What Happens When the World Is Fatherless
The companion to Motherless. On the noble masculine we have never been allowed to meet, and why everything we are living through right now also depends on his return.
When I finished What Happens When the World is Motherless and sent it out into the world, I thought I had written the piece.
I hadn’t.
Almost the moment it went live, something flashed into my awareness with a clarity I had not been expecting. A sudden visceral knowing that the piece I had just written was only half the story.
The world is not only motherless. It is fatherless too.
And you cannot bring the Mother home by herself. It is not that kind of restoration. The Mother and the Father have always belonged to each other. The severance of one is the severance of the other. You cannot mend half of a torn thing.
If the Mother has been in exile, the noble masculine has been missing right alongside her. He disappeared when she disappeared, exiled by the same patriarchal forces that pushed her aside. He has been absent for as long as she has been absent. And we cannot bring one home without the other.
So this is that piece.
Why I have to write this
A word to the women before I go any further. Because I can feel the risk that this piece could be misread, and I need to close the door on that misreading before it opens.
I am not writing Fatherless because I have gone soft on men.
I am writing it because the Mother cannot come home to a world that has not also called the noble masculine home. She will not be safe. She will not be revered. She will not be held in the dignity that is hers. She will be, exactly as she has been for the last few thousand years, met by a masculine that does not know how to honor her, because it has never been taught. And we will find ourselves in the same endless story we have been trying to break for generations.
This is the cycle we keep running inside.
We call the Mother home. We rise. We find our voices. We reclaim our bodies. We gather in circle. We become more ourselves than we have been in thousands of years.
And then we meet the men. And many of the men have not done their work, to heal from the ravages of patriarchy, and what it has robbed them of. And so the Mother in us, newly risen, is met by the same unconscious, unreckoned, untutored masculine that has never known what to do with her. And she is wounded again. And we go back into hiding. And the whole thing resets.
This has been the shape of it for thousands of years. I am writing Fatherless because I do not want to run this loop one more time.
The return of the Mother without the return of the Father is not the return of the Mother. It is only the first half of a motion that collapses back on itself if the second half never arrives.
That wall must come down. Not by us hammering at it from our side. By the men on the other side of it doing the reckoning that has been waiting for them for so very long.
I am writing to the men now, as fiercely as I have ever written to us. Not because I have gone soft. Because I have gone deeper. Our work and their work are one work, done in two directions. Neither half completes itself without the other.
The Mother rising without the Father rising is how we got here the last time. I am not doing it again.
And to the men reading
I want to turn to you now, briefly, before I go any further.
I know many of you are here. I know some of you wrote to me. I know some of you are standing quietly at the back, not sure yet if this is for you.
You are.
This is for you. Not as spectator. As participant. As the one I am writing toward.
What I am about to say is going to land hard in places. I am not going to soften it. I owe you more than that, and so do you. But I want you to know, before we go in, that I am writing from love. Fierce love. The kind that refuses to let you stay asleep in the counterfeit of yourself that patriarchy has been handing you for four thousand years.
You are not the problem. You are not the enemy. You are the one we have been waiting for, alongside us. The one whose return is inseparable from hers.
So stay. Read all the way through. The piece is for you as much as it is for any of us.
Let us begin.
What came back
The morning after Motherless went out, I lit the candles on my altar.
I had been reading the responses for hours. Tea going cold next to me. I was a bit shocked at the chord of resonance the piece had struck.
Women who had wailed and thrown their phones across the room. Women in shock and disgust. Women who said they did not know they had been carrying this their whole lives until they read it, and then they could not stop. Women saying they are ready to stand, to circle, to call the Mother home.
And then there were the men.
I was not expecting the men. Which goes to show the depth of the issue. I had gotten so used to my own internalised idea that men do not want to hear from us women about things like this.
When their messages came pouring in, I sat at my altar and I cried. I felt something I have not felt in a long time inside the slow flood of these months. The Epstein files. The legislation. Roe. The website. The children. The whole unreckoned machinery of it grinding forward in the ordinary news cycle of our mornings.
Men I have never met, writing from their kitchens and their desks. Men crying. Men furious with a clean, specific fury I recognised instantly as the noble masculine finally handed something to stand against. One man wrote, as a man, I do not tolerate this. Period. End of story. Another wrote that not since reading bell hooks’s The Will to Change has a piece of writing challenged me as a man so deeply.
