The poet Aretino (flourished second quarter of the 16th century), known to tarot enthusiasts as the author of
The Talking Cards, wrote a dialogue mentioning the Popess in particular. The author's spokesperson, a prostitute named Nana, is educating Antonia, her naive colleague, about how to succeed in their trade. She is describing how she attracts rich clients (
Aretino's Dialogues, trans. Rosenthal, Stein & Day 1971, p. 143:
NANA: I had all the haughty airs and manners of an empress, which would barely suit her and are in any case a swindle. I took as my example a certain noblewoman who always carried a silken pillow around with her and made whoever spoke to her kneel on it.
ANTONIA: Oh, you mean the female Pope?
NANA: The lady Pope, or so I am told, did not put on such high and mighty airs; by my oath, she did not. Nor did she give herself so bright a title as those whores did. One woman, for example, called herself the daughter of Duke Valentine and another the daughter of Cardinal Scanio.
This passage also gives us information about the Empress—she does usually look rather haughty--and, if not the Pope, then at least a cardinal. But popes were usually former Cardinals. Apparently it was a mark of distinction to be the daughter of someone who had been pledged to celibacy since adolescence. But the main point of interest is that the author’s spokesperson is commending the Popess, conventionally considered haughty, for her modesty.
Similarly, Boccaccio spoke of Pope Joan’s "outstanding virtue and holiness" despite her "unparalleled audacity," i.e. daring but not haughtiness. God even apparently protected her as long as she stuck to scholarly activities. But becoming Pope was too much. Boccaccio says of God (
Famous Women p. 439)
He abandoned to her own devices this person who boldly persisted in doing what should not have been done.
The implication is that God saw nothing wrong with women becoming university scholars, even when disguised as men; he drew the line only at their becoming Pope. Even that may be Boccaccian irony.
Another thought: In the Schoen horoscope (1515), several of its astrological houses have been identified as having similar images to those of the tarot trumps: emperor, pope, marriage, etc. House 1 shows a woman giving birth to a newborn, as ignorant as a Fool. House 2 shows an artisan, in a depiction very much like the “Mantegna” Artixan and not dissimilar to some versions of the Bagatto. House 3, the house of communication, shows one woman reading to another.
The Popess is also reading, as early as the Cary Sheet, and continuing in the Marseille versions.
The Virgin Mary, of course, was reading a certain passage in Isaiah when the angel Gabriel made his appearance. She is an example in defense of women’s learning how to read, teach, and study. Anna teaching Mary how to read was a common subject in Renaissance art (below).
I conclude not that the Popess is Mary but that it is a card that attaches importance to women as readers and scholars. Even the PMB Popess holds a book. The Cary Sheet Popess seems not only reading but lecturing; an adoring acolyte, perhaps snidely suggesting Pope Joan’s lover, listens attentively. But the card in all these versions remains propaganda for women’s greater presence in education and other walks of life.
I see no reason why anyone would originally create a Popess just to match the Pope, on analogy to Emperor and Empress and King and Queen. The Papacy wasn’t supposed to be hereditary, requiring two royal parents, and nobody before tarot associated the Popess with the Church. The earliest picture of “Ecclesia Catholica” looking like the Popess that I know of (on Ross’s website) is from 1615. It is a reaction to the Protestants’ use of Durer’s “whore of Babylon” to satirize the Roman Catholic Church.
Sometimes an analogy is made between the PMB Popess and Giotto’s Faith (center and left below), where “Faith” is held to be similar to “Church.” Well, perhaps; but Faith does not equal Faith in the Church. Sister Manfreda had her faith, too. And I also see a similarity of the PMB Popess to Giotto’s “Justice,” which might be Bianca’s intended view of Sister Manfreda (justice on her side); Popess Manfreda was burned at the stake just five or so years earlier than Giotto’s fresco, in nearby Venice.
Along the same lines, I seem to see a similarity between the PMB’s Pope and Giotto’s “Injustice.”
