Was the cult of Great Mother exchanged with Jesus?

The same life-shaping force is said to have acquired its fullest realization in Minoan Crete. Here "the Minoan Goddess was depicted in clay and porcelain as the Earth-Mother, the Mountain-Mother, the Mistress of trees and the Lady of wild beasts." ⁴ W.K.C Guthrie understands that the Potnia (Lady) was the earth in all its aspects, the universal mother goddess, mother of fruits, mother and mistress of animals, and had the king and his palace under her special protection. ⁵ We would thus find in this culture the first evidence of the infinite variety of forms that belong with the image of the maternal divinity.

She had received, it is said, her new significance with the agriculturalists' new mastery over their environment, since the miracle of vegetative growth was assimilated to the mystery of the fertile womb. Mircea Eliade thus asserts, "The sacrality of sexual life, and first of all of feminine sexuality, became inseparable from the miraculous enigma of creation. . . . A complex symbolism . . . associates woman and sexuality with lunar rhythm, with the earth (assimilated to the womb), and what must be called: the 'mystery of vegetation." ⁶ Since women participated more fully in tilling the soil than in hunting savage beasts and may even have invented agriculture, a matriarchal society may have arisen, in which it is only natural that the mother goddess, now seen in the image of the fruitful earth, the Earth Goddess, should have acquired yet another powerful dimension. Thus "it is not surprising that in the religious thought of a farming culture the great earth-goddess is conceived as a Supreme Being, and more especially as a Supreme Creator." ^7..."

^{pg. 5-6 from "Faces of the Goddess" by Lotti Merz, that I read on Questia, so I cannot provide a live link, sorry.}