Cats

Cats

The cat is the only animal to have succeeded in domesticating man.
—Marcel Mauss


A cat has enormous eyes that shine especially dramatically when the
rest of its body is shrouded in darkness. Because the pupils of the cat
constantly expand and contract to adjust to the level of light, they
seem like the waxing and waning moon. The lunar cycle, in turn, is
closely bound up with the menstrual cycle of women. Most civilizations,
especially Indo-European ones, have thought of the moon as
feminine (a partial exception is the Germans, for whom the word for
“moon”—Mond—has a masculine gender).

The position of women in patriarchal societies is a bit like that of
cats in homes. In many ways, cats may be subordinate to the master or
mistress of the house. Nevertheless, their manner always suggests confidence
and power. They are able to bestow affection and appreciation
without debasing themselves. Furthermore, the intense attachment that
cats develop to their homes is a bit like the domestic role that women
have often played. Jean Cocteau called the cat “the soul of a home made
visible” (Delort, p. 426). The troubled partnership of cat and dog in
many human homes often resembles that of women and men.
We can also think of the cat within the home as the secret wildness
in every person that survives despite the regimentation of our
public lives. The confident bearing of cats suggests secret knowledge,
which people have both valued and feared.

“When I play with my cat, who
knows but that she regards me more
as a plaything than I do her?” wrote
Michel de Montaigne in “Apology
for Raymond Sebond” (p. 444). Touch
or pet a cat and there may be sparks!
Cats are constantly rubbing their
backs against any available surface,
so static electricity builds up in their
fur. People have always been mystified
by the ability of cats to survive
after falling from tall trees or buildings.
No wonder cats have always
seemed magical.

The curvilinear design of the feline
body and the cat’s rhythmic way
of walking are very feminine. No
doubt this is why so many archaic
goddesses were closely associated
with cats. The Greek Artemis, goddess
of the moon, fled to Egypt and
changed herself into a cat to escape
the serpent Typhon. A panther was
sacred to the goddess Astarte, the
Mesopotamian equivalent of Aphrodite.

She was often portrayed standing upright and riding on her mascot.
The Hindu goddess of birth, Shasti, also used a cat as her mount.
Freya, the Norse goddess of love, rode in a chariot drawn by cats.
Perhaps most important, the Egyptian goddess Bast was depicted
with the head of a cat and the body of a woman. Our word puss
or pussy for cat comes from Pasht, an alternative name for Bastet. The
yearly festival of Bastet, held in autumn, was the most splendid celebration
in all of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of people would come
on boats, singing and clapping to the music of castanets. They would
offer sacrifices at the temple of Bastet, then feast for several days.
The Egyptians punished unsanctioned killing of a cat with
death. Diodorus Siculus reported that in the middle of the first century
B.C. a member of a Roman delegation to Alexandria accidentally
killed a cat. A crowd stormed his house. Not even fear of Rome could
keep the local citizens from punishing the perpetrator with death.
Several superstitions about cats probably go back to ancient Egypt,
and many people still say that killing a cat brings bad luck.

According to Herodotus, the entire family in an Egyptian home
would go into mourning when a cat died. All members would shave
their eyebrows to show their sorrow. Dead cats were taken to the city
of Bubastis, where they were embalmed and ceremoniously buried.
Hundreds of thousands of mummified remains of cats have been
found in Egyptian tombs. Veneration of the cat eventually reached far
beyond the Mediterranean, and Robert Graves has reported in The
White Goddess that when Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland, there was a
shrine in a cave at Connacht where the oracle was a black cat upon a
chair of silver.

A fable known as “The Cat Maiden,” traditionally attributed to
the Greek Aesop, records a triumph of feminine wiles over masculine
power. The gods and goddesses were arguing about whether it was
possible for a thing to change its nature. “For me, nothing is impossible,”
said Zeus, the god of thunder. “Watch, and I will prove it.” With
that, he picked up a mangy alley cat, changed it into a lovely young
girl, had her dressed in fine clothes, instructed her in manners, and
arranged for her to be married the next day. The gods and goddesses
looked on invisibly at the wedding feast. “See how beautiful she is,
how appropriately she behaves,” said Zeus proudly. “Who could ever
guess that only yesterday she was a cat!” “Just a moment,” said
Aphrodite, the goddess of love. With that, she let loose a mouse. The
maiden immediately pounced on the mouse and began tearing it
apart with her teeth. This fable has been written down in many versions,
some of which date back to the fifth century B.C. in Greece. Perhaps
in some still earlier version, the cat was Aphrodite herself.
“Dick Whittington and His Cat,” an early rags-to-riches tale
from England, shows how cats were valued in the early modern period
by those engaged in trade. The hero, Dick Whittington, was an
impoverished young man in London who had worked hard and managed
to buy a cat, which he lent to a ship’s captain. The captain sold
the cat for a vast fortune to the king of the Moors, who was plagued
by rats. Dick became a wealthy man and was Lord Mayor of London
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, though the tale
was not written down until much later.

