The Legend of A Female Pope

For centuries there have been whispers of a woman of great learning who donned the clothes of a man and was elected pope by cardinals who had no idea that they had chosen someone of the "weaker sex" to sit on the highest throne of the Roman Catholic Church. This legend of a female pope had largely been unknown to most in the current generation until Donna Woolfolk Cross resurrected it in her amazing and controversial novel, Pope Joan, published in 1997. I read Pope Joan a few years ago, and the novel is one of a few books where I actually saw aspects of myself in the character.

Pope Joan is the story of a girl born in the 9th century to an English canon and his Saxon wife in Frankland in what is now Germany. The canon had come to Frankland as a Christian missionary to convert the heathen people to Christ. There he had spotted and fallen reluctantly in love with a pagan Saxon woman. The marriage is very unhappy because the canon despises his wife because he sees her as an instrument of the devil, seducing him away from his Godly mission and causing him to lose his purity in the possess. He goes into violent rages when his wife seems to hang on to her heathen gods and passes the stories on their daughter. He hates just about every thing about women because like the Biblical Eve, he believes women are always the impetus for sin and trouble. He is abusive of his wife and daughter, whereas he is more lenient with his two sons whom he encourages to be scholars.

Early on Joan has strong curiosity about learning. When a Greek scholar in exile from Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) comes to their town, he teaches Joan's brothers not only about the great authors of the church like Augustine, but also those from classical Greek and Roman history like Plato, Seneca, Ovid, and Homer which were almost unknown or banned by the western church, but appreciated by the church in the east. The 9th century is at the tail end of the Dark Ages in Europe. Learning and scholarship have moved east to Constantinople which is the capital of Byzantium which was the Byzantine Empire (Rome in the east). The Greek scholar witnesses Joan passion for learning and stands up to her father, demanding that he be allowed to teach her as well. Like the slogan for the National Negro College Fund here in the US, to him "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," even if it is a female mind.

The patience, devotion, and attention that the Greek gives Joan plants a seed that will eventually carry her to a Benedictine monastery where she will further her learning. After her last surviving brother is killed in a Viking attack she cuts her hair and dresses in his clothing. No longer does the questions she has asked herself plague her, "Why am I different? What is wrong with me?" She has come to terms with the fact that she and no woman with potential should be confined to a life dictated by men and society. She will go her own way, but living as man because she knows that in her world, women are confined to the home as only wife and mother. Learning and scholarship are not an option.

In time, Joan goes to Rome posing as John Anglicus. She wins the respect and envy of many. During her years of study she has become a physician, eventually becoming the personal doctor of the current pope. She is the one person who inspires this pope who is a fat overeater and a crybaby to be courageous. The Rome of Joan's era is a place of piety, corruption, nepotism, sexual licence, competition, and murder, even in the halls of the Vatican. In the meantime, Joan has also fallen in love with a handsome, open-minded German landowner and minor noble named Gerold. Gerold was married when she first met him, but his family and estate is wiped out in the same Viking attack in which Joan's brother was killed. Gerold follows Joan to Rome, and when she is elected pope he remains faithfully by her side, keeping the secret that the most powerful personage in Christendom is a woman.

Joan's robes and mien conceals her deception until she becomes pregnant by Gerold. Joan is so ambitious that she is set on never allowing her secret to come out, even to him. She knows that Gerold would tell her to stop her act, vacant the papal throne, and marry him. Stubbornly Joan concocts a potion that she takes to abort her child. The potion does not work until a terribly violent tragedy happens in the streets of Rome one day to Gerold right within Joan's view. Now without her lover and best friend, Joan miscarries and dies in the street to the horror and fascination of the people in her papal entourage and the general populace. As Joan dies moving from grief to fear to peace, the people around her nearly riot believing that it is witchcraft that has gripped their beloved pope or that "he" is possessed by a devil. Others think it is a miracle because a tiny premature infant has appeared beneath the pope's robes. For almost 2 years, Joan named Pope John, has been the supreme leader of the church. She had come a long way, extracting herself from a limited life to a life of power and prestige. But in the end, in her 40s, even though she had played the role of a man, the reality of her sex had come to haunt her in a way she had not expected at her age to have happened. Since Gerold her friend, adviser, protector and lover was even older than she, she never believed that she might become pregnant.

