The Neolithic farming communities had a nonlinear sense of time, believing that time began anew with each new year. The pregnant Mountain Mother gave birth in August when the seeds, spring-planted in her womb, had grown large. At that time the entire community came to be with her: the divine birth is the harvest of the wheat, and the first fruits were offered to the Goddess. Similar mysteries were enacted in Eleusis around Demeter, the Grain Mother. In Britain she was known as Bride, Ana, or Danu, and she was celebrated on her womb/mounds in August as late as the seventeenth century A.D. Great assemblies of witches traditionally gathered on Lammas Eve (August 1), the people believing that their welfare in the coming year depended on the performance of these sacred rites of the Corn Mother, or Harvest Queen. (The Christian church throughout Britain finally took drastic action against this "pagan cult worship." The Christian priesthood preaches linear, not cyclic time, hoping to separate "man" from the Goddess of Nature, and "God" from the great cosmic rhythms of creation. As many wise people have observed, the way to control human life is to control the rhythm of life. Pagan life was ruled by natural cyclic rhythms. The church opposed these female rhythms with linear-historic ones, thus trying to change human rhythm from natural to mechanical—which serves the industrial process but leaves human life and labor, including agricultural life and labor, quite alienated.)
-Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth.
