History of the High Priestess

Hi roppo,

roppo said:

John Lydgate depicted in his "Assembly of Gods"(1415) the personified Doctrine as "Crowned she was lyke an Emperesse / With iii crownes standyng on her hede on hy"(stanza 214). She sits in a house of which four walls are full of symbolic pictures. She is the exponent of the pictures, which show considerable similarity to the early tarot cards.

Click to expand...

That's an interesting quote.

I found an edition of the text
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/godsfr.htm
(the lines we want are 1492-1493)

with an introduction and notes by Jane Chance of the Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo Michigan
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/asint.htm#f10

She says that most scholars now think it wasn't written by Lydgate, but rather by a "Lydgatian" after his death, after 1449.

This is closer to the date of our earliest tarot Papesse, if we take her as "Dame Doctryne". The three crowns could easily be thought of as a triple tiara. It would be interesting if there were any engravings of her in any of the editions.

Ross G Caldwell said:

with an introduction and notes by Jane Chance of the Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo Michigan
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/asint.htm#f10

She says that most scholars now think it wasn't written by Lydgate, but rather by a "Lydgatian" after his death, after 1449.

Click to expand...

Hi, Ross,

First thank you for the new information. I read Lydgate almost 25 years ago by 1895 edition...well, those student days, full of hopes, romances etc. I have yet to meet an iconographical presentation of Dame Doctryne. Someday I will.

I know it's a off-thread, but I can't help pointing out the lines 1893-97

"Som were made standyng, & som in chayeres set,
Som lookyng on bookes, as they had stodyed sore,
Som drawyng almenakes, & in her handes bore
Astyrlabes, takyng the altyude of the sonne--
Among whom Dyogenes sate in a tonne."

These lines show remarkable resemblance with the Star-Moon-Sun trio of d'Este cards. Is it possible Lydgate(or Lydgatian author) and the maker of d'Este used same source ? Unknown frescos or something ?

Anyway these wild guesses give me immense pleasures!

some other possibilities

Helvetica, perhaps this information will lead to answers to some of your questions:
Tom Tadfor Little pointed out that 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. To read more of Little's study on the history of the Major Arcana, visit The Hermitage: A Tarot History Site.

So how did the Papess card turn into a high priestess? Again borrowing from Little: by the time of the Counter-Reformation, the female pope was often considered an inappropriate subject for the cards and was dropped from many decks, though not from the Tarot de Marseille which was the base for the occultist decks. Some insight into the transition can be gained by looking at a number of suggestions that have been offered as the source for the original 15th century image.

1. There was a custom of using female figures to depict institutions or abstractions, so a female pope might represent the papacy or the church at large. Kaplan, Vol 2, p 160, shows a reproduction of a painting by Vassari that celebrates the victory of Spain, Venice and the Papacy over the Turks. Here the Papacy is represented by a female Pope. However, if the Papess had been intended to represent such an abstraction, one would expect the card to be labelled “The Church."

2. Renaissance art also depicts the legendary Pope Joan. For example, she appears among the historical popes in the 15th century Cathedral of Sienna. Joan was an Englishwoman who allegedly entered a monastic order disguised as a man. She rose in prominence and was 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. However, Pope Joan is ordinarily depicted as giving birth or holding her baby.

3. Gertrude Moakley (The Tarot Cards, 1966) has called attention to a small heretical sect, the Guglielmites, which was active in Milan about a century before the tarot cards were invented. They elected one of their members, Manfreda, as pope! Manfreda was a relation of the Visconti family who ruled Milan and commissioned the earliest surviving tarot cards. On that deck, the Papess is shown in the habit of the Umiliata, the order that Manfreda belonged to. However, beyond the deck specifically produced for the Visconti about 1450, the local Milanese phenomenon of Guglielmites is unlikely to be the source for the image on earlier decks, for example, the 1442 deck mentioned in an inventory of the Este estate in Ferrara.

4. Little ( The Hermitage: A Tarot History Site) develops the idea that the Papess did not represent an individual person so much as a dualistic principle to balance the male Pope card, just as the Empress forms the female dual of the Emperor. This dualism, evident in many of the Tarot trumps, may stem from Catharism, a popular dualist heresy that flourished in the city states of northern Italy.

