On top of the many legends surrounding the church of Gran Madre di Dio, the building is also at the center of a number of mysteries. Starting with its name, the "Great Mother": not many other Catholic churches bear this label, as the figure of the Great Mother seems to hearken back to pagan times and Mother Earth cults, enduring through the centuries in a number of variations. According to some studies, the church was indeed built where once, at the time of the city's foundation, stood a temple dedicated to Isis, mother to the Egyptian god Horus. Ultimately, Gran Madre could be not the hiding place of the Holy Grail, as many occultists claim, but rather an allegory of the Grail itself: the figurative finish line to an alchemical journey of self-perfection starting in Piazza Statuto, and a synthesis of the "eternal feminine".