s voice. The river waiting outside.

We stayed along the Seine that night — the river gliding by like an ancient breath. My partner and I watched it in silence, the city flickering around us. The Seine became the thread: the feminine, undivided. She had seen them all — Lou Andreas-Salomé, Camille Claudel, and all the forgotten women who held the torches for the men who claimed to shape history.

We visited Camille Claudel’s museum a few days later outside Paris — her birth home, now a sanctuary. I wept as i heard the sculptures sang. And I could not help but wonder — Did Rodin truly honor her? Was he ever whole without her? Did Rilke ever write a single enduring line without the breath of a woman at his back?

Even Rilke, that luminary of lyricism, confessed:

“Without Lou Salomé, I could not have become myself.”

And Lou? The weaver of men, the muse of Rilke, Nietzsche, and Freud — she was the unseen axis upon which so many of their minds turned. Without her, perhaps none of them would have found the courage to descend.

The next day, we drove to Chartres. The cathedral rose like a vision in the frost. Inside, the light moved through stained glass like blood through the veins of a higher body. Schwaller once said that Chartres held “a memory in stone of a sacred order.” Standing there, I saw that memory. I felt the feminine as presence — not merely inspiration, but origin but it was hard to trace with my rational mind. I stand at the threshold of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, shoes muffled by centuries of stone. The air carries incense and shadow. The nave stretches above like a great womb, vaulted and silent, holding more than architecture in memory, myth and longing. Before me, the labyrinth coils inward, not as a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be entered. And I wonder—not just about this path beneath me, but about the feminine that lies dormant here. What breathes beneath the stones? What whispers beneath the Marian blue of the stained glass?

There is something here that feels older than the cathedral itself, older even than the Virgin to whom it is dedicated. Something Celtic, perhaps. But surely wild and earthbound and spiraling. I sense a sacred geometry not imposed by doctrine but grown organically from the land, like ivy or bone. Was this once a place where the goddess was known by other names? Did the pilgrims who walked here once understand that to walk inward is to descend into the womb of the world?

The labyrinth, unlike the linear aisle or apse, does not promise destination but transformation. It winds like thought or like a memory imprinted in water. And in that, it feels profoundly feminine. Not in the reductive sense of gender, but in the archetypal, elemental sense as the feminine as a container or as cyclical knowing, the receptive and the intuitive, as Sophia—the wisdom the early Church once revered, before it was hushed into silence.

I recall Jean Gebser’s reflections—his sense of Spain as a place where the mythical shimmers just beneath the surface of the rational. He wrote of women with reverence, as vessels of time and being, their presence bound to sky and stone. His integral vision did not banish the feminine, but welcomed it home—as something essential to wholeness. As I walk the labyrinth, I feel the invitation he described: to move beyond duality, into transparency, into presence and perhaps into ever presence origin.

Days later, in Paris, I stand again in wonder, but now before a different spiral: the grotesque, gorgeous dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí at the Centre Pompidou. Here too, the feminine is everywhere—distorted, somehow innocently erotic, and of course: surreal. She is muse or the monster but for sure, the mystery. Dalí does not suppress her but fears her, exalts her, is undone by her. She emerges from drawers in the body. She melts across clocks and skies. She is wound into time itself.

Through the windows of the Pompidou, the Seine slides past like a silver serpent, slow and inexorable. The first snowflakes fall gently. A feminine river if ever there was one—curving, ancient, indifferent to category. The Seine too holds memory, but it doesn’t archive—it flows. I begin to think that Chartres and the Seine are speaking to each other, in different languages. One rooted in stone, the other in water. One still, one moving but both feminine, both sacred and both, somehow, asking us to remember. But how?

The Church, for all its beauty, feared what it could not contain. It crowned the Virgin but stripped her of her wildness and it veiled the Black Madonna. It paved over the spiral with doctrine. But stone remembers what is buried, and water remembers what was whispered.