The legend of Pope Joan has been around since the Middle Ages. The legend was once as popular as that of King Arthur. Writers such as Boccaccio even mentioned the female pope. However, the Catholic church has vehemently denied the existence of an amazingly scholarly woman who tricked the church establishment and ascended to the throne of St. Peter over 1000 years ago. The Catholic church has viewed the legend as a weapon of the Protestant Reformation to discredit the church. Arguments by some who say that the church waged an active campaign after Joan's death to expunge her from history are championed by other scholars as unfounded. They feel she never existed. The first mention of La Popessa was in the 13th century 400 years after the time of Joan. So the skepticism remains, but I love the idea of a woman who overcame the chains of her age to go out into the world to seek her fortune.

In 1972 the Swedish actress Liv Ullman starred in a filmed entitled Pope Joan.

Now I have learned that next year Donna Woolfolk Cross' novel is slated to be brought to the big scene. Franke Potente, a German actress, recently seen in the US movies Blow and The Bourne series starring Matt Damon will be playing Joan.

The novel Pope Joan brought to life a time of savagery, brutality, and Romance. The novel is a fast read even though it is a little over 400 pages. All the elements of human drama, life in The Dark Ages, and of even our time can be found in the novel. Joan's story is timeless and universal, because as Cross said in an interview at the back of the novel:

"I want readers--particularly women--to understand one basic truth: to empower yourself in this world you must learn. Joan armed herself with the power of knowledge. This knowledge allowed her to rise to the very highest rank of the most powerful institution of her day. Even today in countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, the first priviledge that is taken away from a subservient group such as women is the right to an education."

As an African-American woman and being a part of an group where too many now encourage mediocrity and low achievement because to learn and to be articulate is "being white" or to be a "real woman" you must have a child before you are 15 or 16 by some immature teenager or some worthless guy with no intention of being a man and responsible, Cross' words speak volumes to me. Most of my life, I have gone against the grain of what it means to be a black woman in America. I have flown and fell down, but always with the determination to be unique and to go totally against the grain.

British sculptor Philip Jackson's piece called Pope Joan.

The official website for Joan Woolfolk Cross' novel Pope Joan can be accessed here.

Murasaki of Japan

Long ago in the mists of time in feudal Japan a daughter was born to a provincial governor and his wife. They named her Murasaki Shikibu.

Not only was the governor an official, but he was also a scholar. The traits of the enjoyment of learning and curiosity was passed on to his daughter who from a young age showed a remarkable ability to grasp and understand literature and languages. This was a miracle and a source of pride and disappointment for Murasaki's father who once said to her, "If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!"

Murasaki's brother, unlike her, did not display her swiftness in learning. In ancient Japan, women were allowed to do some basic learning, but the realm of the classics which were in Chinese was the province of men. Being a man with an open mind and appreciating his daughter's singularity, Murasaki's father allowed her to sit in on her brother's private tutoring sessions.

When Murasaki came of age, she was married off to a distant relative. She bore him a daughter. In time, plague appeared in the land, and Murasaki's husband was carried off in the epidemic. Alone, except now for her daughter, Murasaki began to write a book. Since she was the daughter of a prominent man and quite a curiosity herself, she captured the attention of the empress. She was brought to court, where she became the special companion to the empress, even teaching her Chinese in secret. She is given the title of "lady."

Lady Murasaki continues to write her book which is about a prince named Genji, getting ideas for the plot from her surroundings. She also keeps a diary which is a vivid description of life at the Japanese court and also expresses her distaste for what she sees as a vapid existence of nobles intriguing, backbiting, and focusing mainly on the silly and trivial. She writes one day in her diary, "Pretty and coy, shrinking from sight, unsociable, fond of old tales, conceited, so wrapped up in poetry that other people hardly exist, spitefully looking down on the whole world-such is the unpleasant opinion that people have of me. Yet when they come to know me they say that I am strangely gentle, quite unlike what they had been led to believe. I know that people look down on me like some old outcast, but I have become accustomed to all this, and tell myself, 'My nature is as it is."Despite her indifference and dislike of court life she becomes a reluctant celebrity when her novel, The Tale of Genji, is discovered. It is presented as a serial and read orally. Lady Murasaki writes this in her diary, "His Excellency saw The Tale of Genji laying about in the Empress's apartments. He made his usual stupid jibes, and then handed me a poem written on a piece of paper to which he had attached a branch of plum-blossom: 'What with these ardent tales of love, little can I think that men have passed you by, as they might this plum-tree's sour fruit.' And so I replied, 'If no man has tasted, who can say if the fruit is sour, or if the writer of these tales herself has known such love?'' Is the novel's hero, Prince Genji, Lady Murasaki's alter ego?