I have been feeling so much these last months. I know you have too. But reading your messages, I started to feel the visceral sense that I am not alone.
And reading all of your messages, 1000’s of them, I could feel a pulse of goodness underneath the horror. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of the yes that keeps rising even now, even inside this, even after everything..
And from that altar, with the candles lit and my face wet, this companion piece began to write itself.
A note on where I am writing from
If I am being honest with you, and I am, I know this wound in my own body. I was not well-fathered. I have raised myself from fifteen on. I am, decidedly, unparented.
I am not writing this from the warm middle of a well-fathered life, offering tidy wisdom about men to women who have been mauled. I am writing it from inside the same longing a lot of us are carrying. And still, I still love the men. I still believe in the noble masculine. And I want to tell you what I mean by that.
What patriarchy actually is
I want to name something that will land uncomfortably for some of us. I am going to name it anyway, because I think we are ready.
Patriarchy is not the masculine winning.
Patriarchy is the masculine broken.
Read that again if you need to. I had to, the first time I thought it.
For thousands of years we have lived inside a structure we call patriarchy. And we have, with quite good evidence, identified it as the source of most of what has gone catastrophically wrong on this planet. The wars. The extraction. The legislation of women’s bodies by men who have not earned the right to name a single one of our organs. The worship of force over tenderness. Dominance over relationship. Empire over earth.
All of that is real.
And the men are not patriarchy’s beneficiaries. They are its foot soldiers. Its casualties. Its orphans.
Patriarchy took the noble masculine out into a field somewhere about four thousand years ago and shot him. Then it put a uniform on the body and told every boy born since that this was what a man looked like.
That was never what a man looked like.
That was the corpse of one.
The noble masculine
Somewhere underneath all of it, there is an archetype that has been waiting a very long time to be named.
He is the protector, and the steward. The one who stands between the vulnerable and the harm. Whose strength is in the service of what he loves, rather than at the throat of what he fears.
He is the father who blesses, not the one who withholds. The one who sees his child and says yes. You. Exactly as you are. I am here. You are safe.
He is the lover who worships, but does not seek to own or posses. The one who kneels before the feminine because he recognises what she carries, and rises alongside her because his ground is different and his ground is also sacred.
He is the elder who holds. Who has sat with his own shadow long enough to no longer project it onto someone smaller. Who has grieved his own father’s absence, and chosen, consciously, not to recreate it.
He has been missing so long that most men alive today have no living memory of him. Their fathers did not embody him. Their fathers’ fathers did not embody him. Each generation has been handed a counterfeit and told it was the real thing.
Imagine being handed a counterfeit of yourself at birth, and spending your whole life trying to live up to something that was never you.
That is what has happened to men under patriarchy. And we are asking them to hear our rage about it.
[Image: The Green Man. Ancient figure of the noble masculine. Earliest cave representations from 25,000 BCE.]
What a fatherless world actually feels like in the body
Let me tell you what fatherless means. The felt texture of it from inside my body. I am asking the men reading to linger here especially. This is not an indictment. This is a map of what has happened to you too.
On the personal level.
It means there has never been a man in your life whose shoulder you could lay your head on and feel the world go quiet.
It means you learned early that if you wanted to be safe, you had to become the one watching the door.
It means you walk to your car at night with your keys between your fingers. Nobody taught you. You simply absorbed it, the way a plant absorbs light.
It means your nervous system runs a threat assessment every time a man gets too close on a train, and you call it normal, because it is.
It means you have not been held by a man, really held, stilled, met, seen, in so long you cannot remember what it felt like.
On the relational level.
It means your father loved you and did not know how to reach you.
It means your brother was taught to armour at eight and has not cried in front of you since.
It means your husband loves you and cannot name three things that are alive in him right now.
It means your son is thirteen and has already learned to say I’m fine when you can see from across the room that he is not.
It means you have been in partnership with a man for years, and at some point the touch became functional, and neither of you has the language to begin the conversation that would bring it back.
It means your daughter is looking for a father in every boy she kisses. She does not know why. You do. And you cannot bear it.
On the cultural level.
It means the boys are killing themselves in numbers we refuse to look at.
It means the men are dying of loneliness, and the medical system calls it a hundred other names.
It means a boy can make it to twenty-five without a single adult man ever asking him how he actually is.
It means the men who legislate our bodies have never once paused to examine why they feel the compulsion to.
It means the men who run the extraction industries cannot feel the earth under their feet any more, because you cannot feel what you have been trained since boyhood not to feel.
