Junon (The High Priestess) - Poster

Most people expect the High Priestess here. Veiled, seated, a scroll in her lap. This deck does not have one. Where the Papess should be stands Junon, Roman queen of the gods, on a bank of cloud with her peacocks at her feet. The swap was commerce rather than theology: the pattern was printed in Strasbourg and sold through Protestant Alsace, Switzerland and southwest Germany, where a Papess and a Pope on a playing card cost sales. That substitution is what makes this a Besançon deck rather than a Marseille one. She reads in the Papesse's place: the one who knows more than she is letting on.

This print is hand-vectored from an 1891 French chromolithograph in the Besançon pattern, the variant that replaces the Papess and the Pope with Junon and Jupiter. Every line is redrawn by hand. No auto-trace, no AI, no upscaling — the irregularities of the original press are kept where they belong and the color is matched to the antique sheet rather than modernized.