The Story of The Cunt: Feminine Disempowerment & Etymology
She has been known in ancient times and continuously throughout history even up to the moment by names too numerous to mention. She predates Christianity (who adopted her names, her liturgy, her holidays, her rites and her places of worship) by thousands of years. Remains of her temples and her images have been found on every continent and in every country the world over. For the last two thousand years she has been abused, misused, maligned and cast out by those “in control”. Her worshippers have suffered rape, the rack, nail screws, stonings, skewerings, stampede, flayings, quartings, burning, drowning, disembowlment and any number of unmentionable tortures in the quest to rid the world of her influence. And yet she lives on, not in our memories as a quaint fertility object from a distant and barbarous past, but as a living breathing regenerating entity upon which all humans reside. She is Gaia (Gaea), the Great Earth Mother. She is also the triple Goddess; maid, mother, and crone or the creator, the sustainer and the destroyer. She is the virgin and she is the sacred whore. The Goddess is back, (although she never left) and she is seeking retribution for the sins of the fathers and the sins of the sons back seven generations.
To understand the defilement of The Great Mother we need only look to the language of our times. As children we were instructed not to say certain words, because they were bad words. “Cunt, bitch and whore”, are representative of those words. Yet when we investigate their etymology we find not words of debasement, but words of honor and names of the Great Mother.
The words “cunt, bitch and whore” are not slang, a dialect or any marginal form but true language words of the oldest stock. Words are not evil or good, they simply are. It is the connotation that society gives them which labels them “bad”. In the case of these Goddess related words it was society (now ancient society), indoctrinated by pagan-hating religious hierarchy who sought to defame the feminine in any and all forms. It is time we become reeducated to the true meanings of language and seek to reinstate The Great Mother on her rightful throne of authority, wisdom and knowledge. The Oriental Great Goddess Cunti was also known as “Yoni of the Universe”. Yoni translates to vulva and was used 6-8,000 BCE. The Greek Goddess was “Kunthus.” The Sanscrit Goddess was “Kunti.” Goddess Cunina was known to protect children and Canaanite priestesses were known as Khnt.
Purportedly, in India “Kunda” (derived from Goddess Cunti) were female children born out of wedlock and were considered divine gifts of the Goddess Kunda. To the Chinese, Kunda were females having no natural connection with their fathers. The Latin word “cunnus,” is the common root of language describing the word we know today as cunt. Words that stem from the Latin root are cunabula (cradle), cuntipotent (all powerful, having cunt/feminine magic), cunicle (hole or passage), cuniculate (penetrated by a passage). It is a true language word of the oldest origins and is a word that has direct correlation to the Divine Mother. What has become an ugly word in our lexicon was once simply a word used to describe “the feminine” in different variations in almost every culture. The word cunt harkens back to an era in time when women were honored as life givers and wisdom bearers. It described the Sacred Feminine which was a mysterious wellspring creation that births both male and female, a circle that contains both yin and yang.
The Oriental Great Goddess Cunti would be honored to know that her name has endured through the millennia, retaining its original meaning to describe a part of the female anatomy. However, she would surely be offended that what was once a word used to describe the Sacred Feminine has now become profane.
“Horea” was a Persian word that meant “Ladies of the Hour” which evolved into the word we know today as whore. In Greece the Horae were Aphrodite’s celestial nymphs, who performed the Dances of the Hours, acted as midwives to the Gods and inspired earthly Horae (harlot priestesses) to train men in Sexual Mysteries.
The dance, the hora, was based on the priestesses’ imitation of the zodiacal circling of “hours”. Time-keeping is known as horology because of the systems devised by these ancient priestesses of the Goddess. The Horae were called “fair ones, begetters of all things, who in appointed order bring on day and night, summer and winter, so as to make months and years grow full.”
The Vestal Virgins serving in the temples of Vesta and Hestia in Greece and Rome were originally harlot-priestesses. The temples of Aphrodite at Eryx, Corinth and Cyprus were served by a thousand sacred harlots apiece. The promiscuous priestess-shamans of Japan were called Holy Mothers. Every Babylonian woman prostituted herself in the temple before marriage. The original meaning of the word prostitute is “unmarried woman”. (Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets…Walker, B.)
A bitch was once an honored and powerful woman. The Bitch Goddess of antiquity was known in all the Indo European cultures, beginning with the Great Bitch Sarama who led the Vedic dogs of death. Artemis-Diana, leader of the Scythian alani or “hunting dogs” was another such Bitch Goddess. Harlots or “bitches” were identified in the ancient Roman cult of the Goddess Lupa, the Wolf Bitch, whose priestesses, the lupae, gave their name to prostitutes in general.
Tantra is Sanskrit for sacred Hindu and Buddhist scriptures known as Tantrics, which provide detailed instructions on a wide range of topics including spiritual knowledge, technology and science. Their content is often paradoxical. In Trantric, science and mysticism go hand in hand. In Tantra the Yoni is seen from a perspective of love and respect, as important a fact for men to learn today as in the yesteryears. Yoni is a Sanskrit word for vagina or translated as sacred space or sacred Temple. Words are not good or evil, positive or negative, of or by themselves, they simply are. It is society who determines words acceptability or vulgarity. It was pagan hating religious hierarchy who sought to defame the feminine in all forms and caused the word cunt to evolve into what we know it as today. In all things there is polarity and the polarity allows balance. White is to black, day is to night, male is to female, positive is to negative, up is to down, in the same way that virgin is to the whore or creator is to destroyer. We do not judge the day as being “better” than the night, nor black as being more powerful than white. We only experience day because it is balanced by night, or summer as balanced by winter.
