The High Priestess

"In the late thirteenth century an Italian group called the Guglemites believed that their founder, Gugliema of Bohemia who died in 1281, would rise again in 1300 and begin a new age in which women would be popes. Jumping ahead they elected a woman named Manfreda Visconti as the first papess. The Church graphically ended this heresy by burning Sister Manfreda in 1300, the year of the expected new age. Some one hundred and fifty years later the same Visconti family commissioned the first set of Tarot cards as we know them. Among the unnumbered and unnamed trumps appeared a picture of a woman later decks titled 'The Papess'. "
-Rachel Pollack