Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
La
Papesse is a quietly subversive figure in the tarot de Marseille. In some
of the Besançon
decks she is one of those censored and replaced with the Roman Goddess Juno,
(along with Jupiter as a replacement for La Pape), due to the sensitivity of
such figures in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is
uncertain whether this was to avoid offending the Catholics, because the
protestants didn’t want reminders of papal authority, or perhaps a combination
of the two. But in any case, I find it best to stick with the
original designations and tend to regard Juno and Jupiter as placeholders, so
will stick the La Papesse.
But
who is she? She is sometimes called Pope Joan, referring to a woman who,
disguised as a man, rose through the church hierarchy to be elected pope. Whether
she really existed or not is unknown, and it seems likely that if such a person
did exist then the catholic church would be keen to suppress such heretical
information. As for Joan herself, the story goes that her secret was safe until
she got pregnant by a lover, which obviously rather blew her cover!
In any
case, La Papesse is an authority figure, but from the renaissance and late
medieval perspective a paradoxical figure, and a rather countercultural one. In an
age where the church was (as it still is) dominated by men, the fact that a
woman could rise to such heights is unthinkable. Yet she did so, by intellect,
by secrecy and immense strategy and wisdom, though she seems a passive figure,
she’s clearly nobody’s fool.
In
the card itself she is seen as a woman clad in papal vestment, holding a book
of (presumably) scripture, perhaps her Breviary or Book of Hours. She thus
teaches theological or spiritual truths from a position of authority, yet a
veiled one where her true nature is not known. A Jungian might call her the
Anima, and later traditions call her the High Priestess, but coming from a Christian
society I feel that her designation La Papesse, should be honoured as her existence
itself is a challenge to the monolithic authority and dogmatic rigidity of that
system, one which we in the west imbibe, whether we know it or not, from the
moment we are born.
La Papesse
shows that even within a rigid hierarchical and dogmatic system there is room
for quiet spirituality, intuition, receptivity and sensitivity to the higher. She
is a gateway figure, but not a dogmatic one, rather she beckons from behind the
veil for those who would seek real wisdom. She is transgressive in that she
does not insist on norms and rules, all the while existing within those rules
as a quiet current of spirituality.
All
in all she is one of my favourite cards in the tarot for her simplicity
conjoined with intelligence and not a little bit of guile. She fools by being
unrecognised, unseen for what she really is to those bound and blinded by rules
and structure, and thus is able to operate and teach in a gentle and intuitive
way. She is the gentle home room teacher in an otherwise strict school, the
kindly aunt, the older lady, not necessarily family, who has something to teach
based on a life lived among adversity, experience turned to wisdom, and her
lesson is the second to come in the series of trump cards, where the seeker is
still young and clear eyed enough to receive her gifts.
Love
is the law, love under will.
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