What Happens When the World Is Motherless
On the CNN "rape academy" story, the ten thousand year erasure of the Mother, and what we do now.
Trigger Warning.
A note before you begin, my love. This piece moves through tender and activating territory. If today is not the day, please put it down. Make yourself a cup of tea. Come back when you are ready. The work will still be here. x
I am sitting at my kitchen table reading the CNN article.
I have my tea next to me. The morning is ordinary. The light is coming in the way it always comes in. And I am reading a sentence about men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before they rape them.
I read it once and my brain stops and refuses to let it in.
I read it again.
Then I hear myself say it out loud, because that is the only way the words are going to land in my body.
“The website is called Motherless.”
And when I hear my own voice say it, something tears open. The horror moves through me in a wave that starts in my chest and keeps going. I am shaking. My hand is over my mouth. I hear myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen.
What the fuck.
What the actual fuck.
What can possibly be next.
Because it is not just this, my loves. It is this, landing on top of the Epstein files, on top of the SAVE Act. Landing on top of the erasure of Roe Vs. Wade. And of everything else we have been absorbing month after month after month, each one a little more surreal than the last, each one a little more impossible to metabolise before the next one arrives.
This is the Handmaid’s Tale. We are in it. We are living in it. We are reading it in the news with our morning tea.
And I sit there, at the table, with the horror still moving through me, and I realise something that I want to bring to you now. Because I think it is the only place to begin.
The website is called Motherless.
Read that. Out loud if you can. Let it sit in your mouth for a moment.
Motherless.com. Sixty-two million visits in February alone. Twenty thousand videos of what the men on the site call “sleep content.” Tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In those videos a man lifts the closed eyelid of his drugged wife on camera, to prove she is fully under, before he films what he does to her.
A Telegram group linked straight off the site. About a thousand men strong. They trade dosages the way other men trade fantasy football tips.
Bottles of tasteless liquid for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pop, shipped anywhere in the world.
Livestreams of assault at twenty dollars a viewer. Crypto preferred.
This is not the dark web. This is the indexed, legal, ad-supported internet. This site had more monthly traffic than most newspapers. And the name at the top of the masthead is Motherless.
I want us to stay with that. Because the men who built this have told us exactly what they are. They always do. The name is the confession. The name is the unveiling.
Apocalypse does not mean destruction. The Greek root, apokalypsis, means to uncover and pull back the veil. And what we are watching right now, in the ordinary news cycle of April 2026, is the veil being pulled back on what a motherless world actually produces. This is not an archetype on a bookshelf. This is men, in their millions, congregating to render their own wives unconscious so they can use their bodies without the inconvenience of being witnessed.
Sit with that for a moment. They cannot bear to be seen by her. They need her eyes closed. They need her absent from her own life. They need her as object. The whole erotic charge is her unknowing.
What kind of man needs a woman drugged to touch her?
A motherless one.
I want to say very clearly, I have zero interest in shaming the men who have found themselves inside this machinery, and zero interest in protecting the men who built it. Those are two very different conversations, and I can hold both. As a psychotherapist, as a woman devoted to the return of the divine feminine and the Mother, what I am interested in is the diagnosis. And the diagnosis is written out in clear sight.
What a motherless world actually feels like in the body
Let me tell you what motherless means. The felt experience of it, on every level we live on. Let this one land slowly, my love. Let yourself feel where each sentence hits in your body.
On the personal level it means..
You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.
When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.
When you cry you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.
Your body has been braced since you were a small girl and you do not remember what unbraced feels like. Your shoulders are up near your ears right now. Drop them. Feel how fast they come back up.
You learned to mother yourself before you were out of primary school because there was not enough to go around, and you have been doing it ever since, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.
On the relational level it means…
Your friendships are transactional and you know it. Voice notes. Schedules. Catching up. You love these women and you would do anything for them and you have not actually been held by one of them in a year.
Your daughter came home bleeding for the first time and you ordered her pads from Amazon and asked if she was okay and she said yes and you both moved on.
Your own mother is ageing and you do not know how to be near her grief, or your own, so you phone once a week and keep it light.
You have a husband or a partner or a lover, and the touch between you has become functional, and neither of you quite remembers when it stopped being anything else.
There are women in your neighbourhood whose names you do not know, and if one of you collapsed in the street, the other would call an ambulance and go home.
On the cultural level it means
Birth is a medical emergency managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.
Death is a medical failure managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.
Menopause is a deficiency to be corrected.
Menstruation is a hygiene problem.
Ageing is a cosmetic crisis.
The wisdom of a woman at seventy is worth less, socially and economically, than the smoothness of a woman at twenty five.
There is no cultural container for grief that lasts longer than a funeral.
