“Some fifteen hundred  years ago, the Teuton tribes of Northern Europe held an annual ceremony. At night, under the rays of the moon, a veiled statue of their preeminent female divinity was placed in a wagon. Her sacred cows were hitched to he wagon, which was pulled through the fields, as people assembled to greet and salute them…

“While this ceremony itself has obviously not been performed in centuries, vestigal memories of Herta or Eartha, as her name was sometimes spelled, remain. Her name resonates in our language as the name given to our planet: Earth.”

From Pure Magic by Judika Illes