Bianca Maria herself might have tended to identify the Pope with Injustice, as her husband had been excommunicated shortly after their marriage, in a dispute about territory he had but the Pope thought should be his. The excommunication was lifted only when Francesco gave up the territory.
Ross brings up the point that the CY had Female Knights and Female Pages, as though paired with their male counterparts. Well, these were unconventional but not heretical. Ladies did ride horses and serve as attendants. Perhaps some were even armed. Some decks of regular cards also had such cards (for female knights, see my post at
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334&p=5670&hilit=f ... ghts#p5670; for female pages, in decks that may or may not be tarot, see Kaplan Vol. 2 pp. 274, 281); in an effort to correct the all-male court cards of the Malmuks, card designers would have tried out various feminine options before settling on just Queens. The Popess is a different thing entirely. I find it difficult to believe that a deck so pious as to have the three Theological Virtues (which are no more feminine-imaged than the others typically were) would have such a contradiction to the Catholic faith—unless, to be sure, the image meant “Church,” for which we have no evidence. Visconti undoubtedly knew the “Pope Joan” story in Boccaccio; the book was in his library (I forget where I read that). Unless Filippo had a heretical streak I don’t know about, he would have avoided at all costs calling a card in a deck of his by any name suggesting that personage.
She did get a couple of other incarnations explicitly, when the Pope and the Popess were replaced with two other cards, namely Jupiter and Juno and Bacchus and the Spanish Captain. Jupiter and Juno are simply the King and Queen of Heaven, a pagan heavenly equivalent of Pope and Popess, but unlike them married to each other. It seems to me that Bacchus is just a satirical equivalent of the Pope, the God of Wine replacing the sanctifier of the Eucharistic wine. All that access to wine produced drunkard priests, of course.
Then how would the Spanish Captain be a satiric equivalent of the Popess? Well, by the late 16th century he would have been associated with Il Capitano of the Commedia dell’Arte (
http://www.delpiano.com/carnival/html/captain.html), and scores of Italian comedies before that. Il Capitano was an arrogant boaster, thus claiming to be someone he wasn’t. (Look at his portrayal on the card.) In that way he was like Pope Joan; some of the meaning is retained, without the suggestion of blasphemy. At least by the time of the Captain, then, “Pope Joan” was probably how the card was understood.
Another issue: why is she number 2 in the sequence? In the Steele Sermon, she is number 4, next to the Pope. One answer is that she was given that position by Filippo Visconti, on a chess analogy: she and the Pope are the two bishops on either side of the King and Queen. It is said that the Cary Sheet Popess, in having a bishop’s staff, links her to the bishops of chess. Well, if so, this is the only version of the card to do so, and it is not the first Popess. Perhaps the artist felt it would be too blasphemous to give her a papal staff. In the same way, he muted her gender characteristics and doesn’t give her a tiara. And her headpiece might be a crown, like that of Mary, not even the headgear of a bishop, much less of a Pope.
If we assign the relevant cards in the CY (Popess, Empress, Emperor, Pope) tarot numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5, as though they were chess pieces, what, following the same principle, would correspond to the other spaces in the row, and to the pawns? It is rather too convenient if chess gives the order for these four cards and no others. It would seem that there would have to be two cards lower in number than the Popess. As Trionfi presents the chess analogy, there is no Fool (0) or Bagatto (1) in the CY. If not, and the Popess is 2, what is below them, i.e. to their left on the board? Moreover, if we went in order, the pawns would get all the higher numbered cards, an absurd indignity. Or do they go to the opposing pieces? In fact the chess analogy, as used on Trionfi, is only meant as a way of reconstructing what the missing trumps were, not their numbers in the sequence.
But there is no evidence, apart from the indirect considerations of the chess analogy, that any Visconti deck had a Popess. No one even knows if Visconti played chess. Tolfo, on the site Historia di Milano, flatly denies that he did (find “chess” on my post
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&p=4643&hilit=tolfo#p4643_); If he sponsored a chess club and had chess books in his library (per Autorbis at
http://trionfi.com/0/c/30/), that may have been to satisfy his court and its visitors. Perhaps he learned but wasn’t very good, so he pretended he didn’t play; if so, he wouldn’t have wanted to sponsor a card game that would remind him and others of that fact.