As a public entity, Catharism was eradicated by the Inquisition by the middle of the 14th century (Lambert, M. 1998. The Cathars. Blackwell, Oxford) but dualistic concepts continued to influence Italian culture well into the 15th century and beyond. This explanation is appealing because it helps explain why the Papess evolved into the High Priestess even as its dual, the Pope, evolved into the Hierophant.

5. However, there are also hints that the Papess image was associated with a Pagan goddess/priestess from the beginning. For example, the Papess may represent Isis who was very much a part of Late Medieval and Renaissance thinking. Peter Comestor wrote an influential history of God's People in 1160 that discusses Isis as the inventor of letters and writing. Isis also appears as a complete chapter in the History of Jacopo da Bergamo (1483). And we should not forget Plutarch's influential work: "Isis and Osiris" from which we can get the modern associations with the crescent moon and water seen in the Waite-Smith deck.

An image of Isis appears in the Appartmento Borgia in the Vatican (Yates: Giordano Bruno, plate 5). She is seated on a throne between two pillars with a veil stretched between them and a book in her lap. There is also a Renaissance image of Isis with the orb and horn crown (Shumaker: Occult Sciences in the Renaissance, p 247).

6. There is a figure of the High Priestess of Venus in Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). She appears in Chapter 31:

* http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp435.htm

There are also images at:
* http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp429.htm
* http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp431.htm


This image may be completely unrelated to the Tarot image but does suggest that the High Priestess of a pagan goddess was part and parcel of the Renaissance imagination.

7. The Papess image may also represent a Sibyl. The Sibyls were pagan prophetesses who were believed to have predicted the Virgin Birth and other aspects of Christianity. Although unfamiliar to us, the Sibyls were an important part of late medieval and Renaissance culture because of the Sibylline Books, the earliest dating back to the 4th century. Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millenium, Oxford University Press, 1970, p 33) points out that "uncanonical and unorthodox though they were, the Sibyllines had enormous influence - indeed save for the Bible and the works of the Fathers, they were probably the most influential writings known to medieval Europe.

They often dominated the pronouncements of dominant figures in the Church, monks and nuns such as St. Bernard and St. Hildgard whose counsel even popes and emperors regarded as divinely inspired...From the fourteenth century onward translations began to appear in the various European languages...these books were being read and studied everywhere."

Imagery derived from the books was widespread and therefore available to the illiterate. Finiguerra's "Picture Chronicle" ~1460 (99 images representing history) shows Sibyls. Phillippus de Barberiis "Opuscula" (1481) has illustrations of the 12 Sibylls. They are found on French Cathedrals of the period. The church of San Francesco di Rimini (~1450) has images of Sibyls as does the Cambio of Perugia and the study/library of Pope Julius II in the Vatican. They were common illustrations in prayer books (Books of Hours). Sibylls are in the pavement of the Sienna Cathedral. They were probably a part of the original floor plan (~1400) and were executed ~1480.

The easiest access to images of the Sibyls is in Levenson, Oberhuber and Sheehan Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art. There you will find, for example, the Sybil of Persia: seated, elaborate robe, book in her lap, face partially covered by a veil.

Wow, thanks wandking! You have indeed given me quite a few interesting paths to follow.

Norman Cohn was an important guide when I was at university, but I'd not thought of associating the Sybilline books tothe Papesse - maybe because they suggest something quite different from the more formal "look" of the Papesse. But their reach and influence was undoubted - and interestingly on "my" Papesse-figure, Hildergard of Bingen .

The influence of Catharism is another thing I detected in some of the tarot themes (it could not be in iconography, as the Cathars did not make religious images)- though I must admit I was troubled by the century or so between its formal disappearance in the fires of the Inquisition and the apperance of Tarot cards. As you say, however, it might have remained in the memory of the people and the erudite alike, somewhat debased and mingled with other unorthodox beliefs (as it did in Languedoc). Catharism in Italy, as it had in Languedoc, attracted the protection of the powerful lords, who were jealous of their independence against the Church (this battle joined also the ghelf and gibeline conflict, that had some strong element of religious orthodoxy vs heterodoxy to it).

It is likely, then, that the heretic sect that elected Manfreda as Popess inherited beliefs from the Cathar "mutations" and mingling with other currents.