It means there is a grabbing, narcissistic, wilful little boy’s hand in the highest office in the land, elevated there by the very culture that spent forty years pretending his violence toward women was locker room talk.
It means the Epstein files. The names. The drugged women. The children. The men who knew. The full-altitude demonstration of what happens when the unreckoned masculine reaches the top of a pyramid and finds that nobody has ever asked it to stand for anything.
On the archetypal level.
It means the Good Father has been exiled from our cosmology just as thoroughly as the Great Mother.
It means when a boy reaches for a template of the sacred masculine, he finds a soldier. When he reaches further, he finds an emperor. When he reaches all the way down, he finds nothing.
It means the only model of masculine divinity we have left in the dominant story is a jealous, punishing, solitary sky god who demands obedience and destroys what displeases him.
It means every myth of initiation, where the boy was once taken by the elders and handed back to the village as a man who had known the underworld and returned, has gone quiet.
It means there is no Osiris. No Green Man. No wounded healer. No holy king. No consort of the goddess in the dominant imagination. Only the uniform. Only the corpse with the uniform on it.
On the spiritual level.
It means the men do not know how to grieve.
It means they do not know how to descend, how to rest, how to kneel, how to belong.
It means a boy can make it to forty without ever having knelt before anything, and then we wonder why he cannot stand for anything either.
It means a generation of men has been trained that the only legal emotion is rage outward. And so everything else, the grief and the fear and the tenderness and the love, has metastasised into precisely the rage we are now watching externalised onto women, children, the earth, and each other.
It means we have built an entire civilisation on top of the wound of the missing father, and we have called the wound progress, and we have called the wound strength, and we have called the wound masculine.
That is fatherless. That is the air the men have been breathing. That is the air we have all been breathing.
The noble masculine would never stand for what is happening right now. He would block the way. He would throw his body between the powerful and the child. He would say no to his brothers and mean it. He would feel the earth underneath him.
His absence is what we are paying for. In bloodshed. In greed. In the abuse on the bodies of women and children. In a culture that cannot feel itself.
And the men who are doing the harm are also the men whose fathers never blessed them, whose elders never initiated them, whose culture handed them a counterfeit of themselves and told them to perform it or die.
Both are true. And if we cannot hold both, we cannot heal this.
The pulse underneath
What I am clear on is that, something is stirring.
It is not the revolution, yet. Not the arrival of the Father at scale. Not the end of patriarchy. Let us not confuse a first tremor for the shift itself.
But something. Something I have not felt in thirty years of doing this work.
Men are beginning to answer.
One wrote that he read Motherless and took it to his men’s group the next day. They sat in the silence afterwards and then one of them started talking, and then another, and they were there until midnight. Another wrote that he cried in a way he had not cried since his own father died. Another that he had been waiting his whole life for a woman’s voice in this space to tell him how to help.
We have been waiting over three thousand years for this. Longer, really. Through every witch trial, every silenced girl, every drugged wife, every legislative erasure, every generation of women who died without ever being met.
A handful of men writing to say this is terrible and I am with you is not the arrival of the noble masculine at scale. It is a few trees beginning to move in what is still an almost windless forest.
But the trees are moving.
I am not asking you, sisters, to throw a parade. Nothing about this rewards the basic fucking minimum that ought to have been the baseline for thousands of years. I feel the slight intake of breath at even naming it. I feel it in my own body.
And.
If I cannot feel the pulse of goodness beginning to rise in men, even now, even here, then I have lost the thread of what this work is actually for.
This work is not the accumulation of grievance. This work is the restoration of the Whole. The Mother, yes. And the Father. And the relationship between them, severed for ten thousand years. And the ordinary humans, women and men, whose bodies carry the pain of that severing, and whose bodies also carry, somehow, still, the pulse of what could be otherwise.
The return of one is the return of the other. This is the work of anyone awake inside the end of this long era.
For the men who are reading, which I know so many of you are
I want to speak to you directly. Because the question you are most likely carrying, if this piece has moved something in you, is what do I actually do now.
Not a list of tasks. A map of the inner territory first, and then the outer action that follows from it.
You cannot call the noble masculine forward in the world without first calling him forward in yourself. Skip the inner movement, and the outer one will collapse the first time it is tested.
These are my invitations. They are very similar to the work my sisters and I have been doing for years, to recover and heal from the insanity and cruelty of patriarchy.