So I stand—half in the labyrinth, half in the museum. Between spiral and stream. Between Chartres and the Seine. And I feel the feminine principle not as concept, but as presence, not lost, but waiting.

Not suppressed, but sleeping in symbols, in gestures, in dreams. It rises in the curved path, the painted eye, the holy well. It asks not for conquest, but for attention. For reverence. For re-integration. But how?

Perhaps that is the true pilgrimage: it is not outward, but goes inward.

It does not call to arrive, but to awaken, to walk the spiral, to watch the river, and to remember the feminine not as past, but as origin.

There are questions I carry with me still:

Why was Rilke so dependent on Lou Salomé?

Was Rodin ever whole without Camille?

Was Chartres really wholesome as a church or were there hidden and dormant deeper celtic geometric riddles and mysteries which we now could no longer forsee?

Did the masculine honor her, truly — or only after history had already forgotten her?

The Black Madonna in Chartres rests in a crypt.

It is a subterranean mystery.

She is not the Marian icon of radiant, sky-bound purity, but something older, darker, or perhaps more rooted. Her face is soot-darkened or painted black—or perhaps the blackness was always hers, not an accident of candle smoke but a truth hidden in plain sight.

This is not the Madonna of ascension but of descent which leads to earth, to womb, to alchemical night. Is she Isis, she is Cybele, she is Demeter before Persephone’s return? She is not a symbol of purity, but of power. Hidden in the crypt, she waits. She does not need to be seen to act but if you dare, she remembers.

In the hidden geometry of Chartres, in the winding path of the labyrinth, in the crypt where the Black Madonna waits—not as relic but as origin—she is there. Isha. She who sees not with the eye, but with the heart. She is Sia made flesh, consciousness as womb or perception as devotion.

The Egyptians knew her as Sia, the power of inward knowing, the vision before form. Schwaller de Lubicz taught us to read her in stone, in proportion, in the way the temple breathes. She is the silence beneath Hu, the space where the Word is conceived, the invisible architecture of the sacred.

Aaron Cheak calls her the revealer of the world-soul. Not as a idea, but as participation. Not in abstraction, but tin he luminous veil through which matter speaks its mystery.

She is the curve, not the line. The spiral, not the ladder. The one who whispers: you are not outside the sacred—you are shaped by it.

Isha is the presence that endures—through exile, suppression, symbol, and dream. She is the feminine principle not as gender, but as mode of knowing. She is not lost. Only veiled. And the veil is now parting.

To walk the path is not to seek her. It is to remember that she walks within us.

Isha: she who sees through the world to the soul beneath it.

As I bend close to a cold piece of stone in the nave of Chartres, my breath mingles with centuries of silence. The carved curves beneath my fingertips hum with an ancient pulse—something older than the soaring arches and the towering spires above. Around me, the cathedral’s masculine order—its sharp lines, its soaring verticals—seems to demand allegiance, structure, control. It is the domestic church this seems so much defined, contained, rigid to my senses.

Yet in the grain of the stone, in the soft worn edges where light pools, I feel her—the feminine principle—restless, veiled but alive. She does not shout or command. She whispers. A presence not confined by dogma, not overwhelmed by male architecture, but insistent, persistent in her call to remember.

She is the pulse beneath the stone, the curve beneath the line, the labyrinthine breath beneath the straight path.

I feel her there—a subtle, deep geometry of becoming. The call to remember her is a call to reawaken to a deeper architecture—not built by hand, but by heart.

In that moment, the cathedral shifts. It is no longer just stone and mortar, but a living dialogue between the seen and unseen. Between the light that claims the heavens and the shadow that cradles the earth.

She is the silent architect beneath it all. And so I bow to her, not in submission, but in recognition.

Gebser spoke of the “ever-present origin”—that place or presence not behind us in time, but beneath time, always available in transparency, when our structures of consciousness allow it. He knew that the mythical and magical structures still pulse within us. And I begin to feel that the Black Madonna is equally the ever-present origin—embodied. She doesn’t point beyond herself, as dogma might demand. She is the presence.

