Best check your facts re: Pope Joan

“Around this time [the 13th century] her image also began to appear as the High Priestess card in the Tarot deck.”
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/pope_joan/

However, playing cards didn’t enter Europe until the 14th century, and the first known Tarot cards weren’t created until the 15th century. Furthermore, the chronology implied by this statement is simply wrong. The trump La Papesse was always part of the Marseille Tarot, the oldest of which date to the 15th century. Other decks later renamed this card to avoid the Pope Joan connection imputed to La Papesse. There was no High Priestess card until the 18th century when the Tarot was reinvented as a fortune telling device with origins in ancient Egypt.

That is, the Marseille deck didn’t change to incorporate a Papesse, the Papesse was rather interpreted as Pope Joan by contemporary conspiracy theorists. Nor was the Priestess trump revised to be La Papesse. Rather, the aboriginal La Papesse was renamed in some later decks to avoid association with the controversy, and not the other way round.

Perhaps you could find a more reliable source for this hoax than Peter Stanford.

Assuming you got your information from Wikipedia (you failed to provide any cites), and assuming Wikipedia is more or less correct, then you are right - the first Tarot cards did not appear until around 150-200 years after the first documentation of a female pope.

This mistake, if it is one, hardly invalidates the Pope Joan myth, however.  La Papesse *is* the High Priestess, they’re just different terms for the same thing.  The term also comes from an 18th-century woodcut Marseilles Tarot, not a 15th century one as you hinted.  The image was there, but the actually terminology didn’t come until later.  Presumably they called her something to differentiate that trump from all the others, and some variant of ‘High Priestess’, ‘Regina’, or La Papesse seems likely.  What else would you call her?  She hardly fit the role of a laborer.

I should also point out that La Papesse means ‘the Popess’ while ‘High Priestess’ could mean quite a bit more.  Your argument is backwards.  By your argument the Popess existed as a trump image long before she came to be called the High Priestess, which sounds more like someone trying to lessen the Papal connection rather than strengthen it.

Once again ‘La Papesse’ means ‘the Popess’.  ‘High Priestess’ could mean anything.  Your argument should have been that La Papesse came later and was an attempt to connect the image of the priestess with the myth of Pope Joan, which makes a bit more sense.  But you would need to provide evidence that the connection was never made before the 18th century.  We know the connection was made then, but we don’t appear know if it was ever specifically made earlier.

BURN!