The Great Goddess

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, 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 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.

Cunt (Kunda): Derived from the Oriental Great Goddess Cunti, also known as The Yoni (vulva) of the Uni-verse. Other words coming from the same source are "cunabula", a cradle or first abode, "Cunina," a Roman Goddess who protected children in the cradle, "cuntipotent, having all powerful cunt-magic, "cunicle", a hole or passage, "cundy"; a culvert; also cunning, kenning and ken meaning knowledge, learning, insight, remembrance and wisdom. In ancient writings the meaning of the word was synonymous with "woman". Kunda : Saharan, Goddess of the Kuntahs a tribe who traced their beginnings to "the cleft of the Goddess". Kundas were children begotten out of wedlock and were considered divine gifts of the Goddess Kunda.

Horae : Multi Cultural, Known in Persia as "houris", in Egypt as "Ladies of the Hour", in Babylon as "harines". Semetics called them "whores" after Hor (meaning a hole) who was the ancestress of the Horites. 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.)
 
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.

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.

From Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets