Episode 319: Legendary Popes (with Daniel Lavery)
/From a Jewish Pope to a woman Pope, we are hearing all about the legendary popes from author Daniel Lavery. We talk about “The Rule of Harlots”, Dan Brown novels, and we pitch a production of a Young Pope Sheldon TV show.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of religious persecution, antisemitism, homophobia, kidnapping, death, childbirth, misogyny, hanging, suicide, gore/body horror, illness, genitalia, transphobia,
Guest
Daniel Lavery is the cofounder of The Toast and the author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You.
Housekeeping
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Transcript
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast. This is a sometimes boozy, sometimes not, dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And this Episode 319, all of her legendary Pope's with the one, the only Daniel Lavery. Daniel, welcome to the show.
DANIEL: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so pleased to be here.
AMANDA: I think this is the first episode where I've asked the guests like hey, what do you feel like any topics, you said in a list of things that all look fascinating, legendary Pope's, and I said no further questions. So I, I have noth— I have no knowledge what to expect, and I'm sure it's gonna be delightful.
DANIEL: I promise you that it will be.
JULIA: Excellent. That's what we'd like to hear.
AMANDA: Now, you are somebody whose work I've been reading on the internet for a long time, which I may describe as weird, humorous, wonderful, archaic interested in mythology, folklore, and tradition. How do you describe what you do and what you're interested in professionally to people who don't know your work?
DANIEL: That sounds about right. I would say like a professional amateur of general interest, which also describes a lot of the internet of the last decade or so. But I used to run a sort of general interest site called The Toast with my friend and business partner, Nicole Cliff, and then went on to write an advice column for a little while at Slate called Dear Prudence. And now I run a newsletter called the Shatner, formerly the Shatner Shatner, but William Shatner is very litigious. Some of my areas of sort of, like perpetual interest, have to do with like medieval Christian legends and folklore, among others. But so this is definitely a sort of sweet spot of mine.
AMANDA: I think you gave Shatner new relevance among, you know, young and middle-aged queer people. But that's just me.
DANIEL: I think he's doing fine for himself. Like, I don't think he's in any danger of totally falling off the map. But I also don't think that he was yeah, in any danger from my goofy newsletter. But you know, it's just one of the many subjects that William Shatner and I disagree upon.
AMANDA: That's totally fair. And before we get into the meat of the issue, and I know Julia has a lot of questions for you as well. What are some of the stories you were fascinated by as a kid? Were there any like ghost stories or urban legends, or mythos that you were obsessed with, that you would like to talk about now?
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh. Well, certainly, I can think of a number of like, you know, suburban Illinois in the 80s and 90s, was not as much of a hotbed of like urban legends, and folklore as I would have liked. I've talked about this elsewhere, but I think one of the early indicators of like, potential or future homosexuality in a certain type of suburban child is like, nonspecific delusions of grandeur. And like a deep desire for like, why aren't there more legends and myths surrounding me, and the people I know, don't you know who I'm supposed to be?
AMANDA: Yeah, I preserved my own papers as a child, as if I was one day going to be like a president or a pope. I don't know.
DANIEL: My future biographers will need this.
AMANDA: Yes.
DANIEL: And I grew up in a fairly religious family, but in an evangelical Midwestern tradition, which is really well, it has lots of kind of cultural effects all its own, it comes from a long line of trying to like divest Western Christianity from its own, like history and tradition, like always trying to like, oh get rid of that, get rid of that, get rid of that, that's too much. So you know, in some ways, getting rid of all the fun stuff. So I was aware of, you know, some like Protestant history as far back as maybe like the Pilgrim's Progress, but anything, you know, beyond that was just like, wildly exotic. And so certainly, the idea of Catholicism was just like, wow, you know, you're allowed to get your ears pierced when you're a baby. They got all kinds of gold. What a remarkable, you know, fascinating people.
JULIA: Also the 80s and 90s in like the Midwest, I imagine that was probably a hotbed for satanist rumors and urban legends and stuff like that. Was that something that reached your town?
DANIEL: Not at least by my time, I think part of this was it was also a slightly like newly, socially mobile or at least socially ambitious type of denomination. So I think the Satanic Panic of a few years earlier would have been seen as a little like de clase. Not even like mistaken, just like, oh, that's kind of poor. And we want to shop at J Crew someday. So you know, like you would occasionally hear about, you know, a neighbor at the end of the coldest act, who gave out chick tracks on Halloween instead of candy? And that would be very like, oh, we don't do that, that's embarrassing.
AMANDA: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: And of course, I'm sure actually, chick tracks have their own Papal legends, because Jack Chick was part of that American Protestant tradition of, you know, virulently anti-Catholic leanings. So, I'm sure although I have not read any of them, that he, he would have produced a number of pamphlets of really wild, wacky ideas about what the papacy meant.
AMANDA: I had never heard of chick tracks, I just Googled it. This is a wild tradition growing up suburbanly Catholic. This—this is, this was not how we roll.
DANIEL: I can imagine that. Have you ever seen like on Twitter, a little drawing of like, it's usually replaced by someone else saying something kind of silly, but like Jesus saying something, and then it's like, no one believed him? And that's like a memento thing.
AMANDA: Yes.
DANIEL: That's just—that's from a chick track.
AMANDA: Oh, amazing. I mean, the visual language of it is really, like, I get why this was a real thing. But that's—that's amazing. And I think a perfect segue into our, our topic.
DANIEL: Yeah. So you know, away from a, you know, American Protestant, anti-Catholic sentiment, and into simply like, interesting Papal legends is, I think, a good place for us to move.
AMANDA: Please.
DANIEL: But you know, it is one of the oldest institutions in the world. There, you know, with a few iffy months here or there, and a couple of you know, disputed folks on either side of the—the formal list. You know this is a an institution that stretches back over 2000 years, and through numerous changes in global history. So it is not surprising that there would be a number of kinds of myths that would spring up around something so old. The two biggest ones, there's—there's—there's Pope Donus II, who is a clerical error. Who was accidentally inserted after one of the Benedicts, but that's it? That's kind of all there is like it was a clerical error.
