From relationships, from institutional demands, from collective obligation. Not by cowardice, nor nihilism, nor weakness - but by sacred refusal to collude with a world that has hollowed out the feminine into parody, and severed eros from its mythic root.
This retreat is not a conscious movement toward soul, for most men have not heard of soul. It is not a deliberate descent into myth, for most don't remember the myths. And yet it happens. Everywhere.
Men retreat not in search of the feminine within but in search of refuge. They turn away from real relationships, work, education, not because they hate women, but because the outer feminine devoid of beauty, of function, of soul has become unrecognizable. And if given a choice between emptiness and the parody, they choose emptiness. They choose nothing rather than violate what remains of their inner integrity.
But it is there, in the void, that the great possibility stirs.
Even if they do not name her, do not know her, have never met her, still within that emptiness, the anima awaits.
She does not need to be reimagined, reengineered, or "updated". She does not ask to be made familiar to the modern psyche. She need only be seen. Once. As she is. In the dark. Without distortion. Without irony. Without demand.
This act of remembering is enough.
Because where culture collapses, myth re-emerges. And where men descend into the silence beneath language, soul prepares its next eruption. The anima was never meant to be found in daylight; she is born in shadow, dwells in dream, and speaks first through absence.
So let it be said: true virtue is born in darkness.
And when men meet her there not as escape, not as fantasy, but as a reawakening they will return. Not as obedient citizens of a broken world, but as bearers of the fire: visionaries, warriors, poets, and builders, not of new systems but of meaningful life.
This is not disappearance, it's gestation.
