From Washburn's 1917 yearbook.

From L'Assiette au Beurre, 1903.

From Taylor's 1934 yearbook.

From Ohio Wesleyan's 1923 yearbook.

A patron saint for cuckolds.  From La Colotte, 1907.

The Middle Ages' female pope Joan is now considered fictional, if you can believe that.  From La Colotte, 1908.

Compassionate war?  From Lustige Blätter, 1916.

From North Carolina College for Women's 1988 yearbook.

"God's devil."  From Spectral Tales #01 (1988).

From Kansas State's 1921 yearbook.

Not referring to this image in particular, but this anti-Roman Catholic magazine of the early 1900s was so over-the-top virulent as to seem genuinely evil in itself, ironically giving credence to the tenets of Catholicism that were meant to be lampooned.  Also, it's fascinating to see that priests were depicted as womanizers and alcoholics, not as any of the things they're accused of today, which shows up how political power struggles are crafted according to the mores of their time.  In a few decades from today, priests will be subjected to yet a different set of accusations, whatever seems most controversial then.  And of course these sorts of heated sarcasms are never actually about anything philsophical, but rather greed for money and control to change hands.  There's an age-old game, alright, but religion isn't even in the ballpark.

From La Colotte, 1908.

Here's a precursor to robot priests, like this one who runs a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, and this one in Germany that bestows blessings in five languages.

From La Colotte, 1908.

Here's a precursor to overlaying album covers and photos onto other scenes.  From La Colotte, 1907.

"The really carefully guarded secret of the priests of all the religions, which they will never voluntarily relinquish to the world, is that priests are not needed, nor what priests know or what initiates do or what the devout believe—practices and sacraments, anything. The truth is that God inhabits without limit; wherever the real is or the actual does, He is it. Special knowledge of how to get in touch with him is that same knowledge which carries the bee home to its hive each night; who sells that knowledge to the bee? If we have no money, if we can't read or be wise, are we abandoned? Does He abandon the lowly insects because they are virtually no more than reflex machines? Just as truth cannot really be suppressed, at least not forever, it neither can be horded. We are taught day and night, as all living entities are: ceaselessly. God did not begin to govern and inform the cosmos when writing and money were invented."