Pope Joan

"I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope
and all his Cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self."
~ Martin Luther

 

 

 

 

The Pope is the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism, the 'Vicar of Christ,' God's right hand on Earth. According to orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, the Pope is infallible - his word is divinely inspired, and so cannot be in error (the Muslim prophet Mohammed, in what you may see as an echo or evolution or reflection of this, remarked in the Hadith that "my people cannot agree on error;" as a result, ijma, or 'consensus,' is considered in scholarly Islamic circles to be a basis of religious authority. Authority, and fallibility, have not been explicitly discussed as yet, but of course they are centrally important to a parasimplistic worldview). One might expect that in the spiritually symbolic Major Arcana, one would find a Pope, and one does (his number, as Malaclypse the Younger could tell you, is 5, and we'll come to a discussion of his import later); but first, one finds a Popess.

 

The reason for this is tied in with the numerology we talked about a while ago, the arithmetic underpinning of the Law of Fives. The Magician, numbered 1, represents the apotheosis of the Self in this moment (allegorically, the Self in the moment of satori, the Self in the moment of awareness of itself qua self) - but this Sein-in-der-Welt is, of course, not the parasimplistic self, which is both itself and something more than itself. The Magician is identity, and Identity is an illusion.

 

The Popess, numbered 2, is duality; this is represented most clearly by her obvious femininity, by contrast with the foregoing two cards (respectively showing Man in the folly of ignorance, and Man in the folly of self-knowledge). In Rider-Waite, she is shown with a crescent Moon at her feet - this is also the iconographic depiction of the Virgin in Roman Catholicism, in reference to the Book of Revelations (and, intriguingly, according to one theory, in reference to Catholicism itself, and what came before it) - and wears the diadem of Hathor, the Egyptian "Mistress of the West." Both allusions identify the Popess with motherhood, with the divine, and with the yin energy of the taijitu. In Rider-Waite, she is depicted holding the Torah and seated between the pillars of the Temple of Solomon, reinforcing the syncretism of the imagery.

 

(The Popess also has a historical imagery to it, a very early and subversive element of proto-feminism, but despite her appearance in the title, Pope Joan is not a subject for discussion in this metanow.)

 

The Popess can be understood as the apotheosis of the female, which is more than mere Identity because the female can nurture and birth new beings. The female explicitly has something of the divine energy of Creation in her, which the male can merely ape with construction of unliving devices. The symbolism of the Virgin is significant here; the Popess powerfully alludes to the Pagan Triple Goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and the biologically necessary role of the male in conception is not to be understood here as part of the Divine Mystery of creation. Where the Fool represented blind faith, and the Magician self-knowledge, the Popess betokens intuition - a sense of things unseen, complementary to and cumulative with the Magician's arid knowledge of what is clearly before him. The Popess makes the connections between things without needing to know what those things-in-themselves are; the Magician understands things in their nature without appreciating the wholeness of the world. Thus the necessity of union between the energies for balance, and for enlightenment.