AMANDA: Damn.
DANIEL: It was pretty swiftly corrected. There were not like decades in which everyone thought Pope Donus II was this incredibly important figure. But so the two sorts of biggest fictional or mythological or legendary Pope, are Pope Joan, which if you've heard about a fake Pope, that's probably the one that you've heard of. There's actually a movie—
AMANDA: Right.
DANIEL: —about this in 2009, I think from a German studio, and I haven't seen it, so I can't vouch to its either accuracy or entertainment value, but it's, you know, it's stuck around. And the other is of the—the Jewish Pope Andreas. So those are the sort of two big ones. Have you heard of either of them? Are you familiar at all?
JULIA: I've heard of Pope Joan in passing. I'm not super familiar with Pope Andreas.
AMANDA: Same.
DANIEL: Yeah. So you know, we can certainly, maybe it makes a little more sense to start with Andreas just because it's shorter.
JULIA: Hmm. Sure.
DANIEL: And won't take as much time. But I do think it's interesting, you know before we jump into that, just like the papacy is something that we do think of, as, you know, incredibly old, incredibly static. And yet, it wasn't until, you know, after the first thousand years that it was really—that the Western Catholic Church started pushing for the celibacy of the priesthood. And, you know, it wasn't until a few 100 years after that fa— you know, that there—there would be, you know, conflicts about whether or not priests would get to have beards. And so, there's a lot of interesting information from the sort of first millennium of the papacy of popes with wives, Popes with—popes with children, popes who fathered other Pope, popes, who—who were, you know, uncles to anti-Popes. And so there's—there's a lot more sort of fuzziness, I think, in that first millennium. And that's, I think, a big part of where some of these stories come from. And I think it's pretty straightforward to say they—they speak to certain anxieties both about like—
AMANDA: Jews, women, homosexuals. Yeah.
DANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, the big—the big ones, right?
AMANDA: The big three exactly.
DANIEL: The big three. So the—the Jewish Pope Andreas, which you know, came from old Spanish legends, which again, that—that makes sense, like the—the history of the Reconquista and the Inquisition like that's where a lot of the most sort of anxiety around the status of have the, you know, Jewish people that we have forced to convert to the Catholic Church at the end of a sword actually done so or have we now invoked Jewishness within ourselves in a way that we have to become really uncomfortable and violent about within our own communities. But so it's essentially like a retelling of the story of Esther. The idea is that Andreas becomes the Pope, during which time there's one of the calumnies against the Jews, which is like those false accusations of sometimes poisoning, sometimes murdering Christian children that was often used to kick off anti-Jewish violence throughout Western Europe. And then at the critical moment of sort of like we're, we're going to the community is going to go ahead and commit genocide. The Pope shows up and he delivers a speech sometimes in favor of the Jewish people, sometimes simply against persecution, sometimes kind of invoking the history of like Christian pacifism. And then there's some sort of moment where he either like offers a prayer, or, or has a sort of artifact with him as a token of his own Jewish heritage, which he sometimes gives to the Jewish people in secret, like in a secret meeting in his room, but something that kind of denotes I'm here, and I'm looking out for you. And I know who you are. And sometimes this is associated with one of the anti-Pope, Anacletus II, sometimes the Pope Alexander III, who were both sorts of known for being well disposed towards European Jewish populations, which often in context means simply in order of magnitude less violence. But the sort of interesting thing there is that there's also some roots to actual stories throughout the Middle Ages and up into the enlightenment of Jewish children who were kidnapped and raised by Christian families. And there's a real case that's fairly notorious in Italy, from the 19th century of Edgardo Mortara, who was a Jewish child, who was secretly baptized by a Christian servant in his parents' household and, and on the strength of that baptizing this infant in the middle of the night, she claimed that she had the right to take him and raise him. And eventually, legally, the courts sided with her and he became a priest within the Catholic Church. So this is obviously, you know, centuries after the first story of Andreas was popularized, but it's sort of fascinating that actually had so many real-world moments of replication, I suppose.
JULIA: Yeah, that's—that's wild, not surprising because it's Italy and Catholicism. And obviously, the—during that time period, any like Catholic person would probably trump any Jewish person, because that's just how— Europe is— was and sometimes it's still, but I think that's really interesting that you have the story. And then you do see these kinds of real-world consequences, or real-world reflections that it finds their basis in a mythos that was created, you know what I mean?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. And you know, in both the stories of Joan and Andreas, you know, it's, it's incredibly and immediately apparent, sort of like what's at stake, or like, why these communities would be telling me stories to themselves. And so Pope Joan was both incredibly popular prior to the Protestant Reformation. And then during the Protestant Reformation for sort of obvious reasons. But that so it was popular both among first Catholic and then later Catholic and Protestant audiences, whereas the legend of Pope Andreas was more squarely within Jewish tradition. So it was not in—at least it's not as far as I'm aware, especially popular among Catholics, or Christians of any kind.
AMANDA: It feels like a sort of fear of Christians that, you know, someone may have converted, some may have claimed to converted, somebody may, you know, disclaim, and kind of disavow their heritage. But I think particularly then, like fear of, of Jewishness, of Jewish ethnicity of Jewish blood is absolutely a thing that feels like, well of course, in this story, the person born Jewish would have some, you know, bit of Jewishness inherent to them that is not purgeable and maybe makes them you know, an exception or an asterisk or, or not fully Catholic, and certainly not fully fit to rule Catholics.
DANIEL: And like the Esther story, there's very much a sense of somebody being forced to hide in plain sight, and an attempt to sort of ring some goodness out of like traumatic dispossession. And so, you know, often the story of Pope Andreas is one where he is stolen from his family, often while his parents are asleep and held prisoner in a monastery. And in fact, one of the one of the versions of this story, he calls his father to see him after having issued an edict of persecution against the Jews of the community, in this instance, Magonza, which would have been a region in Germany. And when his father comes to see him, they play chess, and he plays a chess move that his father had only taught him. And so by this token, his father knows that this is his son, that the edict is, in fact, not actually going to result in a campaign of terror, that this was just his attempt to communicate with him. So again, you see this real like, retelling of things that would actually happen, but in a way that contains the seed of or the possibility of hope, lessened violence in the future, caretaking the promise that it will not always be violence, terror being driven out.
