The oldest word for female genitalia once meant womb wisdom. Here's what that has to do with ayahuasca, the suppression of the feminine, and why Madre Ayahuasca has been waiting for us to remember what we already knew.
There's a word so ancient and so charged with power that most people can't say it out loud.
Cunt.
Stick with us here, because this isn't shock value. The word traces back to cunctipotence, meaning all-powerful, omnipotent. Its roots connect to the Asian goddess Cunti, to Kundalini energy, to the divine Yoni of the universe. It originally meant womb wisdom - the oldest form of knowing.
Somehow, over the last two thousand years, it became the dirtiest word in the English language. But that didn't happen by accident (surprise surprise).
The suppression of the feminine runs deep and deliberate. Goddess traditions were dismantled, sacred priestesses were recast as witches and animals long associated with women — snakes, spiders — became symbols of fear and disgust. Even the number 13, tied to lunar and menstrual cycles, was cursed into superstition. When you systematically discredit something across centuries, people stop questioning why they fear it. And the fear just becomes part of the furniture and sticks around.
This is exactly where ayahuasca enters the conversation.
Every tradition that has worked with ayahuasca — from the Amazon basin to the Andean highlands — recognises her as feminine. Not metaphorically, but genuinely, literally feminine. She is called Madre Ayahuasca. The Great Mother. A consciousness older than memory who speaks directly to what lives beneath your conditioning, bypassing the carefully constructed stories you tell yourself about who you are.
She doesn't negotiate with your ego or placate you with flowers. She goes straight to the wound (with love!).
What's remarkable is that she tends to find the same wound across thousands of ceremonies and countless different people: disconnection. From nature, from each other, from the body, from the kind of intuitive knowing that lives below rational thought. In other words, she dismantles patriarchy from the inside out, and she does it through direct experience rather than ideology.
People arrive at ceremonies carrying decades of suppression stored in their nervous systems, their relationships, their sense of what they're worth. Again and again, the medicine brings them back to something they didn't realise they'd lost. That is the capacity to be receptive, to surrender, to trust the intelligence of the body and the wisdom of actually feeling things rather than thinking around them.
These are feminine qualities. They belong to everyone regardless of gender, but they've been consistently devalued in a world built on control and extraction. Womb wisdom. Cunctipotency. The ability to generate, channel and hold energy. To create life from the inside. Ayahuasca doesn't teach you any of this, so much as remind you that you already knew it.
At Taozen, we work exclusively with native wisdom keepers who've carried these traditions with genuine reverence, understanding them as a responsibility rather than a commodity. Because this medicine deserves to be received with the same sacredness it was transmitted with.
Preparation and the container matter so so much. Who holds the space matters enormously too. When those elements come together, what becomes possible goes well beyond healing. There's a kind of sovereignty that emerges, the same quality the Sheela-Na-Gigs carved into church walls were pointing at: ancient, unashamed, fully alive.
The feminine was suppressed because it was genuinely threatening to a system built on fear and hierarchy. Ayahuasca has always understood this - and has been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for the rest of us to catch up.
Curious about working with plant medicine in a held, intentional setting? Explore our upcoming retreats and integration programs at www.taozenfamily.com