We call a woman hysterical when she is telling the truth and composed when she has learned to swallow it.
The word crone, which once meant keeper of the deepest wisdom, is now used as an insult.
Your local high street has three nail bars and zero elders.
On the archetypal level it means…
The Great Mother, who for tens of thousands of years was the central image of the sacred, who was Inanna and Isis and Asherah and Tiamat and Sophia and the Shekinah and the Black Madonna and a thousand other names, has been exiled from our cosmology.
We live inside a story that begins with a father god alone in the sky. Alone. No partner. No mother. No consort. Just Him.
When a little boy looks up at the heavens looking for the divine, he is told to look for a man.
When a little girl looks up at the heavens looking for herself, she is told to look for a man.
The feminine has been cut out of the very shape of the sacred, and so has the body, and so has the earth, and so has everything we are made of.
On the spiritual level it means…
We do not know how to die well.
We do not know how to be born well.
We do not know how to grieve, or how to descend, or how to rest, or how to belong.
The body is treated as an obstacle to holiness rather than its temple.
We are ashamed of what makes us alive.
We have severed the cord that once connected every human being to the earth, to the ancestors, to the dark mysteries, to the rhythm of the moon, to the knowing in the blood.
We have a generation of seekers who are spiritually starving in a world where spirituality is a booming industry.
We have built an entire civilisation on top of a wound, and called the wound normal, and called the civilisation progress.
That is motherless. That is the air we are all breathing. Motherless.com did not invent this. It is just the loudest part of a song we have been humming for a very, very long time.
And yes, this is why Roe came down. And yes, this is why the SAVE Act threatens to disenfranchise millions of women who changed their names when they married. And yes, this is why the Epstein client list is treated as background noise rather than a five alarm fire. And yes, this is why Motherless dot com had sixty-two million visits in February.
They are the same story. They are the same severance. They are the same machine, wearing different uniforms.
The ten thousand year severance
I have been tracking this for more than three decades, and I will tell you what I know.
The erasure of the Mother is of course not a recent thing.
For most of human history, and I mean most, stretching back tens of thousands of years, the sacred was feminine. We have her figures carved in mammoth bone and limestone, dating from twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago. Wide hipped. Full breasted. Pregnant bellied. Held in the palm of the hand like a prayer. She is all over the archaeological record of our species, long before anyone was writing anything down, long before anyone was building temples to a sky father. She was the first image we made of the holy.
Around ten thousand years ago something began to shift. As agriculture took hold, as property took hold, as patriarchal structures of lineage and ownership began to replace older cooperative ways of living, the Mother started to be displaced. Slowly at first. Then not so slowly.
By about four thousand years ago the rewriting was well underway. In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, the great goddess Tiamat is split in half by her grandson Marduk, and her body becomes the raw material for his new world. That is not a metaphor I invented. That is on the clay tablets. The primordial Mother, dismembered, and her body used as building blocks for a male cosmos. This is the founding text of the world we still live in.
Then came the last two thousand years in earnest. The temples of the goddess were systematically destroyed. The priestesses were murdered or forcibly converted. Asherah, who had been worshipped alongside Yahweh for centuries, was written out of the Hebrew Bible. The Great Goddess of the Mediterranean world, in all her many names, was declared demonic. The Gnostics who remembered Sophia were persecuted as heretics. Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, was rewritten as a prostitute by a pope in the sixth century. The Black Madonnas were hidden in crypts. The village wise women became witches. Something on the order of hundreds of thousands of women, possibly millions across the centuries, were tortured and burned by churches and states for carrying the old knowledge, for being midwives, for being healers, for being eccentric, for being old, for being beautiful, for being poor, for being alone.
Every midwife replaced by a surgeon.
Every birth moved from the home to the hospital.
Every girl taught that her body was shame.
Every boy taught that softness was weakness.
Every grandmother dying alone in a facility where nobody knew her name.
I am writing this list long on purpose, my love. I want you to feel the length of the severing. Ten thousand years of pulling the Mother out of everything. Two thousand years of putting her to death every time she tried to return. And here we are, arriving at the inevitable end of that arithmetic, and we are shocked that men built a website called Motherless and sixty two million people visited it in a month.
Motherless.com is the logical outcome. It is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough. The men there were not imported from some other world. They are our world. They are our sons and our husbands and our fathers and the man who delivered your package yesterday. Some of them are us on a different timeline.
Of course this is where it ends. Where else could it end?
Venus Of Willendorf created over 25,000 years ago.
To the men in our lives
And this is where I have to stop, and turn, and speak directly to you.
The men reading this. The ones who saw the CNN headline and felt sick in your body. The ones who are not doing this and cannot imagine doing this. I love you. I need more from you. And I am going to be specific.
