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[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Ages ago, Someone sent me this in email. I believe it is from the book mentioned, but I don't know how authoritative the author's information is. Does anyone here know? I'd love to know for sure. It's one of my favorite words.


From: Barbara G. Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" (Harper & Row, 1983)

Cunt [appearing between Cuckold and Cupid]: Derivative of the Oriental Great Goddess as Cunti, or Kunda, the Yoni of the Uni-verse. From the same root came country, kin and kind (Old English cyn, Gothic kuni).

Related forms were Latin cunnus, Middle English cunte, Old Norse and Frisian kunta, Basque cuna. Other cognates are "cunabula," a cradle, or earliest abode; "Cunina," a Roman Goddess who protected children in the cradle; "cunctipotent," all-powerful (i.e., having cunt-magic); "cunicle," a hole or passage, "cuniculate," penetrated by a passage; "cundy," a coverted culvert; also cunning, kenning, and ken: knowledge, learning, insight, remembrance, wisdom. Cunt is "not slang, dialect or any marginal form, but a true language word, and of the oldest stock." [Quoting from Michael Dames, "The Silbury Treasure," London: Thames & Hudson, 1976.]

"Kin" meant not only matrilineal blood relations, but also a cleft or crevice, the Goddess's genital opening. A Saharan tribe called Kuntahs traced their descent from this holy place. Indian "kundas" were their mothers' natural children, begotten out of wedlock as gifts of the Goddess Kunda. Of old the name applied to girls, as in China where girls were once considered children of their mothers only, having no natural connection with fathers.

In ancient writings, the word for "cunt" was synonymous with "woman," though not in the insulting modern sense. An Egyptologist was shocked to find the maxims of Ptah-Hotep "used for 'woman' a term that was more than blunt," though its indelicacy was not in the eye of the ancient beholder, only in that of the modern scholar.

Medieval clergymen similarly perceived obscenity in female-genital shrines of the pagans: holy caves, wells, groves. Any such place was called cunnus diaboli, "devilish cunt." Witches who worshipped there sometimes assumed the name of the place, like the male witch Johannes Cuntius mentioned by Thomas More. "Under painful circumstances" this witch died at the hands of witch hunters, but it was said he was resurrected, and came back to earth as a lecherous incubus.

Sacred places identified with the world-cunt sometimes embarrassed Victorian scholars who failed to understand their earlier meaning. A.H. Clough became a laughing-stock among Gaelic-speaking students when he published a poem called Toper-na-Fuosich, literally "bearded well," a Gaelic place-name for a cunt-shrine. The synonym "twat" was ignorantly used by another Victorian poet, Robert Browning, in the closing lines of his Pippa Passes:


Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!


Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary hesitantly asked Browning where he learned the word. He said it came from a bawdy broadside poem of 1659: "They talked of his having a Cardinal's Hat; They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat." Browning thought the word meant a wimple, or other headgear corresponding to "hat."

Comments

[tarafuzz.livejournal.com]

hahaha! that's so great!

thanks for posting it.

[isolt.livejournal.com]

The Oxford English Dictionary would be something to use to check the validity of that. Also the American Heritage Dictionary might be helpful.

It is true that "cunt" is a very very old word.