The Vatican’s Greatest Secret?
Imagine the scene. It’s the 9th Century. The Dark Ages. Rome is a dirty, sprawling mess of ancient ruins and religious power. A procession is moving down the Via Sacra. Incense burns. Crowds cheer. The most powerful man on Earth, the Vicar of Christ, sits atop a horse, draped in heavy golden vestments.
Suddenly, the Pope stops.
He grips his stomach. He cries out. The cardinals rush forward, thinking it’s an assassination attempt or a heart attack. But it isn’t. The Pope falls to the ground, writhing in agony. And then, right there in the dust of the Roman street, under the shadow of the Colosseum, the unthinkable happens.
The Pope gives birth to a baby.
Chaos. Madness. A mob forms.
This is the legend of Pope Joan. The woman who stole the keys to the kingdom. For centuries, this story wasn’t just a whisper in a tavern; it was history. It was fact. Kings talked about it. Monks wrote about it. But today? The Church says it never happened. They say it’s a fairy tale. A glitch in the matrix of history.
But is it? Or is this the ultimate cover-up?
Who Was She? The Rise of “John Anglicus”
To understand how a woman could supposedly fool the entire Catholic hierarchy, you have to understand the era. Women were second-class citizens. Education? Forget about it. But Joan—or Agnes, or Gilberte, depending on which ancient chronicler you trust—was different. She was brilliant. Dangerous.
The story goes that she fell in love with a monk. To be with him, she did the only thing a girl could do to enter the world of men: she cut her hair. She dressed in coarse robes. She became a man.
They traveled to Athens, the center of learning. There, her intellect exploded. She debated the greatest minds of the time and crushed them. When she arrived in Rome, she wasn’t just “some monk.” She was a superstar. She was known as John Anglicus (John of England).
The cardinals loved her. The people loved her. Her piety was unmatched. Her knowledge of scripture? Flawless. When Pope Leo IV died in 853 AD, the choice was obvious. They elected John.
They elected Joan.
She ruled for two years, five months, and four days. And by all accounts, she was a fantastic Pope. Until nature caught up with her.
The Scandal on the Via Sacra
According to the legend, Pope Joan concealed her gender and ruled with an iron fist and a soft heart. But she had a secret. A lover. Some say it was the original monk; others say it was a palace valet. It doesn’t matter who. What matters is the result.
She got pregnant.
In the baggy robes of a pontiff, hiding a bump is easy. But you can’t hide labor. The timing was a disaster. While riding from St. Peter’s to the Lateran Palace, the pains hit. The story, first appearing in 13th-century chronicles and spreading like wildfire through Europe, ends in blood.
The birth exposed her. The shock turned to rage instantly. The astonishing sight of a newborn child at the feet of the Holy Father broke the spell.
In most versions of the story, she dies shortly after. Some texts say she died of childbirth complications right there on the street. Others paint a much darker picture: an angry mob, feeling betrayed by this “monstrosity,” dragged her behind a horse and stoned her to death. Her memory was shunned. Erased. Deleted.
But you can’t delete everything. Traces remain.
The Street of Shame
For centuries after this alleged event, the Papal processions took a strange detour. They deliberately avoided the direct route between St. Peter’s and the Lateran. Why? The people of Rome whispered that the Popes refused to set foot on the ground where Joan gave birth.
There was even a shrine there. A statue of a woman with a child. The Church later removed it, claiming it was a pagan relic. Convenient, right?
The Chair of Masculinity: The Strangest Ritual in History
This is where things get bizarre. And I mean really bizarre.
After the Joan debacle, the Church allegedly implemented a new fail-safe security measure. They needed to make sure—absolutely, 100% sure—that the Pope was a man. They couldn’t risk another “Mother” on the throne.
Enter the Sedia Stercoraria. The Dung Chair.
It was a special marble chair with a hole cut in the seat, shaped somewhat like a toilet. But it wasn’t for the bathroom. It was for the coronation.
The legend states that a newly elected Pope had to sit on this chair. A junior cardinal—usually a deacon—would reach underneath the chair, through the hole, and manually inspect the Pope’s… equipment.
If everything was present and accounted for, the cardinal would shout out the most famous Latin phrase you’ve never heard in Sunday School:
“Duos habet et bene pendentes!”
Translation: “He has two, and they dangle nicely!”
The assembled crowd would roar, “Deo Gratias!” (Thanks be to God). Because, thank God, the Pope has testicles.
Is this real? The chairs do exist. You can see them in the Vatican museums today. The Vatican claims they were just old Roman bath chairs used because they were fancy marble. But why use a toilet chair for a coronation? It doesn’t add up. The “grope test” theory persists because it offers a logical, albeit hilarious, reaction to the trauma of Pope Joan.