AMANDA: Totally. And it's codified in Judaism, that sometimes you have to convert and say it with your mouth, even though you don't mean it in your heart, and that's not a sin. It is understood and what actually—like one of the very few things you kind of can't come back from, is worshipping a false idol in your heart and not just with your actions. Because sometimes, lots of us throughout time have really had to do that and like we get it, which is the thing I've always found really, like poignant and fascinating.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you know, that's sort of the beginning and the end of the story. It doesn't have the same kind of legs that the story of Pope Joan has had, or the same sort of like, attempts to identify various, like actual pieces of Papal furniture.
AMANDA: Right.
DANIEL: Which Pope Joan does have? But so I think there are more, more similarities than perhaps you would, you know, first immediately think of between the two. But so, again, you mentioned briefly that you thought you had heard of Pope Joan, can you tell me just like anything you have heard about the story or whether or not you learned about it as like a fiction or a potentially true story, or what.
JULIA: I feel like I just heard, like, Lady Pope, and that's all I remember. You know what I mean?
AMANDA: Yeah. I think I might have heard and like there is, there is a bit of Catholic lore that may or may not have come from Dan Brown novels or history like that. That is a site of transference in my brain that I know is true. But I've heard of a pope potentially giving birth that may be related to Pope Joan.
JULIA: Yeah, and it's not a corner of AO3 that you were reading that on?
AMANDA: That's right, Julia. That's—that's different. That's different.
DANIEL: Right. So that's a big part of the story. And I don't think we have to worry too much about spoiler alerts, ideally.
JULIA: Check the tags, everyone.
DANIEL: But yeah, so, so there's a tension in the Pope Joan's right. Both Pope Joan and Pope Andreas, in both legends, there's—there's a specific bit about how good they were at being pope. And so again, there's that sort of sense of like, what if an outsider is as good at being pope as Pope are supposed to be?
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, so both, both Andreas and Joan are incredibly competent. And there's—there's sort of two different versions of how Joan gets there. The Legend of Pope Joan, we first see written records of it in about the mid-13th century, but she is supposed to have reigned during the mid-9th century,
AMANDA: A comfortable 300 years in the past, when people were dumber than we are now in the cosmopolitan 1200s.
JULIA: They just didn't know as much.
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, so the sort of period of the papacy that it's harkening back to, is a really complicated and interesting one. And it has to do with I think, an ongoing reevaluation of that period. I don't know if you're familiar with the term the, the Pornogracy.
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: No.
DANIEL: So, so the word Pope, you know, comes from the Greek Papas, meaning father. It refers to the in Western Christianity, the bishop of Rome, who was also the head of the global Catholic Church, and the head of Vatican City, and apostolic successor to St. Peter, you know in Matthew 16:19, Jesus says to Peter, I'm giving you the keys to the kingdom with them. Whenever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth, will be loose to heaven. And that's generally understood as the beginning of apostolic succession. That's a little like it doesn't take right away. It's also used for the Bishop of Alexandria, for example, in like Coptic and Greek Orthodox churches, but like around by the fifth or sixth century, Pope is being used in the Western Church, exclusively for the Bishop of Rome, with a few notable exceptions, like the Archbishop of Milan, was formally rebuked in 1998, for calling himself the Pope.
AMANDA: Incredible.
DANIEL: It's like, I know, I'm the Pope, I need to make sure everyone else knows that I'm the Pope.
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: So you know, there's no real temporal power in the papacy until after the conversion of Constantine. Because the first few hundred years in the church, under Roman authority, it was largely one of you know, trying to keep things under wraps as much as possible. But once Constantine does convert, he starts this tradition of donations. So lots of early Christians within some form of power would donate usually upon their death, like, oh, Catholic Church, you can have my villa when I die, or here's some money when I die. Please pray for me. And up until this point, the church is just like a private landowner. They're trying desperately to figure out how do we keep all of these properties connected. How do we pass things on? How do we—do we still need to fly under the radar? And meanwhile, you know, the Goths are invading and taking over different parts of the empire. So there's like the Ostrogothic papacy, there's the Byzantine papacy, which is also sort of like, tense because of the XR Kate of Ravenna, which was sort of like a second, not quite papacy, but like the Byzantines were trying to run Rome from Byzantium. And that wasn't going great.
JULIA: I feel like I'm in college again, this is great.
AMANDA: I know. I—I feel really smart because I know who wins. And so like, I just know from the words I know, and the words I don't know, like, I bet those guys lose. And it feels like I'm watching a children's mystery and like feeling really smart that I know who the villain is.
DANIEL: Yeah. I mean, it is incredibly like the the moving chairs and the moving possessions of seats of power within, you know, late antiquity, early medieval Italy is really stunning. I mean there's just, you know, waves and arrows, waves and arrows coming and flowing all over the map. So—
AMANDA: Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: —around the mid-8th century, you start to get the consolidation of the Papal States and so you have, you know, real earthly political power, actual lands under the rule of the papacy. And so, the, the time that I'm referring to, sometimes called the Saeculum obscurum or the pornogracy or the Rule of Harlots, that took place around you know, 9th, 10th century, there were particular aristocratic families, particularly the Theophylact die. Also, just to—as I mentioned earlier, I grew up in the Midwest in the 80s and 90s. My Latin is purely theoretical. My Italian is no better. So I apologize, you know, if I've been mangling any words here, and I'm sure I will [20:30]
AMANDA: You're saying that with confidence, which I think is 85% of the battle. But I mean, isn't most Latin theoretical? Like we—we kind of don't know how it's pronounced. Is that true? Or is that like a truism?
DANIEL: I think there's yeah, there's no sense of like, how people who spoke it every day, would have sounded like, but I'm sure if you've got an actual, you know, like Latin expert in here, they'd at least be able to say with some confidence words that I'm guessing on.
