Only a tiny handful of the keenly dedicated have continued to look for them, and even these people can no longer quite remember what the missing archetypes actually look like. Those who oppose repatriation of the missing archetypes still act as our culture's most powerful gatekeepers, deciding what books get published, what movies get made, what news gets reported, what TV shows get aired. They are the cultural descendants and beneficiaries of the kidnappers' crime and they do their best to denigrate and disparage the missing archetypes and anyone who grieves their absence. Yet times are changing and the yearning for these missing archetypes is escalating, albeit largely unconsciously. People don't know what's missing, just that something isn't there, something they know should be there.
People feel lost.
We are told we are happy, yet we yearn and we search without quite understanding what we search for. We'll know it, we tell ourselves, when we see it. The answer can be most profoundly appreciated when we look at which archetypes got kidnapped and at whose expense. In addition to the Hero, the Sage and the Trickster, whom we've already mentioned, there are a great many other archetypes. It's easy to envision them, to mentally make them material in the world, perhaps because we can imagine actual people, even people we know, being Santa Claus or Mother Earth or the Virgin Mary.