Aboard ships, cats were used as mascots and to catch mice. Virtually
all mariners were male. Sailors sometimes believed the presence
of a woman on board, or even the mention of a woman’s name,
would bring ill luck. The cat, often the only female on the ship, was a
mediator with the feminine powers of the weather and the sea.
Mariners predicted weather by watching the cat. When the cat
washed its face, they would expect rain. When the cat was frisky, they
would expect strong winds. Cats would also know if the ship was
about to sink. Every detail of the cat’s behavior would be closely scrutinized
for portents.

Superstitions about cats are almost as diverse as they are numerous.
Ablack cat, for example, is usually thought of as a sign of bad
luck, while a white cat means good luck. Sometimes, however, this
has been reversed. Wives of mariners in England would keep black
cats as a charm for the safe return of their husbands at sea, a practice
that people in other communities could misinterpret as witchcraft.
In Renaissance Europe, cats were often thought to be the familiars
of witches, and black cats in particular were frequently named as
such in the witch trials. Jean Boille, who was burned as a sorceress at
Vesoul in 1620, claimed to have seen demons and cats participating
together in sexual orgies at the witches’ Sabbath. Apact with the Devil
was sealed with a paw print placed on the body of a witch. The Black
Witch of Fraddan flew through the air at night on an enormous cat. In
the early thirteenth century, the bishop of Paris, Guillaume d’Auvergne,
claimed that Satan appeared to his followers in the form of a
black cat and they had to kiss him beneath the tail.
Diabolic, and sometimes almost as frightening as the Devil himself,
is the King of the Cats in Irish folklore. Sometimes the King is
black and wears a silver chain, but he cannot always be recognized.
Lady Wilde in Legends of Ancient Ireland tells of a man who once, in a
fit of temper, cut off the head of a domestic cat and threw it into a fire.
The eyes of the cat continued to glare at him from within the flames,
and the feline voice swore revenge. A short time later the man was
playing with a pet kitten; suddenly the kitten lunged, bit him on the
throat, and killed him.

When people are fond of certain animals, they assume the animals
will also be beloved by the gods and goddesses, and they offer
them up as sacrifices. The ancient Egyptians may have punished the
killing of a cat outside of a temple with death, but they offered thousands
of cats to Bastet, generally by breaking their necks. Christianity
officially rejected animal sacrifice, but ceremonial killing of cats continued
for thousands of years. Cats were burned alive on Ash Wednesday
in Metz and other Continental cities during the Middle Ages to produce
the ash for the mass. In England, the effigy of Guy Fawkes that
was ceremonially burned every year sometimes contained a cat that
would howl as the flames rose. Cats have been found walled up alive
in the foundations of several medieval buildings, including the Tower
of London. This was the theme of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous horror
story “The Black Cat.” Terrified that his wife was a witch and her black
cat the Devil, the narrator killed his wife and built a wall to conceal her
body. The cat howled from behind the wall until the police came.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages there were few cats left in
Europe. Their absence led to a great increase in rats and diseases, including
bubonic plague. The few cats that had survived the persecutions
came to be highly valued. For the first time, Europeans began to
realize that cats were not only useful but also loyal and affectionate.
Benevolent cats began to appear in fairy tales, though they still usually
seemed to have something a little disturbing about them. In “The
White Cat” by Madame D’Aulnoy, a magical feline guided the hero
through all sorts of trials and tribulations. Finally, the cat cast off its
skin, became a woman, and married him. Then she burned the skin;
after all, would the man want his wife changing shape and casting
spells? Perhaps the magic here is the power of young love, to be put
away as a person enters maturity.

In “Puss in Boots” by Charles Perrault, a cat loyally helps a
young man. To win a fortune for him, however, the two must connive
and deceive everybody else. Master Puss makes up a title, “the Marquis
of Carrabas,” for the young man. Then the cat tells harvesters
that they will be chopped up into little pieces if they don’t tell the king
their land belongs to this marquis. At the request of the cat, the ogre
who really owns the land in question transforms himself into a
mouse. The cat immediately pounces on the mouse, eats him, and
takes over the ogre’s castle for the young man. Finally, the young man
has so much wealth that he can marry the king’s daughter. If the story
were told from another point of view—say, that of the ogre—the
reader could easily take this cat for the Devil. At any rate, it is great
having such a cat on your side.

In folklore, the animals in a household often make up their own
little society, a sort of microcosm. The dog, of course, is among the most
domesticated of animals, while the rodents are completely wild. The
cat is in between. The dog and cat are constantly quarreling and making
up. Sometimes they cooperate to help their master, but the old enmity
can break out at any time. The cat and mouse, by contrast, are
mortal enemies. The mice in the household hardly ever defeat the cat,
though they often manage to get away. The situation is a bit like a troubled
family of human beings, where mother and father quarrel and the
children suffer. In a tale traditionally attributed to Aesop, the mice meet
in council to decide how to protect themselves against the cat. One
mouse proposes that they fasten a bell around the cat’s neck to warn
them when she approached. After the proposal is warmly applauded,
an old mouse stands up and asks, “But who is going to bell the cat?”

