This is probably the most enigmatic card in the entire tarot and the most difficult to analyze from a historical standpoint.
As usual, a few preliminaries about the changes that were made from the traditional decks by the occultists. The title "High Priestess" first appears (as "La grandpretresse") in the Grandpretre tarot, issued in France probably around 1800 and inspired by Court de Gebelin's book Le Monde Primitif, which launched the occult tarot revival. Before that, the card (when it is not replaced by a completely different subject) is invariably called the Papess (female pope): la papessa in Italian, la papesse in French.
In the old decks, you will not find the crescent moon or the black and white pillars. You will find the veil hung behind her, the book on her lap, and the triple crown of the papacy. She also often holds a staff topped with a cross. In a few decks, she holds the papal keys rather than the book. All of these (except the veil, which may be purely decorative) are symbols of the papacy, and could just as well be shown with a male pope.
The Papess forms a quaternity with the Empress, Emperor, and Pope (later called Hierophant). There is a nice symmetry: two secular rulers, two ecclesiastical rulers, two men, two women. A custom developed early on of referring to all these cards as "popes" (papi in Italian), suggesting that card players saw them as a natural grouping. In fact, in Bologna, all four cards had equal rank in the game! This is the only instance in the history of the tarot game where a strict sequential ranking was not followed.
These four cards were always placed immediately above the Magician, but their order varied greatly. Aside from the equal ranking they were given in Bologna, there were three basic ways of ranking them: Empress, Emperor, Papess, Pope; Empress, Papess, Emperor, Pope; and our familiar Papess, Empress, Emperor, Pope. You can see the underlying rule that male figures always outrank their female counterparts (as the kings outrank the queens), and that the Pope must take the highest position. The first two orderings are the most logical superficially, either placing the women directly below their male consorts, or placing them together below the men, with Papess outranking Empress just as Pope outranks Emperor. The familiar Tarot de Marseille order (taken up by our modern decks) is rather curious--why would the Empress outrank the Papess?
In the 15th and 16th centuries, there was apparently not much particular objection to the presence of the papess in the tarot deck. However, by the time the Counter-Reformation got underway, church authorities had become quite irritable. Both the male and female popes were considered inappropriate subjects for depiction on playing cards. Particularly in central and southern Italy, in regions under direct church control, these offensive cards were dropped to appease the authorities. Two of the three tarot variants made in France, the Belgian Tarot and the Tarot de Besancon, also dropped the Pope and Papess. By the mid-1700s, only the Tarot de Marseille retained these two controversial figures. Here is a list of the substitutions that were made--
So those are the facts.
But what does it mean? What could the 15th-century designer of the triumph cards have been thinking by inserting a female pope among the powers of the world?
Odd though it is, we would be wrong to think that the image or idea of a female pope was unique to the tarot, or that it was necessarily blasphemous.
There was a custom of using female figures to depict institutions or abstractions, so a female pope appeared occasionally in art as an allegorical reference to the papacy or to the church at large. Likewise, an female emperor might stand for the Empire. The difficulty in seeing the Papess card this way is twofold. First, if the card represented the papacy or the church, we might expect to find be called "The Church" or something similar, at least once among all the dozens of early written references. But no, she is always "The Papess". Furthermore, this interpretation is not usually applied to the Empress, and never (to my knowledge) applied to the queens. In the Cary-Yale Visconti cards, evens the knights and pages come in male/female pairs. What are the women there to represent? Knighthood and Page-hood? It starts to seem a little silly. No, I think the simple evidence of the cards and their titles asserts that the Papess is just that, a female pope.
One also encounters a female pope in Renaissance art in the figure of the legendary Pope Joan. The story is that Joan was an Englishwoman who entered a monastic order disguised as a man. She rose in prominence in the church and was finally elected pope, only to have her secret revealed when she collapsed in childbirth during a procession. The legend was quite popular during the time of the invention of the tarot, and persisted for centuries. Pope Joan was a favorite among the common people. Tarot artist and scholar Brian Williams is fond of pointing out that a statue of Pope Joan was placed among the historical (male) popes in a cathedral in Siena. So although the idea of a female pope was certainly anomalous, it was not something that would automatically be regarded as an abomination or heresy. In the Reformation, the Protestants used the Pope Joan story to ridicule the Roman church for its decadence, which no doubt made the church officials less tolerant of this bit of folk culture.
So could the tarot Papess be Pope Joan? No doubt it is an association that would have come to mind for many who used the cards in their first centuries. Still, it seems a bit out of keeping with the character of the tarot cards taken as a whole. None of the cards are ever referred to by the names of specific personages. The kings are generic kings, the queens are generic queens, the Empress, Emperor, and Pope likewise. Furthermore, when Pope Joan is depicted in art, she is usually made recognizable by the inclusion of her newborn infant or, more gruesomely, by being shown hung from a gallows for her crime of impersonating a man. So it is unlikely that the tarot inventor intended the Papess card simply to portray Pope Joan as a specific person.