She is the forgotten feminine in stone. A symbol not of what was, but of what endures despite forgetting.

This brings me to Schwaller de Lubicz.

In Egypt, Schwaller read not just hieroglyphs but temples as texts—living systems of proportion, resonance, and symbolic language. To him, sacred architecture was not decorative—it was a language of initiation, encoding truths about cosmos, body, and spirit in form itself. He saw the feminine not as subject matter, but as method and matrix—the space within which meaning gestates. Temples, he argued, think. And they do so in feminine syntax: silence, curve, proportion, receptivity.

Chartres, like Luxor, is more than stone. Its geometry is not ornamental—it is intentional resonance. The ratios, the vesica piscis, the golden section—these are not aesthetic flourishes but invitations into a participatory cosmos. As Schwaller saw in Egypt, and as Chartres perhaps echoes, the feminine is not just revered here; it is the operating system.

Even the labyrinth is not a path to heaven but a diagram of the self, coiled and recursive, not a ladder but a womb, not a race but a spiral. This is feminine knowledge—cyclical, hidden, and profound. It is the symbolic in motion, like the river of Gebser’s transparency, or the inner movement of Schwaller’s “symbolique.”

So much has been overlaid upon her. The Magdalene as penitent, not priestess. The goddess as myth, not memory. But still—she persists. In the crypt, in the proportions, in the symbols waiting to be reawakened. Schwaller taught us to read stone as spirit, and Gebser to sense time as transparency. Between them is the Black Madonna—not conceptual, but living symbol, not in past, but as origin.

She is the body of wisdom buried under centuries of abstraction.

And I begin to wonder: if we walk the labyrinth not to reach God but to remember her—her who is wisdom, her who is the dark soil, her who is the spiral and the sky—then perhaps our entire metaphysics could turn, not from light to dark, but to wholeness.

Chartres is not just Gothic—it is alchemical. It holds, like Dendera or Karnak, a grammar of the cosmos in stone. But to read it, we must let go of straight lines. We must follow the curve, the vein and the descent.

We must, as Gebser urged, move from perspective to transparency.

We must, as Schwaller showed, feel the meaning that lies in form.

We must descend, like a pilgrim into the crypt, and meet the Black Madonna not as symbol—but as source.

And in Schwaller’s voice I hear the echoing answer:

“The feminine is not a symbol. She is the current that carries all symbols. She is not the muse. She is the mystery that makes any art possible.”- Le Temple de l’Homme

I do not know if my pilgrimage is complete. But I know it is circular — like the rose windows of Chartres, like the pulse of the Seine. And perhaps Parallax Media was never only a project. Perhaps it is a continuation of that original vow — to speak from where the masculine and feminine meet, in art, in alchemy, in the quiet certainty of poetic seeing.

We begin, again and again, on a train to Paris.

In a dream I cannot date, I am walking not in Chartres, but in Dendera. The columns breathe. They are alive with color and silence. Hathor watches from every wall—eyes wide, lips curled in some secret smile. Her temple doesn’t speak in doctrine but in geometry, light, scent, and symbol. The walls are not surfaces, but membranes. Every glyph, every proportion, every resonance seems to say: “You are not separate from the cosmos—you are its echo.”

I wake as if I had touched the hem of something immense. Not knowledge—but presence.

Schwaller de Lubicz called Dendera a “temple of man”, not because it honors man, but because it maps the divine within the human. He showed us that ancient Egypt didn’t separate architecture from astronomy, or proportion from prayer. It was a sacred science, a symbolist language encoded in structure, rhythm, and form. And at its center was not a god—but a goddess: Hathor. She of music, birth, intoxication, and cosmic harmony. She who births the universe through vibration.

It is no accident that Hathor’s temple at Dendera mirrors the same harmonics we find in Chartres. The use of the golden ratio, of solar alignment, of sound and space—it’s as if both structures were built not to represent the divine, but to embody it. To generate a field of consciousness. And that field, I begin to feel, is feminine in its very nature: receptive, dynamic, encompassing.

