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Squeezing the Pope where it hurts: Urban myth or Vatican secret?
of TheColumnists.com
It never ceases to amaze me that taboos can be so different from one Western culture to another. Aren’t most of us brought up in the more or less homogenous Judeo-Christian way? Maybe. But if you think the western world is a definable place, take a look at what can and cannot be discussed in polite society. It’s like night and day.
Last week, in all innocence, I happened into a butcher shop five minutes from my new Bordeaux home. This is not the kind of place we used to find in San Francisco in the 1960s, the “erotic butcher” for the hippies. This is a family shop.
What I saw would send Midwest matrons screaming into the street.
After selecting a cut of beef I watched the butcher act it out in the typical French butcher’s pantomime, which amounts to a little slap-dance. He would indicate a rump roast with a slap on his butt, a shoulder cut with a clap on his shoulder, a thigh with a pinch above the knee, etc.). Once I decided on a steak, he wrapped up my dinner and pointed me to the cashier. I hadn’t seen nothing yet.
A rack of specialty Miot jams caught my eye, including one label I thought I must have misread, Couilles du Pape (The Pope’s Balls). My French is pretty good but a slang vocabulary of the nether regions I have not needed very often. I’m a little rusty there. “Couilles”, however, happens to be a word I know.
The butcher’s wife, who handles the money in this shop, noticed my jaw on the floor and cheerfully explained that the couilles were not real testicles (“Oooh non, Monsieur”) but mere preserves made of figs that grow naturally in pairs and in the same form--teardrop shapes, one a little lower than the other.
“Okay, I get it,” I said, trying to keep my cool, “but what does the Pope have to do with it?”
As other customers leaned forward, the butcher’s wife clarified that it might only be a legend, but there was a time when every newly elected pope had to undergo a gender test before he could wear the hat. This test required him to drop his underpants and sit on a chair with a hole in the middle while a cardinal crawled around behind feeling for his testicles. If he found them, the pope was in business. If not, there was trouble.
This procedure started in the 9th century, according to the story, and continued for several hundred years. There is no record of how the various popes responded to the palping.
What occasioned the gender test was an alarming lapse of security following the death of Pope Leo IV in 855. A cross-dressing female named Joan, or temporarily “John the English”, gained the favors of the electors and managed to win the throne. (The English are famous for their love of cross-dressing.)
Joan, or John, was discovered after two years as the infallible one when she ended up pregnant. The legend says nothing of the father’s identity or the child’s fate.
By now the butcher’s customers had formed a tight knot around his well-informed wife. You could hear a pin drop.
She referred me to a small explanatory leaflet that comes with the fig preserves. It provided considerable more graphic detail.
For example: With several nuns present during one such test, a cardinal crawled out from under the chair to announce the news: “He has a beautiful pair, and they dangle like a pair of figs on a tree.”
The legend grew and grew, and within a mere five centuries French botanists had officially named a certain variety of Provence figs “couilles du pape”, a name they still carry.
The leaflet also claims that these figs react to female attention. “If a woman stares at this fig tree long enough with that look in her eye, the figs begin to sweat their juice.” Now that I’d have to see.
The legend of the pope is so widespread that French children first hear of it in religious studies in school, and throughout their lives they remain familiar with it, not really questioning its veracity. Historians who have combed the records say however they find no trace of this Joan or John following Leo IV.
This proves nothing, say the believers. This proves everything, say the sceptics.
Personally, I can only vouch for the quality of the preserves. Tastes like figs. Good on toast.
Some day I’ll look into one of my favourite French pastries, the “pet de nonne” (nun’s fart). There’s bound to be a fragrant legend there.
©2006 by Michael Johnson. The illustration
is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA.
This
column first posted April 3, 2006.
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