Your silence is the oxygen this fire breathes.
The men on Motherless were not raised in some separate society. They were raised in the locker rooms and the group chats and the fraternities and the dinner tables you were also in. They heard the same jokes. They passed around the same early porn. They learned the same lessons about what a woman is for. The only difference between them and you is where you drew the line. They kept going. You stopped.
The question for you now is what you do with the ones who have not stopped yet.
One man. One real conversation. This week. I am asking you for that.
Ask your best friend what he actually watches. Ask your brother what he is teaching his son. Ask your father if he has ever really looked at any of this. Break the silence in the group chat the next time a joke lands wrong. Be the one who does not laugh.
Sit down with the boy in your life, whoever he is. Your son, your nephew, the kid you coach. Before the algorithm finds him, if he is still young. After it has found him, if he is not. Tell him what those images are actually designed to do to his nervous system. Tell him what a woman is. Tell him what he is. Tell him the truth about the first time you were shown something you wish you had not been shown, and what it cost you.
Become the elder. This role has been empty for three generations. It is waiting for you. You do not need a title. You need a willingness to say the true thing in a room where nobody else will.
If you are a man in a position of leadership, a pastor, a coach, a manager, a teacher, a father, name this from the front of the room this week. Do not wait until it is safe. It is never going to become safe.
This is what it means to mother men. Yes. I said mother. Because real mothering has never been soft. Real mothering sets fierce limits. Real mothering says no. Real mothering names the thing. Real mothering does not indulge the tantrum. Real mothering initiates. Real mothering drags the child out of the fire whether or not the child wants to come.
The Sumerians knew this. Inanna descends into the underworld, and she is stripped of her seven powers, and she hangs on a meat hook for three days. The goddess who hangs her there is Ereshkigal, her own dark sister. The Mother has a ferocious face. She is the one who says no. She is the one who ends things. She is the one who will not let you destroy yourself.
We have lost her. We have lost her so completely that we built Motherless dot com and handed it to our sons.
How we bring The Mother back
So how do we bring Her back.
The Mother has never come back through PR. She moves the way she has always moved. Through our bodies. Through us sharing a meal. Through sitting at the bedside. Through being in circle. Through the No that saves a life, and the Yes that makes one.
So.
Put the kettle on. Phone your mum if you still have one. If you do not, phone the woman who has been one to you.
Ask your grandmother what she wanted to be before she was what she became. Write it down. She is carrying something that needs to be carried forward.
Cook for someone who is grieving. Show up with the food. Do not ask if she wants it.
Sit with the dying. Sit with the newborn. These are the same threshold, and they are both tended by the Mother, and both of them are being tended by strangers right now.
Tell your daughter her blood is holy before anyone else gets to tell her it is disgusting.
Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. No content calendar. No agenda. Just the circle. This is the oldest medicine there is.
Walk on the land and say its name. If you do not know its name, find out whose land you are standing on. She knows.
Eat a meal without a screen. Mourn out loud when you lose something. Refuse to be alone when you do not have to be.
Mother yourself ferociously when nobody else is doing it.
Say no with your whole chest. Say yes with your whole body. Stop abandoning other women. Stop abandoning yourself.
This is not a spiritual hobby, my love. This is how a culture comes back from the brink.
What we do now
Here is the action. All of it. Do as much of it as you can.
Share this piece. Do not just read it and close the tab. This story will cycle off the news in seventy-two hours if we let it. We are not going to let it.
Have one hard conversation this week. Just one. With a man you love. About what you just read.
Follow the reporters who broke this. CNN’s Saskya Vandoorne. The German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh. Amplify their work. They have paid for it.
Write to your representatives. Ask them why Section 230 still shields a platform hosting twenty thousand videos of drugged women, and why the only enforcement on record is a paperwork fine.
If you are a woman reading this and you are not in a circle, find one. Or start one. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. That is how it begins.
If you are a man reading this and you want in, I will say it plainly. Find other good men and build something. Do not wait for the women in your life to convene you. That is the whole point.
And to those of us who have been doing this sacred work for years. The priestesses. The midwives. The therapists. The mothers. The writers. The healers. The witches. The ordinary women who are holding whole communities together with their bare hands.
We keep going. We deepen. We do not flinch.
The veil is lifting, beloveds. We are being shown, in broad daylight, what a motherless world produces.
What we do with the sight is the work.
Do not look away.
We are so much stronger together - remember you are not alone.
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.
Thank you dear Elayne. These are the words I didn’t have the capacity to write but I felt each one and the sacred well you drew them up from. Thank you sister. 🔥♥️🌹
We have a lot of work to do sisters