The Tarot de Besançon Mystery: When Someone Erased the Pope

Today's Lesson In the 17th and 18th centuries, a curious variant emerged in the French city of Besançon that replaced two of tarot's most recognizable trump cards. The Pope and the Papess—standard figures in traditional tarot—were swapped out for Jupiter and Juno, classical Roman deities. This wasn't a mystical choice or an artistic whim. Besançon sat in a region with strong Protestant influence and a history of conflict with Papal authority, and card makers adapted their product to avoid offending local sensibilities or, more practically, to keep selling cards in markets where religious imagery might cause problems. The swap shows us that tarot has always been a commercial product as much as a symbolic system, bending to meet the demands of its buyers. What makes the Besançon variant particularly instructive is that it preserved the trump numbering and structure perfectly—Jupiter simply took the Pope's place in the sequence, Juno took the Papess's position, and the deck functioned identically for gameplay. This tells us something crucial about tarot's architecture: the structural positions matter more than the specific figures filling them. When modern readers encounter historical decks or explore tarot's lineage, the Besançon variant reminds us that tarot's meaning-making capacity survived even…