The first known Popess is in the PMB, probably sponsored by Bianca Maria in the 1450’s. The Popess might reasonably have been one of three cards she added to remind her children of their illustrious forebears (the others being step-great-grandfather Amedeo VIII of Savoy as the Hermit and grandfather Muzio as the Hanged Man); the Popess was then Sister Manfreda. I would expect her to have liked Boccaccio’s “Pope Joan,” at least before she became Pope. It is unlikely that Bianca played chess; it wasn’t a women’s game.
Another explanation for her number 2 status that I think I have seen somewhere is that the Popess belongs next to the Bagatto because she is just a higher-level version of what he is: a trickster, a deceiver. In a hierarchy of social levels, she belongs between the Bagatto and the Empress. The latter, although she may have been arrogant, never claimed to be a man. This explanation of the ordering is plausible; it also depends upon the “Pope Joan” interpretation. In that case, too, she would not only be a deceiver, as that would trivialize the card; she would also be a great lady, ahead of her time, though flawed.
It seems to me that at some point, at the card’s beginning or later in the century, there may have been another reason for having the Popess as number 2. She expresses the Neopythagorean Dyad, as expounded in such works as the 4th century
Theology of Arithmetic, continuously available since then. There we read:
...the dyad is the first to have separated itself from the monad, whence also is called ‘daring.’ For when the monad manifests unification, the dyad steals in and manifests separation. (Robin Waterfield translation, p. 42)
And later:
Apart from recklessness itself, they think that, because it is the very first to have endured separation, it deserves to be called ‘anguish,’ ‘endurance’ and ‘hardship.’ (translator’s note: Duas is here linked with due (Anguish)). (p. 46.)
These terms certainly would apply to Pope Joan and Sister Manfreda. The Marseille-style Popesses also look rather anguished, sad, or at least pained.
Actively, the Dyad separates from the creator-Monad as audacity followed by anguish. Passively, she is pure matter to complement the Monad’s pure and perfect form. The
Theology says, “...it is taken to be matter...” and:
...it is in itself devoid of shape and form and any limitation, but is capable of being limited and made definite by reason and skill. (p. 45)
The union of form and matter then produces individual instantiations of form in matter, i.e. round things, heavy things, humans, trees, etc.—or the Christ child, from God’s perfection and Mary’s matter. That is the Triad, the child of the Monad and the Dyad. The Empress, Trump 3, is essentially a mother, and the eagle on her shield stands for her child. In the Dyad, however, what we have is only the desire of matter for form, and vice versa. As the
Theologysays:
The dyad, they say, is also called ‘Erato’, for having attracted through love the advance of the monad as form, it generates the rest of the results, starting with the triad and tetrad. (Translator’s note: Erato is one of the Muses; her name is cognate with the Greek for ‘love.’) (p. 46)
Matter’s love for form, the Dyad’s love for the Monad, not yet bearing fruit in the Popess, produces, in the Triad and beyond, the universe.
I have tried to show on another thread how this analysis of the Dyad contributes to the design of the Sola-Busca Twos and the word-lists for the Twos attributed to Atteilla (
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=530#p7916). I think it extends as well to the Popess. A similar Neopythagorean analysis applies to the other numbered trumps in her vicinity (
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=530&p=8518#p8518).
If the Popess is the Dyad, more aliases follow. The
Theology of Arithmetic identifies the Dyad with Rhea (p. 46), who was mother of Zeus and protector against Hera of her grandson Dionysus. Rhea is the goddess who defied her husband and gave him a rock to swallow instead of the infant he thought he was eating. She is a rebel against authority, in which she suffers much anguish but eventually trumphs.
