 To demonstrate the extent to which the Western symbolic is saturated with violence and death, epitomized in the crucified Christ, Jantzen situated her philosophy of religion in relation to the psychoanalytic theory of both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their account offers a theory of one of the most important features of any religion: sacrifice. Sacrificial codes involve a forgetting/erasure of the complex role of the maternal, amounting to a “matricide” (Kristeva) at the foundation of religious practice. According to Irigaray in “Belief Itself”, the central figure of the western cultural imaginary is the unmourned and unacknowledged sacrifice of the (m)other’s body that Christianity masks under the Eucharistic sacrifice of the son. According to Kristeva (1977 [1987]) in “Stabat Mater”, the real symbolic association is not between women and birth, but between women and death, setting up men as cultural masters over and above mortality and its intimations in the bodies of women.