Buddhists take a negative view of the cat, though they have seldom
carried this to the extremes we find in the West. The Jatakas, ancient
Buddhist fables, in describing the animals assembled around the
deathbed of Buddha to pay him homage, note that the cat was taking
a nap and didn’t come. According to another traditional tale, Maya
sent a rat with medicine for the ailing Buddha, but the cat killed the
rat, so Buddha perished. Nevertheless, cats were regularly kept as
mousers in households of China, Japan, and other countries of the Far
East. Artists were often fascinated by their alertness, their sensitivity
to subtle sounds and motions. For such a common animal, cats were
notably absent from the Chinese zodiac, in part because they were
closely associated with the element of earth.

For all their differences, Christianity and Buddhism have both
tended to be suspicious of archaic magic. Perhaps this is part of the
reason the cultures that have grown around these religions so often
view the cat, the most magical of animals, with mistrust. Islam may
be a legalistic religion, yet the Koran delights in extravagant tales of
the supernatural; consequently, Muslims have always been lovers of
cats. According to legend, Muhammed once found his cat Meuzza
sleeping on his robe. So as not to disturb his pet, the prophet cut off a
sleeve and put on the rest of the garment. When he returned, Meuzza
bowed to him in gratitude. Mohammed blessed the cat and her descendents
with the ability to fall and land on their feet. When cats enter
a mosque, it means good luck for the community. In one story from
Oman, told by Inea Bushnaq, a cat caught a mouse and was about to
devour it; the mouse begged to be allowed a prayer before death.
When the cat agreed, the mouse suggested that the cat pray as well.
The cat raised its arms and the rat escaped. When a cat rubs its face,
the story concluded, it is remembering the smell of the rat.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German writer E.
T. A. Hoffmann took on the formidable task of trying to imagine the
feelings of a cat in The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr. A passionate if
somewhat reluctant romantic, Hoffmann felt cats were like those who
work magic in verse or paint. Like artists, cats have mysterious insights.
Like artists, cats often seem vain and impractical. Both cats and
artists have an odd combination of innocence and guile. The cat Murr,
who tells his story, affectionately mocks his master. He has adventures
climbing the rooftops of the town. He reminds the reader in his preface,
“Should anybody be bold enough to raise doubts concerning the
worth of this extraordinary book, he should consider that he confronts
a tom-cat with spirit, understanding, and sharp claws” (vol. 2, p. 11).
Poets always love mystery, and so they also love cats. W. B. Yeats
and T. S. Eliot are among the many who have found inspiration in
cats, but the most famous poem of all about cats is “My Cat Jeoffrey”
by Christopher Smart. The author takes precisely the characteristics
that have impressed people as diabolic and uses them to make the cat
a symbol of Christ:

For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the
adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin
& glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about
the life. (p. 28)
For Smart, the many paradoxes that surround the cat are a proof of
divinity.

The decades immediately following World War II saw a romanticizing
of alienation in the United States and Europe. In the slang of
the Beatnik movement, a “cat” became somebody who preferred the
colorful life of the streets to the mainstream of American society. In
the last few decades of the twentieth century, cats have replaced dogs
as the most popular pet in the United States. Some reasons for this
preference are pragmatic. Cats are smaller, eat less, need less space to
exercise, and are less expensive to care for than dogs. For those who
find the emotional exuberance of dogs embarrassing, cats seem to offer
emotional support without sacrifice of decorum. The relationship
of cats to people can be warm and nurturing yet with a distance of respect,
intimate yet full of riddles.

Selected References

Aesop. The Fables of Aesop. Ed. Joseph Jacobs. New York: Macmillan,
1910, pp. 180–182.
Briggs, Katharine. Nine Lives: The Folklore of Cats. New York: Dorset
Press, 1980.
Bushnaq, Inea, ed. and trans. Arab Folktales. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Dale, Rodney. Cats in Boots: A Celebration of Cat Illustration through the
Ages. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.
D’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine. “The White Cat.” Trans. Minnie Wright.
In The Blue Fairy Book. Ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1965,
pp. 157–173.
Delort, Robert. Les animaux ont une histoire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1984.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
Herodotus. Herodotus. (4 vols.). Trans. A. D. Godley. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1926.
Cat 63
Hoffmann, E. T. A. The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr. In Selected Writings
of E. T. A. Hoffmann (2 vols.). Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and
Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Houlihan, Patrick F. The Animal World of the Pharaohs. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Jacobs, Joseph, ed. “Dick Whittington and His Cat.” In English Fairy
Tales. New York: Dover, 1967, pp. 167–178.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” In The Complete
Essays of Montaigne (2 vols.). Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1959, vol. 1, pp. 428–561.
Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Trans. A. E. Johnson. New
York: Dover, 1969.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New
York: Doubleday, 1966.
Smart, Christopher. “My Cat Jeoffrey.” In Animal Poems, ed. John
Hollander. New York: Knopf, 1994, pp. 27–31.
Lady Wilde (Speranza). Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions
of Ireland: With Sketches of the Irish Past. Galway: O’Gorman,
1971 (1888).