Meet the wounded boy inside you.
Every man is carrying one. The boy who was not fathered, not blessed, not seen. The boy who was told his tenderness was dangerous, his tears were weakness, his fear was shameful.
Most men have spent their whole adult lives pretending that boy is not there. Reclaiming the noble masculine begins with meeting him. Not fixing him. Just meeting him. Letting him speak. Letting him cry. Letting him be seen, possibly for the first time ever.
Grieve the father you did not have.
Almost every man alive is carrying a grief about his own father. Either he was absent. Or present but armoured. Or he loved you and did his best and still could not teach you how to be a man, because nobody taught him either.
That grief, moved, is what frees you to father differently. It is also what lets you stop looking for a father in every older man you meet, which is what unfathered men do without knowing they are doing it. Let it come.
Feel what you have been trained not to feel.
Tenderness. Fear. Sadness. Longing. Need. These are not unmanly. They are the parts of you that were exiled when you were too small to defend them.
You were told, somewhere between four and twelve, that real men do not feel these things. That was a lie. The difference between the great men and the rest is that great men had elders who taught them feeling is strength. Most of us did not.
Start small. One feeling a day. Name it. Let it stay longer than it wants to.
Find your elders.
Real ones. Men ten, twenty, thirty years older than you who have done this work themselves. Men who can see you. Men who can bless you.
If you do not have any, go find them. Men’s circles. Therapy rooms. Recovery communities. The books of the men who wrote about this before us. You are not the first man to need an elder. Find yours. And when you do, let him see you.
Descend.
Into your own shadow. Your own rage. Your own capacity for harm. Your own pornography use. Your own silences. Your own complicities.
Most men skip this part. They do the nice parts of men’s work and avoid the underworld. The noble masculine does not. He is the man who has been there and come back. Who has reckoned honestly with what he has done, and what he has watched other men do and stayed silent about.
You should not do this alone. This is what the circle is for. This is what the elder is for. But it has to happen.
Come home to your body.
Your body is not a machine you drive. It is where you live. Most men have abandoned their bodies to the point where they cannot feel their own feet on the floor, cannot feel the difference between hungry and anxious, cannot feel whether they are tired or just running on momentum.
Feel your feet right now. Feel your chest. Feel your breath. A man who is not in his body cannot father anything. Not a child. Not a company. Not the earth.
Reclaim your own voice.
The voice that knows what you actually think, feel, want. The voice that has been performing something slightly other than itself since you were ten.
Find it. It is in there. It is probably quieter than the performed voice, and more tender, and it probably says things you have been trained to swallow. The noble masculine speaks in his own voice. He does not speak in the voice the culture handed him.
And then, learn to be witnessed.
This is the deep one. To reclaim the noble masculine is, at the deepest level, to develop the capacity to be seen by another whole human being and not disappear. Not armour up. Not shut down. Not run. Stay.
Let her eyes be on you. Let your son watch you cry. Let your elder bless what is actually in you.
This is the work of a lifetime. You will fail at it constantly. The willingness to keep practising is the thing.
When this begins to move in you, the outer work becomes almost obvious. But for specificity, here is what it asks.
Find one other man this week and read this piece with him. Talk about what moved in you. If you do not have another man to do this with, notice that. That is the first wound.
Find a men’s circle. The ManKind Project. Evryman. Sacred Sons. Your local men’s grief group. If none exist near you, start one. Three men. A living room. Regularity.
Read. Robert Bly’s Iron John for the theory. bell hooks’s The Will to Change for the heart. Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return for the initiatory frame. Start with one.
Interrupt the joke. The next time you are in a room of men and it lands wrong, do not laugh. One sentence, from a man, in a room of men, does more than a thousand women writing essays. “You are better than that, mate”. Stay in the room after you say it.
Teach your sons with your body. Not with the lecture. With the way you speak about women when you think nobody is listening. They are always listening.
Use your power. Whatever power you have. Promote the woman who deserves it. Believe the woman who reports it. Refuse the deal that requires you to look away.
Come back. Come all the way back. Nobody is asking you to kneel. We are asking you to stand.
For the women
Tell the men in your life that you see the noble masculine in them. Directly. Out loud. I see the man in you who is more than this. I am talking to him. That sentence, spoken from the mouth of a woman who loves a man, is one of the oldest pieces of medicine there is. Most men alive today have never once, not ever, heard a woman say it.