Unlike most at court who live only for the moment, Lady Murasaki knows winds of change are moving inside Japan. The decadent lifestyle of the court will eventually be swept away by the samurai who will install a military dictatorship ruled by a shogun.

At age 50, Lady Murasaki asks to retire from the court, leaving it for the peace and serenity of a convent. Finally, she is at peace.

This is my personal rendition of the life of Lady Murasaki (973-1025?) She is believed to have written the first modern novel, The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and the Diary of Lady Murasaki can be purchased on Amazon.com. The quotes listed in my tale are from Lady Murasaki's diary.

In 2001, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist and the only westerner to have been trained as a geisha, wrote the novel The Tale of Murasaki which is a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu.

Ideas for the writing style in this post were inspired by entries in the blogs The Victorian Era and Emma Alvarez Site, Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm, and The Thousand and One Nights.

To Die So Young A Hero

Today fellow blogger Hans posted a story about a Turkish Muslim who will be playing Anne Frank in a stage production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Besides having read Anne Frank's diary in middle school, I have become familiar in more latter years of a Jewish diarist and poet whose writing was equally if not more powerful than Anne Frank's masterpiece. The creator of this other great Holocaust document was Hannah Senesh (1921-1944). In fact, I am an even greater fan of Senesh's diary than I am of Frank's because of its' maturity and depth. More about Hannah and her poetry can be read here.

My most favorite of all her poems is this one.

Walk To Caesaerea

God---may there be no end
to sea, to sand,
water's splash,
lightning's flash,
the prayer of man

Africa's Tragic Romantic: Bessie Head

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk"
----Bessie Head

It is my desire that this blog will never become stale in its' subject matter, and even though my blog has a theme, there is a world of Romance out there both past and present to be written about.

Ardent's latest blog entry got me to thinking about my very first international sojourn, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Botswana. African nations south of the Sahara get such bad press. It is always about disease, war, poverty, or genocide. There is little mention of the good of the extraordinary. The most recent case of bad news are the elections in Kenya. It has hit home with one of my neighbors, because presently he is hosting a student in his home who is Kenyan.

Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa because of its' diamond resources. It does not get much attention because the people are quiet and peaceful with their neighbors. Also there are not a conglomeration of tribes there, so no tribal problems. The Batswana are very tolerant. I used to silently laugh when some Batswana would tell me, "Botswana is not true Africa. You have to got to West Africa, to see true Africa."

I was in Botswana when apartheid was running its' course in neighboring South Africa. In fact, depending on where I was, I sometimes lived as close as 15 miles from the South African border. As a non-white person I went to South Africa only once, because the climate there was very tense and even some British friends of mine who went were harassed by white South African soldiers.

There were a number of people both black and white whom the Batswana like to talk about when I was there. One of them was a person they held in high regard, the writer, Bessie Head. Bessie Head is one of Africa's greatest authors, dying at age 49 just when she was about to come into her own and get the recognition she deserved. Her life was short, difficult, lonely, and tragic. Nevertheless, out of her hardship, she birthed writing of get power and sometimes disturbing beauty.

Bessie Head was the daughter of a white South mother of patrician background and a black South African father who was a stable hand to her mother's family. The relationship was totally illicit because it broke apartheid laws which applied more to white women and black men than to white men and black women. According to my Batswana students and friends who related Head's story to me, when Bessie Head's white grandparents learned that their daughter was pregnant by their black stable hand, they had her committed to an insane asylum. There Bessie Head was born in 1937. Life was tough from the beginning. Of course, her mother's family did not want her, and neither did her father's family. Therefore, Bessie was placed in an orphanage where she grew up.

Having showed strong intelligence, Bessie went to school to become a teacher. Later she married a journalist and had a son, but she eventually became a divorcee.

Unable to tolerate life under apartheid, Bessie Head went to neighboring Botswana where she became a refugee. Even in Botswana life was hard, and Head lived in extreme poverty. She ended up in the village of Serowe, one of Botswana's most famous villages one reason of which is because it is the home of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, another person common on the lips of many Batswana. In Botswana, Head found her calling and began writing. Also in the process she became an alcoholic and died of hepatitis in 1986.

Bessie Head's work is hard to classify under one genre. Unlike many African writer's her work is not very political. Her novels tend to be semi-autobiographical, with Biblical and classical imagery. She was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence.

Here can be seen an online project by students at the University of Botswana (which was spic and span and new when I visited it) concerning Bessie Head.