Alain Bougearal reminds us also of the importance of Frederic II of Palerma - whose influence went far beyond Sicily and with whom the great city-states of the North and their ruling families had strong ties. He founded in Naples a university that became a refuge for Christian heretics, Jews, Muslims and many whose views had attracted the ire of the catholic Church or the civil autorities in their homeland. Given this early crossroads of East and West, and of different religious currents, I wonder if our Papesse might not be an allegorical figure that grew out of this synchretic thought - to be reappropriated later by the Church to mean either the Church, or Right Doctrine (by inference from the "lydgatian" text posted by roppo), in its battle against heresy or influence from other monotheisms. Women, we know, played strong roles in heretical movements.

This means that the figure of the Papesse on the playing cards might have meant one thing in the Visconti-Sforza family tradition - especially if we remember of the ancient link between the Visconti and some heretical currents - but something else to later, or even contemporary users of the image. Or that the Popess had become a common image born out of the synchretic thought that flowered in Italy before the Inquisition, which might have lost some of its original heretical/synchretic association with the passage of time and the work of the Inquisition, and was being reappropriated by orthodox currents.

you have it right

Helvetica -- you have it right. The extinction of the Cathars was so necessary to the awful grand scheme of the Church and the King of France . I have seen the language of their poetry in Languedoc, a language that it almost French, almost Italian, almost Spanish, that language a-forming would have been the center of Europe. They had to crush it.

Helvetica, I'm impressed with the well written conclussion, where you state: "This means that the figure of the Papesse on the playing cards might have meant one thing in the Visconti-Sforza family tradition - especially if we remember of the ancient link between the Visconti and some heretical currents - but something else to later, or even contemporary users of the image. Or that the Popess had become a common image born out of the synchretic thought that flowered in Italy before the Inquisition, which might have lost some of its original heretical/synchretic association with the passage of time and the work of the Inquisition, and was being reappropriated by orthodox currents." However, I problems with the statement "the Cathars did not make religious images." Isn't it safer to assume that the Crusaders were especially effective in destroying all evidence of Cather religious practices since their belief system was an initial target of the Crusades? Also we must realize that any religious iconography Crusaders might have missed was likely destroyed by the Inquisition.

Hi Jean-Michel,

jmd said:

During the late middle ages, the Church and Synagogue were each often depicted together, the latter blindfolded with a broken spear (or arrow), the former with cross, crown and chalice.

The attached version, larger than life-size (which I may have posted in the thread on La Papesse in the Marseille section) comes from the Strasbourg Cathedral, circa 1220.

At this stage, the allegory of the Church is distinct from the representation of the Pope, by may well have evolved to Papess, designating the the Church is the one and only Apostolic and Catholic Church...

Click to expand...

I can add something to this, from my ever-growing collection of "papesse" engravings -

http://geocities.com/anytarot/churchpapesse.html

It shows the Church/New Testament showing the Chalice and Host to the Synagogue/Old Testament.

So here we have an 18th century reworking of the medieval pairing you are talking about, except that unlike the medieval carvings, this Church wears the triple tiara, not simply a crown like on the gothic churches.

There is a reason for this development, a complex one I suppose, but not beyond telling.

Essentially, the triple tiara - or an even simpler crown earlier - is *the* symbol of the Pope, but the Pope was not always an adequate or even necessary symbol of the Church. The equation Pope=Church only occured in the course of the early 1400s, when the Western Schism threatened to replace a virtual Papal monarchy, with Conciliar authority. It was Eugene IV (coincidentally named on the title page of the book I show at the link above) who did the most to bring the Church around to recognition of the Papacy as the sole and supreme authority in the Church during the crisis of the Council of Basel, 1434-1449.

The argument should be made in more detail I know, but I think even this helps explain why we might not find an allegory of the Church, or the Faith, showing a Papal triregno before the middle of the 15th century. The earliest we could find them, I imagine, is during the 1360s, when Popes are depicted actually wearing them.

But we may note that Faith in the Cary-Yale doesn't wear the triple tiara. She is a simple Virtue, not an an allegory of the Church.

Hi Helvetica,

Helvetica said:

I'm interested to see how far back we can find the Church personified in that fashion. Presumably the image did not appear ex nihilo in the early 15th century? I've not made a study of that - how far does the idea of "Mother Church" go back? And would there have been iconographic representations of her in some form or another that predates images of a female pope?

Click to expand...

As far as I know, nobody's made a study of the Church personified with a triple tiara, so I think we are all on a rather new exploration. I myself have given two years to the study of Papesse iconography, and I have presented everything I know on the internet.

