 All sacred literatures of the world display an unvarying ambivalence on the subject of women. For every text that places well-domesticated womanhood on a religious pedestal, another one announces that, if uncontrolled, women are the root of all evil. Religion has thus comprised a primary space in which and by means of which gender hierarchy has been culturally articulated, reinforced, and consolidated in institutionalized form. Religion is hardly the only such space, but it appears to have been a particularly effective way of undergirding and sanctifying gender hierarchy in the West.