AMANDA: Now, was the pornogracy, related to sex? Or is that one of those words that I laugh at, but really means something very banal in Latin?
DANIEL: No, it absolutely was. You're—you're absolutely right. And so this is now a general area of time during which 13th-century writers began to claim that Pope Joan would have ruled. So it's, I think, pretty relevant that this is the era that is retroactively known as a particularly like sexually raucous time, sexually dangerous time, especially because like the celibacy of the clergy is not a totally settled thing yet, you know, we've had as early as like three or four edicts about clerical celibacy issued from the highest possible authority. But that wasn't taking all over by, by any stretch of the imagination. I think the last married Pope would have been Adrian II, which would have been around 867-872. So I mean, we're right in Pope Joan's time, and his, his wife and children were killed. And the Pope who replaced him was himself strangled in jail. So it was an incredibly violence wild— it was like the Wild West era of the papacy I think, is probably the best way of putting it. Just like you run into town. You get your guns, you kicked down the door of the saloon, you say, who's the Pope, and some guy raises his hand and you try to kill him. And then you say, I'm the Pope. Anyone have a problem with that?
JULIA: Imagine if the more modern-day ones were so exciting, the real transfer of power.
AMANDA: I was gonna say I find the white smoke theatrical and campy, like I do love that.
JULIA: But it's not gunshots and an old west saloon.
DANIEL: So the white smoke, but you'd have like somebody like, blowing it out from the gun.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah.
JULIA: I also just want to slip in real quick, Rule of the Harlots was my favorite band in high school. So.
DANIEL: I think rightly so.
JULIA: Yeah. As they should be.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, you know, as I think I had mentioned, they weren't calling it that at the time, like nobody was writing down in like the 9th or the 10th century, like, you know, dear Hans, I'm writing to you during the Rule of Harlots. This is—this is a term that originated in the 16th century, so a little later than the origins of the Pope Joan story, but you know, certainly like late medieval, early Renaissance, like retrospectives of the early medieval period.
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: And so that was a cardinal named Caesar Baronius, who had a contemporary reference Bishop, [23:17] which was a place in northern Italy. So those were his sources. But again, he was writing with his own additional spin. The real sort of consensus was that there were too many women involved in the papacy and that this was in part because the, the celibacy of the clergy was not yet settled. You may be familiar with Edward Gibbon, he wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was one of the big kind of 19th-century guys. And he actually wrote a little bit about particularly two women from the Rule of Harlots, who were particularly remembered in sort of intimacy. One of them was Marozia, and one of them was Theodora, and they were both sisters, and Marozia had the kind of unusual political title of senatrix, which sounds amazing, I think.
JULIA: It does sound really cool.
DANIEL: Up there was like aviatrix and just terms of like, you occasionally get weird words for a particular job when a woman does it. That— is on the one hand, you know, a little silly and unnecessary, and on the other hand, just sounds so much cooler than Senator or aviator, that you wish we kept them.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: Oh, I'm going podcastrix from now on. That's just my new title.
DANIEL: Yeah.
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: So she was—she was given the title of senatrix of Rome by Joan X. She was the alleged mistress of Pope Sergius II, probably a few others. The alleged mother of a couple of Pope she really was involved is the nicest way to say it. Other people obviously said it in very mean ways. And so Edward Gibbon, kind of summarizing a lot of those later medieval perspectives, he wrote the influence of two sister prostitutes. Marozia and Theodora was founded on their wealth and beauty, their political and amorous intrigues. The most strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman miter, meaning the papacy. And their reign may have suggested to the darker ages, the fable of a female Pope, the bastard son, the grandson and the great-grandson of Marozia, a rare genealogy were all seated in the chair of St. Peter. And it was at the age of 19 years that the second of these became the head of the Latin Church.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: Right, because we definitely want a 19-year-old Pope that makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine all his decisions are probably great and just and very pious.
DANIEL: I imagine that's going to be the next season of the Young Pope, like the Young Pope just keeps getting younger and younger.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Yeah. Just like a 17-year-old being like, where the ladies at?
AMANDA: I think we're now at the crossover point where young Sheldon and Young Pope like if we go—
JULIA: Oh no.
AMANDA: —Pope goes backward in age, and Sheldon goes forwards in age. I think they're about 17, Julia, I think you've created that.
DANIEL: I feel like though young Sheldon's whole thing would be like checkmate Christians sort of that.
AMANDA: Yes.
DANIEL: You know, Reddit era 2007, Atheism, which would—
AMANDA: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Frankly only improves Young Pope Sheldon the show.
AMANDA: Fair, fair.
DANIEL: Just horrible Family Guy-style pronouncements.
JULIA: How about we just linger on Young Pope Sheldon for a second and quickly grab a refill?
AMANDA: Let's do.