The earliest certain one I know is Peri da Iesi's painting of the Church in the Council of Trent, probably done around 1563. Here she is seated, wearing a triple tiara, and surrounded by the seven virtues, and crushing heresy (read Protestantism).

Before that, the only Papesse as I know iconographically are depictions of Pope Joan, and with the exception of Jacopo da Bergamo's Pope Joan in 1497, which I believe is modeled after the tarot, they look nothing like the tarot Papesse. Thus I think it is likely that the Tarot Papesse in the Bembo deck is an early allegory of the Church with a triple tiara.

The earlier allegories of the Church that I know are those found carved on Churches, paired with the Synagogue. In other cases, like in Giotto's series of Virtues and Vices, there is a figure of "Faith" that holds a cross, a scroll, and has keys. I think that up to this time, the Faith and the Church wouldn't be differentiated. But something happened that made the Papal component of the Church important. Hence the triple tiara. I think what happened is twofold - the Conciliar movement of the early part of the 15th century, which ended with the Pope front and center, and then Protestantism (growing out of all the dissention of two centuries), which made the Pope even more of an issue. In both cases, Catholic allegory turned to the triple tiara. I think the case for the second is evident, given all of the images I have found from the late 16th century onward; and my case for the former is derived from that.

Pope Joan is depicted with the triple tiara because she is Pope, not because she is a heretic. It is anachronistic anyway - although most artists wouldn't have known it - since the triple tiara didn't exist until around 1315. And the tarot Papesse is clearly not Pope Joan in any case.

How, too, would these images have been reflections of famous Churchwomen (before the 15th century, I mean). The 14th-15th centuries, too, was a time of many prophetic mystics - most of them women. In fact, it seems tohave become a feamle speciality. How might that have influencd the development of a female pope image?

Might not the image have mutated in meaning - into the Church personified? The book you refer us to shows a female pope with a book on her lap - dated to the late 17th century, which is far later than the appearance of the first known tarot cards. The Church did, on occasion, reappropriate for itself images that might even be heretical (a very clever thing to do, btw). When I first saw that card, I thought it referred to heretical or marginal beliefs (marginal but still within the Church, and as you know from the history of the Beguines, the border between the two could be very thin).

I have only questions - no answers! But I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Click to expand...

It's true that the Church - or the popular culture that the Church later sanctified - did appropriate pre-Christian images and practices. But for me to accept that the tarot Papesse was one of them, I would actually have to see such a pre-tarot heretical image of a female Pope, or at least read a description of her in Papal regalia.

All I have discovered, in several years of diligent, hungry, and impartial research, is the Catholic Church itself using such images as those found on Tarot cards. I see nothing heretical in the image in the tarot.

wandking said:

Isn't it safer to assume that the Crusaders were especially effective in destroying all evidence of Cathar religious practices since their belief system was an initial target of the Crusades? Also we must realize that any religious iconography Crusaders might have missed was likely destroyed by the Inquisition.

Click to expand...

The Crusaders - and more especially the Inquisitition - were every effective - how effective we know from their own (very well kept) records. Yet Cathar written sources remain, but we have not found Cathar images of the central period - and indedd, from cathar sources themselves, we know th Perfects rejected images. That does not mean that ther were no "Cathar-inspired" imagery, especilly once Catharism was proscirbed, underground and mingling with other heretical currents. But all we have are some images that look like they could be inspired by Cathatrism and other heretical dogma (I've seen Joachim de Flores cited as another source).

We have a few certainties:

- the first known "proto-tarot" cards were made in Northern Italy;

- much of their iconography was already in use, although its origin is varied. We find some images in cathedrals, some descriptions in orthodox and heretical books, and joining the dots seems to be the difficult trick;

- Italy at that time had gone through two centuries of very agitated religious and political history, had known some influential heretical or alternative religious movements. That's without counting the Black Death which killed a third of Italians, and which changed everything, from religion to art to games. The quattrocento was hardly more relaxed.

- Ideas prevalent in Italy at the time of Bembo we know to have been a mix of pure Catholic orthodoxy, whacky heterodoxy, alternative influences from Jewish and Muslim sources (despite persecution), and new "rediscovered" ideas, brought by the Greek scholars from Constantinople who travelled to Western Europe during the quattrocento. Plato especially was a rediscovery for 15th century Italy, and Platonic thought became a sudden and refreshing success. The influence of the Platonic fashion on the triumfi cards is fairly well established, and fitted well with the already existing taste for allegory.

