Ciudad Mistica is a religious sect located in Mount Banahaw, a "sacred mountain" in Central Luzon, Philippines, which draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims during the Lenten season. The sect is in turn admired and vilified by different sectors of Philippine society for its deliberate lifting of women as sources and holders of sacred and spiritual power. It does it through a tradition of all-women leadership and ritualists, based on its belief that its female founder was a savior sent by God to complete Jesus Christ's failed mission on earth. Feminists view the sect as direct descendants of the babaylan, practitioners of Animism before the arrival of Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth century. Others, particularly its contemporary religious and political rivals, see it as peddling a false idea of Filipino nativeness and sainthood. This dissertation looks at the role that gender plays in the formation and transformation of Mistica's religious identity and in the complex negotiations and contestations generated by that identity in the context of Mount Banahaw and the political and economic realities of postcolonial Philippines.