There is a third type of female pope that might have been on the mind of the tarot inventor. Tarot scholar Gertrude Moakley has called attention to a small heretical sect, called the Guglielmites from the name of its founder Guglielma, which was active in Milan about a century before the tarot cards were first invented. The Guglielmites believed a new age of the world was at hand, and it would be ushered in by the Holy Spirit in female form. They elected one of their members, Sister Manfreda, as pope! (The sect was, of course, quickly suppressed by Rome.) Manfreda was a relation of the Visconti family who ruled Milan and commissioned the earliest tarot cards that have come down to us today. The Visconti-Sforza Papess card is (for me) one of the most haunting images in the whole history of the tarot. Her robes are that of a nun, but she wears the papal crown. Her expression is serene, enigmatic, and thoughtful; the tilt of her head is reminiscent of the Madonna. Most of the other figures in this deck look alike: stylized faces, plump and fair, framed with pretty yellow curls. But the Papess seems to rise above the formula and stand alone as separate work of art. Could it be that the inventor of the tarot sympathized with the Guglielmites and their vision of a world transformed through a feminine manisfestation of God?
The difficulty with this idea is that it seems a rather local, sectarian explanation. The tarot was popular not just among a few Milanese nobles, but throughout Italy and before long in France and Switzerland. The rest of the symbols of the tarot are common property of the European culture of the time, representing universally understood ranks of society or cosmic principles. The challenge is to explain how the little-known local personage of Sister Manfreda might fall into place in the symbolic procession of universals that is the tarot.
I think the Papess card is evidence that the tarot inventor ascribed to an unconventional theology, one that emphasized the complementarity of male and female principles. Such a theology characterized the early Christian gnostics, who allowed women to assume the highest clerical functions in their rites. For the gnostics, the male/female duality was a symbol for all other dualities: body and spirit, humanity and God, darkness and light. Gnosticism was the first and most bitterly attacked target of the emerging Christian orthodoxy in the 3rd century A.D. Although gnosticism did not survive as a continuous organized tradition within the church, gnostic ideas continued to resurface throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Indeed, the Gugielmites can be seen as gnostically inclined. The emphasis on male/female dualism is also very strong in the Hermetic and alchemical traditions. The alchemical process demanded a symmetry between male and female principles, to the extent that male alchemists were obliged to perform their operations in the company of a "sacred sister", a woman who served as the alchemist's symbolic and practical counterpart and coworker.
It is unlikely that we will ever know exactly what particular theological doctrines or theory of the world the tarot inventor ascribed to, but I think the Papess card offers evidence that the gnostic/dualistic vision, in some manifestation or other, informed the original design of the tarot.
Although a detailed historical reconstruction of the inventor's intent is not possible, I think things become clearer if we approach the card from a psychological or anthropologic perspective. The Papess or High Priestess is, in most basic terms, the feminine face of religion, just as the Pope or Hierophant is its masculine face. Priestess and Priest, like God and Goddess, are figures that grow out of the basic human religious impulse. We are biologically dual, and hence that dualism is so primal that all aspects of culture are drawn to reflect it to some degree.
Apparently much of the appeal of early Christianity was in its ability to retain the monotheistic principle of Judaism, but tempering the stern remoteness of the Jewish God through the mediating persona of Jesus, humble and compassionate. Christianity spoke particularly to the oppressed: the poor, the sick, the slaves, and also women. After becoming the state religion of the Empire, the concepts of the religion were progressively brought into greater conformity with the patriarchal power structure, with Christ finally becoming an Emperor, closer to God the Father than to the simple youth of Galilee who wandered among thieves, prostitutes, and lepers.
But human needs find expression, even when the imposed doctrine does not make it easy. The feminine face of religion reappeared in the popular adoration of the Virgin Mary, who now, more than Jesus, became the mediator through which the oppressed might commune with God. The Tarot Papess is not the Virgin Mary, but both tap into the same substrate of human imagination and human need. They are psychological/anthropological "safety valves" for a culture whose religious institutions had become too hierarchical, and too male.
So perhaps with this in mind, we can revisit the peculiar position of the Papess in the now ubiquitous Marseilles ordering. The Pope presides over Empress and Emperor, supporting and supported by the institutions of political power. The face of God he knows is that of Christ the Judge, King of Kings, apex of the pyramid of power. The Papess, in constrast, presides over the wretched (Fool) and the wicked (the Magician as charlatan or thief), humbler than the Emperor or even the Empress. The face of God she knows is that of Mary, Mother of God, who re-embodies the Mother Goddess from pre-Christian times.
I don't think one can find a clear trail (as the occultists imagined) linking the Papess with the priestesses and goddesses of the Hellenistic mystery religions. But, like the bump under the carpet that inexplicably pops up over there when you stamp it down over here, the feminine face of religion has a permanence that persists through many manifestations.
"High Priestess" is actually a very suitable name for this card, I think, even from a historical perspective. It's a shame, though, that the analogous title for trump V, "High Priest", got lost somewhere along the way. The historic tarots clearly invite us to compare and contrast these two figures. Modern writers often contrast the High Priestess with the Magician instead, which breaks apart the parallelism that was built into the system.
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