- All these diverse intellectual currents co-existed and made it possible for such a game as the early Tarot to be invented - neither entirely an entertainment (but certainly that too), nor entirely a spiritual path (but definitely with spiritual value through the force of symbol), but something spiritual purpose, new thinking and witty light-heartedness - preferably all together.

- Images were used by different groups and currents of thought - and unlike texts, were more difficult to pinpoint as "heretical", so that an image that looked innocuous could easily be understood by heretics as meaning "something else".

In that context, the Papesse can be viewed from various persepectives. I don't think her a historical figure - the only thing that points to a historical figure is the story of Manfreda. She is probably at the crossroads of various more ancient influences, including Mary Magdalen (every bit a mysterious figure as La Papesse) and - why not? - the goddess Isis (whom Petrarch celebrated); an iconic figure born out of heresy, and reappropriated by the Church (but not before the formerly heretical courts of Northern Italy had made a triumfo card out of her, an allegorical figure and a platonic ideal...); In any case an unclassifiable woman, powerful by her personality as well as her regalia.

And let's not forget, as Michael Hurst remind us, that in the game of Tarot, she outranks two cards only: the Mat and the Bateleur. That means that, whatever her iconic heritage, her formal importance is very low. By the time people played the game of Tarot with our recognisable "Tarot de Marseille", she is number 2 out of 22.

Of course, this could simply mean that, once again, a woman was "put back in her place". History is full of powerful and influential women who were devalued after their passing (or even in their own lifetime); and just as many who devalued themselves in order to be accepted. So the formal place of women and their actual place might be very different (the dilemma was most famously expressed by Queen Elizabeth: "I have the body of a weak woman, but I have the mind and the heart of a man".) This game strong women played (and the very idea that only men could be powerful, therefore a powerful woman was somewhat masculine) seems to me to sum up the entire tension at the heart of the Papesse card.

Ross G Caldwell said:

All I have discovered, in several years of diligent, hungry, and impartial research, is the Catholic Church itself using such images as those found on Tarot cards. I see nothing heretical in the image in the tarot.

Click to expand...

Ross - thank you for your detailed - and as ever, very eloquent - answer.

Yes, I see your point of view, especially in the study of the tripled tiara. But - forgive my old-fashioned feminism - it is a woman wearing the triple tiara. I know females were commonly used as allegorical figures, but to actually show her in full regalia, in a role that was only ever "fitted" for a man and to call her a Papessa, rather than "Faith" or "Church", especially at a time which you say enhanced the Papacy (the fight against the Protestants was in the future, however), I find surprising, to say the least. You will agree that heretical texts not infrequently took orthodoxy and turned it on its head (at least pamphlet-type texts). Might not the same have been done with images? (and images - I've already written it in my other post , would have been far more easily passed off innocuously).

You say you want heretical images. How would you recognise them? Especially if the heretics in question had elected to show up Church doctrine by putting a woman in Papal regalia? You might be holding one such image in your hands when you hold Visconti-Sforza triumfi cards. You say yourself there are no images of female popes outside the Tarot before the 16th Century, a full 100 years before our first known tarot cards. At best, would you not say "we don't know how this figure came about"? The later use of this figure cannot be evidence for its earlier meaning or provenance.

I'm aware however that my argument cuts both ways - so in support, or mitigation:

- You mention two centuries of religious instability that led to Protestantism (I would say over 4 centuries - that's besides the quarrels within the Catholic Church itself and at its margins). The fights that led to strong orthodox statements in defence of Church institutions and doctrine led also to counter attacks - equally strong (if cruelly repressed) statements of heretical or marginal doctrine. You know what it was like! No sooner had one "foyer d'hérésie" been put down that another sprang up - and another, and another, all mushrooming around Europe. Influential people supported them, beggars and outcasts were protected by them, and all sorts of merchants, bankers, thinkers, clerks and artists gave them their financial and intellectual backing. Heretic influence is known to be widespread, but notoriously difficult to pinpoint in detail because of its skill in disguising itself once the Inquisition got its rack, wheels and bonfires working.

BTW - can you link me to the places on the internet, apart from this forum, where you have posted your Papesse studies? I am very interested and - you have whetted my appetite - becoming as hungry as you are

Sophie