Name the good men out loud. Your father, if he was. Your grandfather, the uncle, the neighbour, the teacher. Say their names. Tell the story. Name the men in your life who are doing the work, the ones in circle, the ones in therapy, the ones showing up. Put them in front of the boys in your life as templates. Every time you name a good man out loud, you bring the archetype one inch closer to the surface of the culture.
Bless the boys in your life. If you are a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a teacher, a neighbour, a sister, a friend, bless the boys. Out loud. Tell them they are good. Tell them their softness is strong. Tell them their tears are welcome. Tell them they are not what the algorithm says a man is. Tell them what a man actually is. They will remember your voice for the rest of their lives.
Send your husband, your brother, your father, your friend, to his own work. Not with contempt. With fierce love. Tell him you cannot do his grief for him. Tell him you cannot father him into himself. Tell him there is a circle of men waiting for him, somewhere, and his job is to go find them. Then let him go.
What I know in my bones
I began this piece at my altar, the morning after Motherless went out into the world, with the candles lit and my face wet. I want to end there too.
We are living through something. All of us. Women and men. The slow flood of these months, the files, the laws, the website, the ordinary horror of the news cycle. I am not going to pretend it is not happening. We are inside it.
And I am here to tell you, from the middle of my own body, that I can feel the pulse.
The pulse of goodness rising. The pulse of the desire in ordinary people to be more human with each other. The pulse of women waking up in numbers that frighten the structures that depend on us sleeping. The pulse of men beginning, tentatively, some of them, to answer.
The Mother is rising. I know this in my bones. She has been rising in my body and in the bodies of the women around me for years now.
And what became clear to me, in the writing of this piece and in the reading of what came back, is that the Father is rising with her.
He has to be. They have always belonged to each other. The one cannot come home alone.
So I am watching for him, The noble masculine, and I am calling him forward. The one we have not been allowed to meet for thousands of years. The one whose face is emerging, slowly, in the writing of the men who are finding their own voices in response to ours. The one who is stirring in the boys we are blessing. The one who is waking up in the men sitting in circles at midnight talking about grief for the first time in their lives.
He is coming.
Call him forward. Name him out loud. Refuse anything less.
The noble father is rising, beloveds.
The pulse is real.
Meet him.
P.S: A note on language and belonging
Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.
The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union — what the alchemists called coniunctio, what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths — happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.
When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.
But the medicine — the calling home of the Mother and the Father — is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.
If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The Sacred Reckoning is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.
Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.
In love and devotion Elayne Kalila
A note on language and belonging
Since Motherless and Fatherless went out into the world, I have received a thoughtful and important letter from a reader who is a trans man, asking where the trans and non-binary community fits inside this framework. I want to answer publicly, because the question deserves a public answer.
The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine are not biological categories. They are archetypal frequencies. They live in every human being. We all carry both within us, and the work of Sacred Union, what the alchemists called coniunctio. And what every wisdom tradition has understood at its depths, happens inside every soul, regardless of the body it lives in.
When I write in the language of women and men, I am writing into a cultural wound that has been enacted along binary lines. The website. The legislation. The Epstein files. The structures of patriarchy that have hurt all of us. Those have been organised through a binary, and exposing that binary is part of the diagnostic work of the series.
But the medicine, the calling home of the Mother and the Father, is for everyone. There is no version of this work that does not include trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and every human being who has felt the severance and is finding their way back to the Whole. The trans women who mother. The trans men reclaiming the noble masculine in themselves. The non-binary souls integrating both within. You are doing the deepest archetypal work there is. You belong inside this conversation. You have always belonged inside it.
If my language has not always made this clear, I want to make it clear now. The time of the apocalypse- and reckoning it is bringing, is for all of us. The return of the Mother and the Father is the return of the Whole, and the Whole has no exclusions. It cannot. That is the whole point.
Thank you to the reader who wrote in. Your letter is the kind of generosity that makes this work better.
in love and devotion Elayne Kalila 🌹
I have been quietly formulating a better vision of masculinity to write about to the male (and female) audience and you summed it up perfectly. At the centre of it are the words nobility and honour. Two deeply masculine words which describe the true alpha (i.e. the masculine hero) and which are entirely foreign to today's misogynist males.
I just wanted to let you know that there are men on the other side who not only hear your message. It is a calling which has been rising in some of us. I showed my son a film involving male honour the other day and I was crying through most of it. It's a world we've lost and if I can I'd like to be a voice calling for it to come back