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It's about people who go on a sort of alone-style reality competition show, The Survivalist show, and weird stuff happens. It is not exactly a horror novel, I would say it's very much about suspense. But it was all about kind of what it means to go on a show like that, what it means to be alone, to be in the woods to you know, come through for people. And as a person who's really into competition TV shows, it was a very cool kind of side of that industry and take on, you know, a book about a TV show that I hadn't ever seen before. And Blair is a fantastic and super lyrical writer. So check out her newest book, Small Game at spiritspodcast.com/books where you can buy it online, gives us a little bit of a commission when you use that link, but also, more importantly, supports indie bookstores here in the US. And hey, we have so much going on this month at Multitude, there is so much happening that we are so excited about. But you know our old favorites. We never leave them by the wayside. And this week, I want to remind you that we have a weekly friendly debate podcast called Head Heart Gut that we publish. That's right, every dang week. We have some extremely cool stuff planned for this year. Right now we're debating what the best symphonic instrument is. It's extremely exciting and nerdy. And I just wanted to highlight for a sec that at the $10 tier of the multi-crew, that's a membership program that supports Multitude, lets us do new things and pay our lovely community manager and make new projects including free resources for all of you out there. A $10 you not just get Head Heart Gut, you also get access to a bonus behind-the-scenes monthly newsletter our multi-crew-only Instagram account, where we post lots of sneak peeks before everybody else, even the rest of the multi-crew gets to see and first dibs of course on any updates coming down the Multitude pike. 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And I know for certain just like when you wake up after you know a poor night of sleep, or if I you know doing something and I am not, you know eating food that makes me feel good and fueled. I know I'm just not at my best. And nothing for me is more true than my state of mind and my mental health for when I'm not at my best. I can't show up for others, I can't do the things I want to do. I can't enjoy the life that I'm living. And whenever I feel that way, I am really grateful that I have a great therapist at my back to help me work through the stuff that I feel is holding me back, that I'm worried about just to talk to someone else, where even if we don't come up with a plan right away, just getting an off my shoulders, off my chest is such a wonderful thing. If you are thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option for you to consider. It is convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. And especially if you live somewhere where there aren't a ton of therapists, or maybe there are but they're not taking new patients, or they're way too expensive, or they don't take your insurance. There are so many obstacles in this country for getting access to mental health care and I really appreciate that BetterHelp makes it easy, whether it's you know you're just getting started or you need something in between seeing other therapists, or you find it really convenient to have therapy online. BetterHelp is a great option to try. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/spirits today to get 10% off your first month at betterHELP.com/spirits. And now back to the show.
AMANDA: We're back, I think I've had enough a very, very pungent ginger tea to purge the image of Young Pope Sheldon from my brain. But now I've, you know resubmitted for all of us, so here we are. We're excited to learn more about Pope Joan.
DANIEL: Yeah, so I'm finally getting us there right like it's been a lot of throat-clearing. So you may have recognized in Edward Gibbons's quote earlier, he refers to it as the fable of a female Pope. So certainly—
AMANDA: Yes.
DANIEL: —given understood it to be legendary, and he himself has an asterisk during this section and talks about how. Until the Reformation, this tale, meaning the tale of Pope Joan was repeated and believed, and Joan's statue long occupied her place among the Pope in the Cathedral of Siena, but she has been annihilated by two learned Protestants, [34:54] and that second name refers to Pierre Bayle, who was a skeptical French Huguenot philosopher of the 17th century. So we have—at least as far back as you know, the 1600s, a tradition of skepticism about the Pope Joan story, possibly earlier. So maybe, maybe it's fair to say that almost as quickly as the legend sprang up, it was contentious, not believed by everyone. And so it was sort of understood as some people believed it uncritically. Some people wanted to believe it or had political reasons for wanting to believe it. Others didn't really believe it had actually happened but thought it was kind of a fun kicky story. And that explained a couple of weird little quirks about Vatican City, or, or various elements of papal ritual. Which is not unlike lots of like stories and myths that we have now, where like, some people might believe it literally, many more people believe it in a sort of like, fun tongue-in-cheek way. And a lot of other people are sort of adamant that this isn't true, and therefore it's not useful.
JULIA: Yeah. I was just about to say the way you described it, the fact that the story explained quirks about Vatican City and the papacy as a whole, and like, of course, you know, you would want to tell a story that kind of explains away things that are otherwise unexplainable, or just don't have as fun of a reason. You know what I mean?
DANIEL: Yes, yes. Yeah. So some of this certainly depends on like, do you find it fun? And that's pretty, pretty critical. So there's—there's—
JULIA: I just find Pope Joan fun.
DANIEL: I do. The basic story—Oh, this is—this is going to be bad. My French is worse than my Italian and my Latin.
JULIA: Here we go.
DANIEL: Purely speculative. So Jean de Mailly, M A I L L Y,
AMANDA: [36:30] Yeah.
DANIEL: Is a Dominican cleric. We're about to have a lot of Dominican clerics kind of coming our way.
AMANDA: Incredible.
DANIEL: Living in Metz, which was a city in Northeast France, first wrote about Pope Joan in his universal chronicle of, of Metz. This is the mid-13th century, and then only a little bit later, Martin of Opava, who was also a Dominican cleric, wrote about—in his Papal history, and the name that he had given—because obviously, she would not have ruled as Pope Joan, the name he gives is John Anglicus. So he says John Anglicus, born at Mainz, which is a city in Germany, was Pope for two years, seven months, and four days and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who was a girl had been led to Athens, dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers. There she became proficient in a diversity of branches and knowledge—of knowledge until she had no equal. And afterward in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. A high opinion of her life and learning arose in the city and she was chosen for Pope. While Pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion, through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected. She was delivered of a child while in procession from St. Peter's Basilica to the Latrine. And Elaine once named via sacra, the sacred way, but which is now known as the [37:53] between the Colosseum and the Basilica of San Clemente.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Hold on. [38:01]
DANIEL: By all means.
JULIA: She gave birth in the middle of the street during a procession?
DANIEL: So right, yeah, your—your reaction is, is one that I think many would probably share, which is whatever level of truth this story exists upon. It is probably not the literal, somebody probably would have mentioned this at the time, if the pope had given birth in the middle of Rome, during a papal procession.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Feel like it would have come up. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. And so certainly, you can see where is the story operates at a more like instructive level, because there's that—that real sort of like hostility I think, in that section about, you know, the church had kind of complicated relationships to what we can broadly call female cross-dressing throughout the Middle Ages. Sometimes it was seen as incredibly spiritual and in fact, indicative of near saintliness. And other times, particularly the longer the Middle Ages went on. It was viewed with more suspicion and as possibly being sexually deviant. And so there's this idea that she would have been led into cross-dressing by a male lover. It would have been a sexual deviancy introduced by a man, that would have led to a love of learning which, even if she might have been good at it, was similarly damaging to her character, to her soul, and which would lead to a sort of spectacle that reveals her inability to be pope, her inability to know or control her own body, and her inability to save herself from public shame and humiliation. So it's really like childbirth, as degradation and punishment, which is really ugly. I think it has always been the sort of most like, flashy, ugly, peacock element of the story. Do you know what I mean? We're like ugliness—
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: —Misogyny can kind of take on like pageantry and beauty, and this really like upsetting peacocking kind of way.
