Happy Pets

Despite such Far Eastern reservations, about the cat’s exact intentions towards humanity, it is considered wise to hedge one’s bets and to treat cats with respect, as in Persia (Iran), where black cats are said to be jinns (spirits that assume feline form) or hemzads (individuals’ guardian ‘angels’). The world over, the cat’s mysterious, far-seeing eyes are considered to reveal its clairvoyant powers, as well as its agility and cunning ingenuity, just some of the characteristics for which it is respected as a totemic animal by many African and Native American peoples.

Two charming stories from Islamic tradition reveal why the cat is regarded with affection many Muslims. The first tells that when a poi rats multiplied and over-ran Noah’s ark, No stroked the lion’s nose, its reflexive sneeze producing two cats who swiftly solved Noah’ vermin problem. The second relates that the can be seen on many cats‘ foreheads is mark that was made by the Prophet Mohami when he stroked his favourite cat. Interesting this explanation for the cat’s ‘M’ has a paral in a long-forgotten Christian tradition, it beir said that it is evidence of the Virgin Mary’s gratitude to the cat who kept the baby Jesus warm in his manger in Bethlehem. Echoing the tale of Dick Whittington, sometime mayor of London, certain Western European folk beliefs furthermore tell of cats (called matagots in southern France) that typically repay their owners’ kindness with riches and other life- transforming rewards.

Such positive feline associations are sadly rare in Chistianity, however, whose influence decimated the feline population of Europe (with the result that, as some social historians believe, rats flourished, enabling the bubonic plague, or Black Death, to sweep in deadly swathes across Europe). Long before they were converted to Christianity, the Celts, who told of terrible giant cats that did battle with their heroes, sacrificed their ‘evil’ feline representatives on earth in religious rites. Whether or not such old beliefs simply persisted or newer anti-feline sentiments replaced them, from medieval times until the last of the vicious witch hunts that infected Europe until the age of Enlightenment, the Roman Catholic Church branded cats — especially black ones — the servants of Satan. They were regarded as the nocturnal (in itself considered suspicious, along with their eerily glowing eyes) ‘familiars’, or demonic helpers, of witches, who were, of course, in league with the devil. Part of the cat’s association with witchcraft dates back to its link with the Roman goddess Diana, whom the Church accused medieval ‘witches’ of invoking in their sinister satanic rituals, as well as with Hekate, or Hecate, the fearsome Graeco-Roman goddess of the underworld who transformed the maiden Galinthias into a cat to serve as her priestess. A more prosaic explanation, however, is that the lonely old women who were accused of witchcraft were often outcasts who had only their pet cats for companionship.

A vital justification of the Church’s attempt to stamp out any beliefs that it regarded as being heretical was the damning ‘evidence’ that those accused of being heretics carried out satanic rites in which the devil was worshipped in the form of a black cat. (The satanic symbolism of the black cat was potent: the epidemic of Sydenham’s chorea, or St Vitus’s dance, that raged through what is now the French town of Metz was said to have been caused by Satan in the form of a black cat, and for centuries thereafter cats were publicly burned in the spirit of commemorative revenge.) And when Europe’s mass ‘heresies’ had been all but eradicated, the Church turned to smaller fry — ‘witches’ and their ‘familiars’. In his instructions to the Inquisition, for example, Pope Innocent VIII ordering the hunting-down of cat-idolaters.

In England, the ascent to the throne of James V of Scotland as James I heralded a virulent period of anti-witch hysteria, fuelled by the new king’s authorship of a treatise on witchcraft, Daemologie, and compounded by the Witchcraft Act of 1604. The salacious transcriptions of the trials of the unfortunates accused of witchcraft, such as Agnes and Joan Waterhouse and Elizabeth Francis at Chelmsford, are strewn with references to feline familiars, in this case ‘Sathan’ (unusually, a white-spotted cat, albeit supposedly a blood-sucking one), whom Agne: Waterhouse, it was said, once ‘toke … in her lap and put hym in the wood before her door, and wylled him to kyll three of the Father Kersyes hogges’. Agnes Waterhouse was hanged, and if Sathan was captured, it is likely that he suffered an agonising death. (Perhaps cats have ancestral memories of those terrible times, and maybe it is no quirk of nature that domestic cats can adapt to the feral lifestyle so readily.)

Vestiges of such irrational anti-feline prejudices survived long after the last ‘witch’ swung from the gibbet. Dead cats were often laid in the foundations of buildings to ward off evil (or rodents: Bohemian farmers believed, for instance, that burying a cat in a field would protect their crops from mice). A black cat crossing one’s path was said by some to be a harbinger of bad luck (although British superstition stipulates the reverse), while spiteful women were sometimes described as being ‘catty’. And if that wasn’t enough, cats are said to cause bad weather, too.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Cat Litter, Cats, Collars, Grooming, Kennels, Scratching Posts, Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.