Who are we then to judge a whore as being less righteous than a virgin? When we understand that, all is balance; all has an opposite pole. We can even make peace with the atrocities of the dark ages for they were balanced by the strides made in the Renaissance. A dark age vs. an age of enlightenment.
One of the most revered and most powerful Goddesses of all time is Kali. Her worship and unbroken Hindu lineage stretches back into antiquity. She is the Great Goddess in her Destroyer aspect, balanced and counterpoint for the Goddess in her creator aspect yet, she is the three in one. In her emanation as Anath she ruled the Middle East back to Neolithic times. In Central America she is The Lady of The Serpent Skirt, her skirt an apron of severed phalluses. Lurena Bobbitt is her modern day emanation. Kali is depicted with black skin. She wears a necklace of skulls, carries a knife to cut through illusion, a mirror of reflection and drinks from a skull cup of blood. She stands above her disemboweled lover, phallus erect, his blood feeding the earth. Her visage is terrifying. She is loved and feared for her destructive powers, for she is both womb and tomb simultaneously. It is upon Kali’s destroyer aspect that the angry, punishing, castrating Father God was based. Yet how much more terrible does she seem than her watered down male version?
It is confusing to think of the Goddess as virgin and the Goddess simultaneously as whore. Yet even in the cheap imitation (Christianity), both Mary’s were adopted in their respective positions. The virgin/whore split into two aspects of the same divine feminine. In truth, prior to Christianity the temple virgin was the temple whore (Isis the woman in Red, She of the Red Apparel, Vieled Isis). Two sides of the same coin. This can only be true because the sacred prostitute was ordained by the Great Mother herself. The divine feminine does not seek to condemn sexuality but to raise it to it’s true place as an act of spirituality.
In ancient times the temples of the Goddess served as healing and cleansing centers for warriors returning from battle. Only by lying with a sacred prostitute (who became the earthly incarnation of the Goddess) could a man cleanse himself of the acts of violation committed in war and be reborn through the Mother and into society. Women as keepers of the secrets and mysteries of sexuality are the teachers and must reclaim their rightful place as the path to the Goddess.
The founding church father’s understood the power inherent in sexuality. They understood that to repress and suppress the populace they needed to control the very act of sexuality. They accomplished this by condemning it as diabolical and women along with it. The church said, “Women are without souls.” and thus no better than demons. Women became the fall guys so that a handful of clergy could hold power, authority, and the purse strings in their ever widening grasp.
The word “devil” comes directly from the word “deva”. The original devas were the nature spirits of the pagan Earth centered religions. The church took all things sacred to The Great Mother and made them profane, even to profaning the Earth herself. She has been raped and plundered and torn end to end. In her death throes she coughs up poison gases (in the form of volcanoes) in resistance. She shifts and quakes grinding her plates in tutonic activity trying to rub the burr from under the saddle of patriarchal oppression. She is not giving up easily but her struggle is apparent. And through all this sickness and pestilence we see rising signs of repentance.
As in the days of the Christos when the sacrificial gods Tammuz/Dumuzi were consorts of the powerful Ishtar and Innana, men seeking to honor the Goddess entered the priesthood performing self castration as an act of contrition. To become closer to the Goddess they emasculated themselves in an attempt to be more like women, having a hole instead of a phallus. Later the church fathers emulated the attire of women by adopting robes as an emblem of their “holy” office.
Patriarchal traditions, so long upheld as “the only way” are falling apart as the foundations of society collapse heralding the new millennium. In some cases “sex changed men” become dominatrix, stylistically punishing “establishment man” for his acts of control and domination in the outside world. The controlling men (lawyers, company presidents, high profile businessmen) seek ritual debasement and submission to purge their day to day guilt. These scenes recall the flailings of early devout monks and nuns beating themselves into a frenzy of zealous ecstacy.
How do we make sense of such seemingly alien behaviors? We must search our own closets, basements, attics and backrooms for clues. As we are still products of our parents, many of whom were dominating, controlling and abusive, we have within us an ingrained sense of guilt for wrong doing, imagined or otherwise. The abused child becomes the child abuser.
When there is no sense of love, acceptance, warmth or forgiveness what might pass for feelings of “love” may in fact be those of the opposite pole. If our parents always yelled at us and hit us (saying, “I’m only doing this because I love you.”), we may now experience “love” in a raised voice and a violent touch. By submitting to dominating behaviors are the dominators (of patriarchal society) simply trying to tap into the “love” feelings of their childhoods? Only by going back to the source and finding the point of departure can we seek to heal the rift that separates so many abused from a conscious awareness of what real love is, rather than simply what feels like “love” because that is what is remember.
Exploring the shadow within ourselves in not a bad"thing nor something to be feared or condemned. It simply is an opportunity to experience the polarity of the light. The Dark Mother is calling us to witness her death and destruction at the hands of the tyrant. We are microcosm in a macrocosm. By taking such paths and finding where they lead we can better walk the 180 degrees around the circle and reemerge into the day light.
The return of Quetzalcoatl is eminent. The winged serpent who unites the power of sexuality with the purity of spirit taking both to a higher level. By “becoming” our dominating parents we can understand, forgive and heal their behaviors so that we do not perpetrate insanity on the next generation. We see the light only because we experience darkness. The cycle is endless as is the Great Mother in her many guises and rotations. It is up to us to find the balance point, to seek to raise conscious awareness.
To find and found a new Earth that seeks to honor the Great Mother in all her forms and guises, to honor the feminine and most of all to reclaim our sacred sexuality. It is time to reinstate the sacred prostitute to a place of honor for through her we reach the Goddess within ourselves, a Goddess who exists within men as well as women.
