The Popess and the legend of Pope Joan

Card II of Tarot de Marseille shows a seated woman wearing a papal tiara, an open book across her lap. Her name on the card is unambiguous: La Papesse, the Popess. It's a genuinely strange image for a Catholic-majority region to have circulated for centuries in an ordinary card game, because the Catholic Church has never recognized — and has actively denied — that a woman ever held the papacy.

The image almost certainly traces back to the legend of Pope Joan, a story that first appears in detailed form in a 13th-century chronicle by the Dominican monk Martinus Polonus. In the story, a brilliant woman disguises herself as a man, rises through the Church hierarchy on merit, and is eventually elected pope — reigning for roughly two years before giving birth in public during a papal procession, which reveals the deception to the horrified crowd. Polonus himself wrote the tale in a noticeably skeptical tone, and virtually every historian who has studied it since agrees it's very unlikely to be a real historical event: there's no contemporary record from any supposed reign, no consistent date across the versions that circulated, and the story's details shift considerably from one retelling to the next.

None of that stopped it from spreading. By the time Tarot de Marseille's standard imagery was taking shape, the Pope Joan story was widely known and widely believed across Europe — a genuine piece of popular culture, not a fringe rumor. Protestant writers later found it especially useful as anti-Catholic polemic, holding it up as an example of institutional corruption and concealment at the highest level of the Church. The Church itself initially tolerated the story's circulation, but by the 16th century, scholars worked deliberately to debunk it, and Joan was gradually scrubbed from official church art and histories.

Rider-Waite-Smith drops the papal framing entirely. Waite renamed the card The High Priestess and, working from the Golden Dawn's Hebrew-letter-and-Moon correspondence for the card, replaced the tiara and book with a more generalized figure — veiled, seated between two pillars, holding a scroll rather than an open book. The specifically Catholic, faintly scandalous imagery of the Popess gives way to a quieter archetype: hidden knowledge and receptive intuition, stripped of any particular institution's iconography.