The feminine here is not merely nurturing. It is cosmic intelligence. The dark matrix out of which form arises. Not just the mother, but the mind behind matter.

Gebser’s “integral consciousness” echoes this. In Egypt, he saw the “pre-perspectival” world still alive. A world where myth, magic, and symbol were not naive projections—but modes of being, still whole, still rooted. He felt that these consciousness structures were not historical stages to be overcome, but layers within us, waiting for re-integration.

To walk through Dendera, then, is to walk through the symbolic body of this integration. And it is striking—how Hathor and the Black Madonna seem to rhyme. Both are keepers of mystery. Both are entrances, not conclusions. Both, in their way, are thresholds to the ever-present origin.

When I return in waking life to the river Seine, I find myself wondering if she, too, is a temple. A slow-moving shrine. She carries dreams, detritus, and the reflections of cathedrals. She teaches flow without striving. She is the opposite of conquest.

She is like the Nile, but quieter.

Schwaller believed that form is a function of consciousness—and that sacred architecture is a means to evolve that consciousness. What then, does it mean to build a cathedral like Chartres, a temple like Dendera, a dream-body like the labyrinth? What is being built within us as we enter them?

It is not belief. It is not certainty. It is resonance.

Perhaps this is the feminine principle we are circling: not as gender, nor even archetype, but as mode of knowing. A mode lost in the glare of reason. A knowing that includes the body, the dream, the symbol. The mythic. The felt.

This is not nostalgia—it is return, not as a regression—but resacralization.

The dream, the spiral, the temple—they do not point to another world. They reveal the depth of this one.

And so I walk again—not in Egypt, not in France, but in some invisible terrain braided between them. The labyrinth beneath my feet. The Black Madonna in her crypt or Hathor in her sycamore. And the river, always the river, whispering:

Remember. You are not separate. You are the symbol remembering itself.

In the last light of day, the river reflects not the sky, but a mystery deeper than reflection itself. The Seine, the Nile, the labyrinth at Chartres—they are all one movement. A turning inward, a spiral, a descent and an ascent folded into the same breath.

“The alchemical tradition does not seek to reduce the world to meaning; it seeks to restore meaning to the world—to re-sacralize matter.”

— Aaron Cheak, Alchemical Traditions

To walk the labyrinth, to approach the Black Madonna, to enter Hathor’s temple, is to re-sacralize. Not merely as an idea, but as a gesture of being. Cheak reminds us that alchemy is not metaphor—it is metaxu, the in-between. It is the feminine space between essence and matter, above and below, within and without.

“The feminine is not one half of a binary, but the receptive principle through which all binaries dissolve and are re-constellated.”

— Aaron Cheak, The Hermetic Deeps

This is the Sophia that Gebser could sense behind the Spanish sky. The hidden Isis that Schwaller traced in the stone symmetries of Dendera. The dark wisdom behind the Black Madonna’s gaze. The spiral logic of the labyrinth. This is not an idea of the feminine, this is the world-soul speaking.

Cheak’s work opens a space where philosophy, poetry, and ritual merge. Where language becomes once again ritualized breath. He shows that sacred knowing requires not the mastery of systems, but a kind of aesthetic fidelity to the invisible.

“Alchemy is not about what happens to matter—it is about what happens to us, when we learn to see matter as ensouled.”

— Aaron Cheak

And so, I realize: this entire journey—from Chartres to Egypt to the Centre Pompidou, from labyrinth to dream to river—has been not about the feminine as theme, but about becoming attuned to the feminine mode of world-relation.

It is a shift in ontological frequency. It is learning to see again.

Or perhaps more precisely—learning to be seen by the world.

To become, again, transparent to the origin.

To dwell, as Cheak might say, in the radiant threshold where symbol and substance become one. Where the stone sings. Where the river dreams. Where the Madonna remembers.

“The heart of the world is not hidden. It is veiled. And the veil is the mystery that reveals.”

— Aaron Cheak

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