The Myth of Pope Joan

Still, if we want to account for the unity that subsumes the very different uses of this episode, we will have to accept the idea that a metastasis of meaning (the various uses) develops from a nucleus that is not directly signifying (do I dare say, that is unconscious?), always present in the name of the popes but never expressed. That structure (an unknown nucleus and metastases of meaning) takes us away from myth, which is a perfectly explicit statement; a permanent, founding narrative that is reactivated metaphorically along the same lines as its original meaning.

Enough of this series of analogies, which are endless and perhaps senseless. To continue on this path is to risk finding all the reasons in the world to situate John, the Englishman from Mainz, in 854, thanks to a cancerous proliferation of microcausal cells that coagulate without any articulation among them. Contextual causality, that peril to historiography, begins here. Its ravages are obvious to anyone who cares to peruse school textbooks for the "causes" of the French Revolution in 1789 or of World War I in 1914: everything converges, hence nothing is explained. The event disappears under layers of a context that exists only by reason of the event.