AMANDA: It is. And it feels to like a story kind of authored by people who haven't given birth because it's not an experience I've had, but I think even stories about sudden—about like pregnancy that you are not aware of. And then suddenly you're giving birth, this suddenly is like a couple of hours. It's not—it's not like going from a preemie of a stomachache, to like, there's a baby suddenly on the street. They feels like some amount of hand waving, whether that's an ignorance of how it actually feels or like, to your point, Daniel, like a, a natural and deserved consequence from, you know, trying to get away from, from some essential truth.
DANIEL: Yeah, and, you know, if, if anything, and this is just like my own pure speculation, but I think if there's any sort of like parallels to be found in that particular episode with like church history, it has to do with the deaths of Judas and the deaths of Herod. And you may be familiar with the death of Judas in the gospels, where he sort of complicatedly in some versions, hangs himself, in some versions spills his guts out over a potter's field. And in some versions, it's both. And then that the death of Herod in the book of Acts is similarly like gut-based and involves being on the throne. And being sort of overtaken by sometimes it's described as a disease, sometimes as worms, sometimes similarly, his gut bursts open and spills. So this is a sort of like gender-swapped version of those two very, like ugly deaths that carry with them the pronouncement of divine disfavor. And that, again, involves, like, [41:21] spilling out in public, and especially in the Herod story on like this site of like the literal throne of borrowed in authentic power. So I—you know, this is just me guessing, but I think this part of the story was probably influenced by the death of Herod specifically.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Seems right to me.
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: Great. I love—I love that when someone's just like, I agree.
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: It sounds like you know, you're talking about.
JULIA: That sounds awesome. Yeah, I can see the parallels, and also like, made worse and with the distinct mwa, flavor of misogyny there because one would assume that like, the birth of a child or giving, like bringing a child into the world should be a positive good thing, but instead is turned into this abhorrent behavior, and then punishment for Pope Joan, you know what I mean?
AMANDA: Yeah. Why are we not saying Pope Joan, not just a pope, but like, Mary? You know, like, there—there is a lens to view these things that, that the story is choosing not to.
DANIEL: Yeah, and I think especially for any sort of like Christian listener at the time, there was this real understanding of like blasphemy as a reversal. So like, the idea that the sort of like Devil's hour or witching hour was the inverse of the hour at which Christ died on the cross, satanic. And this is a little bit later obviously when you get into the sort of like, early modern era, which panics. But you know, you had the Malleus Maleficarum in the—in the 15th century, so I think we can say this is roughly the same time, which is mass, where the sort of infernal kiss was, was when the witch in question had to kiss the devil on the anus. And this was the sort of reversed kiss of Christ, kiss of peace. So Herod dies for like blasphemous, self-exaltation over the power of God, and as such dies on the seat of his power. And so Pope Joan, in sort of like defying, you know, rules about sex and the clergy would be brought low by childbirth, you know, sort of just like one for one, you know, midnight versus noon, up versus down, medieval understanding of like, divine punishments that fit the crime. [43:28] it's called in the—in the Divine Comedy when, when Dante goes down into hell, everyone is suffering, the sort of like logical and exact opposite of their sin, in hell.
AMANDA: 100%.
DANIEL: We're adding so much to the story.
JULIA: I know I love it.
DANIEL: The bit about that street at the end, this is where we get into the sort of, like, echoes of the Pope Joan's story that you could either argue, it was like, created to fill retroactively, or simply borrowed in order to embroider the story. So the shunned street supposedly is a place you know, I'm not supposedly like this. This is a street, the [44:03] but like there was supposedly a tradition where Pope would like look away from that street when they had to walk past it, or they would avert their eyes. And the sort of justification that was given for that was, well, that's where Pope Joan, you know had her humiliating childbirth and was later died. So.
JULIA: Of course, she later died after giving birth, because obviously.
DANIEL: Ohh, and was killed.
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: You know, by, by an angry mob, which angry mobs love to do.
JULIA: I assumed that it was through childbirth, which I was like, of course, why not?
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. So this mostly comes around from a particular story, written down by John Burchard, the bishop of Strausberg, who wrote about a procession for Innocent VIII, which broke with a tradition where they just went down the street, and so Burchard kind of noted like, I guess they're not doing that anymore. I guess it's not a big deal. There's not much beyond that, that I'm aware of. It's not like oh, yeah, you know, we have written records for all the decades of the early middle and late middle Ages, and everybody was avoiding that street. So we don't know a lot about what that custom might have been, or even if it was a custom, just there's a written record of somebody having broken it.
AMANDA: What a delightful piece of like, erota, for someone to be like, I guess they're not doing that anymore. Like there is—it's—there's a real I know, it's like a useful historical observation. But my brain wants to characterize it as like a gossipy little aside of like, times have change, I guess we're not avoiding this street anymore.
DANIEL: It's kind of up there with Pope Donus II right, where it's just—
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: —he's a clerical error or what like, is there a story here—
AMANDA: Exactly.
DANIEL: —isn't there?
JULIA: No.
AMANDA: It's amazing.
DANIEL: Yeah. And then the sort of like biggest element of this would have been the statue in [45:37] where they were—at the Cathedral, there were statues of all the Pope's, and—and for several centuries, in the late Middle Ages, there was apparently a statue with a woman's face in papal vestments. It was apparently destroyed due to another violent mob, at some point in the—probably 16th century, latter half of it. At some point, Martin Luther visited Rome, and he remarked on it and remarked on it specifically, I'm surprised the popes let this still stand here because this is embarrassing to them.
AMANDA: Damn.
JULIA: [46:12] the classic Martin Luther line.
AMANDA: Damn Martin Luther. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. So the—the one that he described was a woman wearing a papal cloak and holding a child. So this statue, at least there's a living child that she's holding, which slightly seems to deviate from the story itself, but could simply be representative. We don't know. And again, it's also possible that it was just removed during renovation work, because around that time, they were renovating the cathedral a lot. It's not definitive. So I'm sorry to because I start with like, such a cool, specific story. And then it's like, well, maybe there was a street some Pope avoided, but maybe not. And, you know, a couple of people mentioned a statue that might have just been like a lady in a cloak, or that could have been specifically, you know, he or she is the woman Pope.
