If we place McLuhan’s progression of cultural change alongside Jean Gebser’s structural transforms in the evolution of consciousness, we can see that both the Canadian and the German scholars were noticing isomorphic patterns of cultural change.

Gebser: Structures of Consciousness
1. ARCHAIC (Prehistoric, but also Ever-present)
2. MAGICAL (Neolithic)
3. MYTHIC (Ancient Civilizations)
4. MENTAL (Classical to European Civilizations)
5. INTEGRAL (Emergent)

For some reason unknown to me, North American scholars of literature ignore Gebser, which is rather strange since Gebser was a friend of Lorca and Picasso and was intensely interested in artistic works as markers of the process of the evolution of consciousness.¹³ As someone who has spent the last forty years moving in and out of various cognitive domains, artistic, spiritual, and scientific, it does seem to me as if academic scholars live in an intellectual ghetto in which they rarely leave “the hood.” But here again the case may be simply one in which Gebser is guilty of having written sympathetically about Zen or Sri Aurobindo.

In the isomorphism of Gebser’s and McLuhan’s narratives we can see that both these cultural historians were sensitive to a complex dynamic in which the later stages recapitulated earlier structures of consciousness. McLuhan called this process “retrieval,” and Gebser called it “diaphony,” and both recognized that the foundational stage – oral or archaic – had not been eliminated but abides as an Ever-present Origin in the contemporary transformation that Gebser saw as Integral and McLuhan saw as a Dantean vision of the reintegration of humanity in the Mystical Body of Christ. Clearly, this is a grand narrative and not one of “les petits récits” favoured by the postmodernists in English departments.