The mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus is not named in the Gospels, but as with the narrative of Mary and Joseph and the holy kinship, Jesus’ extended family which was a very popular theme for medieval artists, the faithful soon were introduced to Saint Anne—Hanna as she is known in Islamic and the Orthodox tradition.
This cult of Anne had early adherents in the Eastern Church, a few shrines in France and the Cathedral of Dรผren, between Kรถln and Aachen, holds her reliquary since the fourteen century. Saint Anne or Santa Ana as she is known in Spanish enjoys most veneration, however, in Central America, dating back to the arrival of the Conquistadors. Most other religious settlement had been claimed long ago, through displacing pagan festivals with the moveable feasts of Christianity and accepting seasonal trappings—long since frozen as traditional, and the Church could not very well bend to accommodate every new encounter with a new liturgical calendar and agenda. Besides, no matter how convincingly disguised, missionaries were worried that aboriginal practises and believes would continue under a different sacrament. As violently cataclysmic as the contact between the New and the Old Worlds was, conversion probably was the most humane and peaceably conducted act of the whole business of colonialism in this part of the Earth, not that that particularly is saying a lot compared to the level of atrocity. Even if they had been willing to make concessions to the native beliefs, the priests found few archetypes—with one exception being the popular spirit of Xmucane, known as the grandmother of the Mayan pantheon of the gods. She and her consort, Grandpa Xpiacoc, also helped the creator spirits fashion the first people—out of
corn once the first trials with clay and wood failed. Churches dedicated to the Grandmother of Jesus were built on the foundations of temples of Xmucane.