The Missing Number: The Case of John XX
Numbers don’t lie. But in the Vatican, they might skip a beat.
From the mid-13th century onward, the legend was widely believed, and it created a massive administrative headache. A problem with this legend is the fact that there is no Pope John XX in any list. The lineup goes from John XIX straight to John XXI.
Wait. What happened to twenty?
Historians argue that there was a miscalculation or a confusion in the numbering system regarding an antipope. But the conspiracy theorists point to this gap as the “Ghost of Joan.”
It is said this reflects a renumbering of the popes to exclude Joan from history. If Joan reigned as “John VIII” or a similar title, erasing her messed up the count for centuries. The Church had to shuffle the numbers to cover the tracks of the female pontiff. The missing John XX is the scar left after the surgery to remove her from the records.
The Tarot Connection
Have you ever looked at a Tarot deck? Look at the Major Arcana. Card Number II.
The High Priestess.
In older decks, like the Tarot of Marseilles, this card wasn’t called the High Priestess. It was called La Papesse. The Female Pope. She sits on a throne, wearing a papal tiara (the triple crown), holding the keys. This imagery didn’t come from nowhere. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, everyone knew about Pope Joan. She wasn’t a secret; she was a cultural icon.
The fact that she was immortalized in playing cards suggests her story was common knowledge, deeply embedded in the European psyche, long before the history books were “corrected.”
So what can we uncover? The Skeptic’s View
We have to look at the other side. The “Official Narrative.” The Church has spent nearly a thousand years fighting this story. In 1601, Pope Clement VIII declared the legend of Pope Joan to be completely untrue. He ordered her statue destroyed (if it existed) and the books burned.
In 1856, the Encyclopedia Britannica took on the Pope Joan legend, and concluded that the legend was false. They dropped the hammer on the believers.
Here’s an excerpt from the article there, and it brings up some solid points:
The grounds on which this conclusion is arrived at may be briefly stated. In the first place, 200 years elapsed between the era of the supposed pope and the date at which her name is first mentioned by any historian.
This is the biggest hurdle. Joan supposedly ruled in the 850s. But the first written account pops up in the 1200s. That’s a 400-year silence. Imagine if we just found out today that a woman was President of the United States in 1650, but nobody wrote it down until now. It’s suspicious.
In the next place there were at Rome, during the time assigned to her Papacy four persons, who each in succession sat on the papal throne, and left behind them many and various writings. Had they ever heard of the story, it is impossible to believe that they should each and all have passed it over in silence as they have done.
Basically, the enemies of the Church—and there were many—would have had a field day with this. If the Patriarch of Constantinople knew the Pope had given birth, he would have written it on the sky. The silence of Rome’s rivals is deafening.
In the third place, all the contemporary writers, without a single exception, attest that, immediately on the death of Leo IV., the papal chair was offered and accepted by Benedict III.
Coins and charters exist that seem to show Benedict III starting his reign right when Leo IV died. There’s no two-year gap for Joan to fit into. Unless… Benedict III is a fabrication? Or unless Joan ruled during a time of confusion and they just backdated Benedict’s reign to cover it up?
Why the Myth Survived
If it’s fake, why did it last so long? Why did monks—Catholic monks—write about her as fact for centuries?
Some say it was a satire. A warning. The story gained traction during a time when the Papacy was weak and corrupt. It was a way for people to say, ” The Church has become so effeminate, so weak, that a woman could run it and nobody would notice.”
Or perhaps it was a misunderstanding of a statue. Or a joke about a Pope named John who was particularly soft-featured.
But there is another possibility. A darker one.
History is written by the victors. The Vatican Archives contain 53 miles of shelving. Just think about that. 53 miles. Most of it has never been seen by the public. If there was a record of Joan—a birth certificate, a trial transcript, a bloody robe—it would be buried in the deepest, darkest vault, protected by Swiss Guards and silence.
The Verdict
Was there a Pope Joan?
Modern historians shake their heads. They point to the dates. They point to the lack of contemporary evidence. They say it’s folklore.
But legends rarely spring from nothing. There is smoke here. The weird chair rituals. The detour of the processions. The Tarot cards. The missing John XX. The persistent cultural memory that refused to die for 500 years.
Maybe she wasn’t Pope for two years. Maybe it was two months. Maybe she didn’t give birth in the street; maybe she was just discovered. Or maybe, just maybe, a brilliant woman outsmarted the patriarchy in the 9th century, sat on the throne of St. Peter, and the only way the men could deal with the shame was to turn her into a monster and scrub her from the books.
Next time you see a picture of the Pope, look closely. History is full of shadows, and sometimes, the things hiding in them are wearing the crown.
Originally posted 2016-02-09 00:10:08. Updated for the modern truth-seeker. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