Later, according to Apollodorus, her daughter Hera afflicts her grandson, the young Dionysus, with madness; he wanders from place to place until finally Rhea purifies Dionysus of his madness (with amethyst, according to Nonus) and teaches him her mysteries (
http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosM ... tml#Kybele). In the tarot, this detail is important because one way of seeing the Fool is as Dionysus (see
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=383&start=20#p6495). In fact, by the 17th century many if not all of the trumps could be seen as connected in some way to Dionysus or his “mysteries” as alluded to in the Greco-Roman classics and luridly illustrated on Roman-era sarcophagi. The Empress would be any of Dionysus’s mothers, chiefly the clueless Semele.
In this regard the curtain behind the “Marseille” Popess gets an explanation. Daimonax (
http://www.bacchos.org/tarothtm/0et9mathermite2.html) shows us a remarkable Roman-era relief in which a Dionysian ritual takes place in front of just such a curtain, which even has a book on top of it, slightly behind, as though suggesting hidden knowledge available only to initiates. The people here are all impersonating characters in the Dionysian myth. The boy (with his head and arm missing) is in the process of becoming a Dionysus. His female initiator is the Domina, in the role played by Rhea, Dionysus’s initiator, in the myth. The male initiator is the Silenus, enacting the role of Dionysus’s mentor by that name. It was held that when a child was old enough to understand, it should undergo the rite that made it a Dionysus or an Ariadne, and so secure its place in Heaven. It is all rather like “first communion.” I only wish I knew to what extent this relief, or others like it, was known in the 16th century, so I could feel more comfortable saying that such scenes influenced how the card was seen.
The
Theology also identifies the Dyad with Isis:
...they call it ‘Isis,” not only because the product of its multiplication is equal to the sum of its addition, as we said, but also because it alone does not admit division into equal parts. (p. 46)
The translator explains that the justification is with reference to the Greek
Ison (equal). McNeil has noted the similarity of the Cary Sheet Popess to the image of Isis in the Borgia Apartments (see my post at
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=566#p8116). And de Mellet, in what I take to be a report on the cards as they were viewed his time, found both the 2 of Coins and the 2 of Cups to be associated with Isis (in section III: “The Cow or Two of Cups, devoted to Apis or Isis”; in section IV: “the Two of Coins surrounded by the mystical Belt of Isis”;
http://www.donaldtyson.com/gebelin.html).
Iconograpically, the “X’ on the Marseille Popess’s front, her stole, while typical of representations of the Pope, is also reminiscent of the “knot of Isis,” as in the Capitoline Museum’s Isis, which comes from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, or the illustration of Isis in Cartari (this one from the 1647 edition):
Boccacio writes about Isis in the same book in which he discusses Pope Joan. He says that after a misadventure in Greece with Jupiter, she sailed to Egypt and became a great benefactor to the Egyptians. Working “hard and diligently,” not only did she teach them agriculture and how to make food from the grain, not only did she give them laws and teach them how to get along, but also
Next she did something that is even more admirable in a woman: marshalling her intellectual powers, she devised alphabetical characters suitable for teaching the language of the inhabitants and demonstrated how the letters should be placed together. (Famous Women, trans. Brown, p. 45, in Google Books)
. Thus the book in the Popess’s hands could easily be seen as a symbol of what Boccaccio held to be Isis’s greatest accomplishment.
Plutarch, in a text well-known in the Renaissance, also described Isis in ways that attest to her daring in thought and action. When Osiris was abroad, their brother, Seth or Typhon, wanted to make himself the ruler of Egypt. Isis successfully foiled him and ruled Egypt well by herself until Osiris returned. Seth then murdered Osiris at a banquet. The coffin in which Seth has sealed Osiris floated out to sea, but Isis managed to find it and resurrect Osiris (Plutarch,
Isis and Osiris XIII, at
http://www.thriceholy.net/texts/isis.html). And so on. Once she even defied her son, by insisting that Seth not be killed; the son responded by either removing her crown or, more likely, chopping off her head (
Isis and Osiris XIX, XX; Plutarch is evasive).