JULIA: Those are notable people saying that, like Martin Luther saying, oh, there's a statue of this lady Pope with a baby. That's a big deal. That's someone who I would not look at and be like, that's an unreliable narrator there. You know what I mean?
DANIEL: It is, it is. Although there is some dispute whether or not it could have been, you know, for example, a statue of Juno suckling Heracles.
JULIA: Sure.
DANIEL: So there's—there's all—other potential explanations for why there might have been such a figure, potentially, just like mere some papal statues, there's a lot of different ways that could have come to pass. So there's another source, a Jesuit Cardinal named Robert Bellarmine, also from the, you know, 1500-1600s. And he refers to a Pope Joan statue, she says the statue wasn't a woman at all, it was of a man holding a large child, several years old, who was preceding him like a servant. So, you know, maybe a claim of just like, you should have checked your eyes that day, you mistook this statue of a guy with a five-year-old for a woman with a baby. So again, this one kind of peters out, but it's not as like cut and dry as there was this incredibly famous statue of Pope Joan that people flocked to for centuries before the church headed out of embarrassment.
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: And then, of course, the sort of last thing was, there's a couple of papal chairs that are incredibly old, and they have kind of holes in the middle. And a lot of stories cropped up around them, including ideas that the Pope would have to sit in it so that somebody could reach up through the chair and like, feel his testicles, and then announce good news. He has testicles, as if after Pope Joan gave birth in the street. They were just like, from now on, we're checking all the Popes.
JULIA: We gotta check. Yeah.
DANIEL: Which is one of those things that like, you could really see how someone was just trying to explain why is there a hole in this chair, and coming up with the goofiest reason they could think of. Because it's like, if you're really that worried about women in disguise trying to become the Pope, you would wait until she was crowned Pope to double check, you wouldn't be doing this—
AMANDA: Certainly not.
DANIEL: —priestly level.
AMANDA: Right.
DANIEL: Before somebody was sitting on a throne, you would wait until the most cinematic possible moment, and then have some guy come out and be like, oh, good news, there's testicles, like, it doesn't pass the sort of like plausibility test. But it's certainly fun.
AMANDA: It is fun. And the tenor and like social purpose of conspiracy theories has changed a lot during my lifetime. Such that this is the kind of speculation that I now find safe and fun to do. Is like, hey, why don't we you know, it, it makes me feel really close to the past to think of people looking at you know, a chair with a hole in it, you know, that you can't really explain and the like, weird, weird little freaks, you know, like, like, the ideas that we would have, you know, as we're a little freaked myself. And, you know, the ideas and possibility like that all makes me feel very kind of close to the past, and those people as really vibrant and real to me, as we think about why, you know, the stories stand out to us. And why this—the specter, is haunting this hope, the story is something that fascinated people so long that it still exists now. You know, many, many centuries later.
DANIEL: Yeah. And of course, the one sort of area in which most people might have encountered, some version of the Pope Joan legend, even if they're not aware of it would be if you've ever used tarot cards. The High Priestess is one of the figures in the Major Arcana. And in a number of earlier tarots, it's crowned with a papal tiara. And it's labeled La Papesse, the Popes. Again, it's not, it's not like Pope Joan. It's not her name, but the implication is certainly a rich one. And so that's also where a lot of that story started to spread. And, of course, you know, tarot cards, in the, you know, late medieval and early modern era were used for all card games, not just for divination. So there's not necessarily an immediate connection with sort of like divination or Auguri, or witchcraft in there, or even of ceremonial magic. But if you want to kind of make those few jumps, you sure can. And that's a lot of fun. And I'm not gonna stop you.
AMANDA: Agreed.
JULIA: Listen, we're not publishing books about this, we can make those jumps if we want to make those jumps.
DANIEL: So, you know, you can kind of see in retrospect, ways in which that is a story that sort of implicates anxieties about women's involvement in the church, potentially, just like, it might have been understood as not something that had literally happened. But, you know, let's look back at this era of the papacy, which we all believe, to have been too influenced by women and sexuality, and carry it out to this sort of grotesque logical conclusion of the Pope giving birth. Now, doesn't that make you long for the genteel days of chaste priests running things? And so there are ways in which it can be understood as like a longing for the norm. And then of course, there are other ways in which you can easily see how, you know, throw it on a tarot deck. What a cool idea. Absolutely, Pope giving birth. Fantastic, give me more. So it's very, like useful, kind of whichever side you're coming from, but I think it has lots to do just with medieval reexaminations of an earlier more complicated state of the papacy when it was not nearly as settled looking as it was later come to, to appear.
JULIA: Yeah. And I think like many myths and folklore that was probably created the story for a certain purpose, but it can always be repurposed or told in a different light or told for a different angle. And what you get out of those stories is what is useful to you, not necessarily what it was originally intended for.
DANIEL: Yeah, and I think it also has a lot to do with, you know, like clerical reexamination of transition, cross-dressing. Anytime you get a sort of Wild West era, you get a lot of trans people popping up. Lots of cross-dressing, lots of people living as the other sex for years and years.
AMANDA: Yeah, like, the laws are all over the place. The people they're doing whatever.
DANIEL: Yeah.
AMANDA: And it's for me, a really lovely reminder of, you know, gender and sexuality diversity, like throughout time.
DANIEL: Yeah. And so, you know, the early Christian monastic period, especially was, there were lots and lots of stories about, and you know, again, I want to like kind of depending on the story, sometimes it would be totally instrumental. Sometimes it would be incredibly like meaningful to the individual in question to be living as a man. So there's—there are different ways in which like, I would probably switch language about different stories there. But I think it's also a real reexamination of, you know, is cross-dressing, a way of getting closer to God and something that we should be celebrating? Or is it a freaky sexy thing and something we should be getting rid of? So you know, like the early saints, some probably like fictional and syncretized, some we have more evidence for their having actually lived but like in that early monastic period, again, we have Theodore of Alexandria, Appala Norris, Syncletica, who involve like women who wanted to retire not only from marriage with the world entirely to become ascetics. There was the legend of Marino's the monk, which is a really great one, it was this young person who decided to forswear being a girl and to live as a man and a monk. And, in fact, was so dedicated to it, that after several years of living at a monastery, was accused of having impregnated a young woman. And rather than say, that's not possible, said, yes, the child is mine, was cast out of the monastery, raised the child in the desert for years and years. And only after his death, did anyone come to understand, you know, his transness, I guess, in this context.
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: And that was sort of celebrated as like, wow, this guy really loves God, really wanted to be a monk more than anybody else, and was even willing to be considered sinful by the so-called righteous, you know, that was—that was a monk. And so these were—
AMANDA: Damn.
DANIEL: —often incredibly popular stories, you know, there's—there's Wilgefortis, who is a fictional Galician saint who, whose father was forcing her into, into marriage with a non-Christian. So she prayed to be made so repulsive, that he wouldn't want to marry her and grew a beard overnight, and then was crucified. And there's kind of amazing iconography of Wilgefortis, both bearded and in a wedding gown on, on a cross.
JULIA: Wow.
DANIEL: Which is sort of remarkable and I'm fascinated to look at. But so yeah, it makes a lot of sense that around the 9th- 10th century, from the vantage point of the later Middle Ages, people would be kind of looking back and trying to renegotiate with the church's early relationship, with cross-dressing, with womanhood, with marriage, with childbirth. And that's the story of Pope Joan.
JULIA: Wow.
AMANDA: Incredible. You very eloquently expounded on what we normally summarized as Haha, it's not pagan, it's fine, which is the secreting mission in so many words, of many early Christian myths, or mid-Christian sort of retellings of earlier Christian holidays and figures.
JULIA: Also, now I want you to tell me all about these different saints and stuff like that. So we might have to have you come back and tell us a little about these.
DANIEL: [55:48] That'd be delightful. I would love that.
AMANDA: What a pleasure. Danny, thank you so much for bringing these stories to us. And for the many, many folks who will be fascinated by your perspective and want to follow your work online. Where can they do so?
DANIEL: They can find me at the shatner.com which is the source of my newsletter. And I'm also on Twitter as daniel_m_lavery. And I wrote some books, I'm trying to remember the names [56:15] My most recent book was something that may shock and discredit you, and you can find it in bookstores or online.
JULIA: And you can find links to all those things in the show notes of our episode.
DANIEL: Also, I wanted to tell you guys specifically, I was recently listening to your [56:28] episode. And I was really excited because this last spring, I got to go inside of a [56:34]
JULIA: That's so cool. What was the experience like? Real quick.
DANIEL: They are, you know, Stone Age tunnels that we don't know why anyone made them. And it was part of carne uni, which is this amazing Neolithic settlement in Cornwall, and it was beautiful. And I had to drive like, remember in Jurassic Park when Newman is driving like in the rain, and through all the crazy stuff, It was like that—
JULIA: Yeah.
DANIEL: —the drive was like that. I thought I was going to die a hundred times.
JULIA: Incredible.
DANIEL: But when I arrived, it was just gorgeous. And the landscape was unbelievably beautiful. And then just, just enough remnants of like old foundations and hedges and like home walls to feel like, oh my god, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And then you could actually walk inside the fuego [57:20] I think.
JULIA: That's so cool.
DANIEL: They're called in that part of the world. And I just lost my mind. I took like 50 pictures. I'll send them to you guys if you want.
JULIA: Please.
AMANDA: I would love to see them. Yeah. Being in it, did you get a vibe or a headcanon, about what you think the purpose was? Or you're just like, there's a mystery and I'm dwelling in it.
DANIEL: It does feel like a huge mystery. I can't imagine it would be very useful for like, hiding from bad weather because it would flood.
AMANDA: Right.
DANIEL: And similarly the idea of like you go there to hide from enemies feels like well, they sure know where you were and they just can't reach you out.
AMANDA: Yeah.
DANIEL: It feels like it's gotta be storage, although then it's weird that they didn't leave anything behind. But—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Yes.
DANIEL: I think storage or like temporary religious rituals make the most sense, like total pantry that you sometimes also worship, I guess.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: I just got a new little rolling cart for my pantry and I love him and he is like a saint to me. So I highly identify with the either extremely clean pantry users or combination housekeeping, ritual observing, you know, homemakers of your.
DANIEL: Yeah, maybe the real spiritual ones go in there, and then the real like gallons to their Goofus comes in afterward. It's like, you gotta clean this place up. This looks [58:36].
AMANDA: Incredible.
DANIEL: Amazing. Well, thank you both. This was really fun.
JULIA: Thank you. We were—we loved having you. And hopefully, we'll have you back soon to talk about some cool things.
DANIEL: Cool.
AMANDA: Incredible.
JULIA: Yeah, and remember listeners when you are pretending to be a Pope and give birth in the street, uh stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
[theme]
AMANDA: Spirits was created by Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini, and Eric Schneider with music by Kevin MacLeod and visual design by Alison Wakeman.
JULIA: Keep up with all things creepy and cool by following us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. We also have all of our episode transcripts, guest appearances, and merch on our website. As well as a form to send us in your urban legends and your advice from folklore questions at spiritspodcast.com.
AMANDA: Join our member community on Patreon, patreon.com/spiritspodcast, for all kinds of behind-the-scenes goodies. Just $1 gets you access to audio extras with so much more. Like recipe cards with alcoholic and nonalcoholic for every single episode, directors' commentaries, real physical gifts, and more.
JULIA: We are a founding member of Multitude, an independent podcast collective, and production studio. If you like Spirits you will love the other shows that live on our website at multitude.productions.
AMANDA: Above all else, if you liked what you heard today, please text one friend about us. That's the very best way to help keep us growing.
JULIA: Thanks for listening to Spirits. We'll see you next week.
AMANDA: Bye!
Transcriptionist: KA Benganio
Editor: KM