The curtain can also be explained in terms of Isis. Of the Popess, De Gebelin said (
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Du_Jeu_D ... te]...elle est en habit long avec une espèce de voile derriere la tête qui vient croiser sur l'estomac:...
... she wears a long dress with a species of veil which falls from behind her head and cross over her stomach:...[/quote]
I am not aware of any pre-de Gebelin Popess, besides the one drawn in his book, that shows a veil coming from behind and crossing over her stomach; but seeing the curtain behind her as a veil fits a well-known passage in Plutarch. He describes an Egyptian statue of Minerva--“whom they consider the same as Isis”--as veiled (
Isis and Osiris IX). It had an inscription reading "I am all that hath been, that is, and shall be, and my veil no mortal hath hitherto raised." This saying might hint at esoteric knowledge, of which mere mortals can attain merely a glimpse, or be seeing her as a personification of Nature, whose principles are hidden from mortal eyes (Hadot,
The Veil of Isis: an Essay on the History of Nature, reviewed at
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-03-25.html). The Popess’s book from this perspective could be the "book of nature," the hidden principles governing the universe. “Nature” is another of the names of the Dyad mentioned in the
Theology of Arithmetic (p. 39). It is in contrast to Moses' "book of the Law." Famously William Blake had his demiurge Urizen writing in both on the frontispiece to his
Book of Urizen, 1794.
Since Isis in the Roman world was assimilated to Cybele (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis#Greco-Roman_world), who was assimilated to Rhea (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele#Cult_history), Isis also equals Rhea. Furthermore, if Rhea can have a Domina substitute for her, so can Isis, and the card might just as well be about this High Priestess as about the goddess herself. In this category I would also place the likeness of the card to the illustration of the priestess of Venus in the
Hypnerotomania of 1499 (for the image, see
http://www.tarotforum.net/showpost.php? ... stcount=12). Venus was another goddess assimilated to Isis; the
Hypnerotomania is full of Egyptianate elements (obelisks, heiroglyphs, etc.). More specifically than the other goddesses, she represents the element of love that the
Theology of Arithmetic associated with the Dyad. However Venus is not traditionally associated with a book or curtain; iconographically, with Cupid, she is more associated with the Empress and her infant-like shield.
Another alias is still the Virgin Mary, who dared to give birth to a child conceived out of wedlock, ironically parallel to Pope Joan, and likewise dared to defy the religion she was brought up in; she then suffered from his separation from her on the cross. In this association, the curtain could be the veil of the temple that was rent at the crucifixion (Matt. 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45). The “Pances” title on the Dodal card (paunch, suggesting “Womb”) connects the card to her, while also applying to the other savior-mothers, Rhea and Isis. On the Marseille-style cards she is too old for the scene to be of the Annunciation; but she traditionally lived a long time.
In summary, the main pre-de Gebelin aliases, or associations, for the Popess that I am comfortable with at present are these: at first Sister Manfreda and Pope Joan; then later, in a similar characterization, the Dyad, Rhea (including the Dionysian Domina), Isis (including her priestess), and Mary; also, in reaction to Protestantism, an association to the Church (meaning the sacrament-dispensing organization headed by the Pope, as opposed to the miserable sinners getting the sacraments).
It is possible that “Church” was an association in the mid-15th century, but the evidence favors the other two, Pope Joan and Sister Manfreda. The evidence is what is presented in the Greer article (thanks Marcos), plus the Boccaccio story and the Steele Sermon that echoes it (as Marco points out). In addition, there is what I have given here about the Aretino dialogue, the Schoen Horoscope, and the likely associations to the Spanish Captain. Later on, too, there is perhaps an association to the Dyad, and in any case other female figures, with their curtains, who had similar daring, suffering, and love as Pope Joan or Sister Manfreda but with more success. The evidence on the other side—the CY male/female pairs, the resemblance to Giotto’s “Faith,” the analogy to the bishops in chess---is at best a matter of interpretation that can go either way.
Please feel free to correct any errors I have made.