History of Cats – Part 3

Posted by Jeanne on May 25, 2009

The Fall From Favor

Medieval man, however, whatever his glories, peered at his world through a fog of superstition. He believed that demons and witches walked abroad and saw their evil hand at work in the misfortunes that befell him. He was also close enough to the earth to believe that nature was inhabited by spirits, hard to please, and easy to offend, who could help or harm him. And, so he built his cathedrals, aspiring to the one God for whom the new Church spoke, and feared the Devil’s legions who showed themselves so often and in so many guises in his daily life.

Man’s ceaseless struggle with himself is often felt by innocent bystanders and few such have suffered more brutally than the cat. In Europe, as in Egypt, the cat fared well at first. In time, she even became an object of worship. In the German states, particularly, cats became associated with Freya, the goddess of love and fertility – a sort of north-country Venus – and a team of them was believed to haul her chariot around Valhalla. Obviously, whoever wove this little fable together had had very little experience with cats.

Eventually, the rites of the Freya worshipers became outrageous, and a wrathful church cracked down. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII directed the Inquisition to burn the heretics as witches – and their cats.

The human slaughter was appalling. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more than 100,000 witches were executed in Germany alone and another 75,000 in France. With them perished countless thousands of cats.

Once the cat was thought to have supernatural powers. No misfortune was too small to blame her for, and no means was too severe to exterminate her. The folklore abounded with horror stories, bizarre, incredible, and devoutly believed. The normal, night-prowling cat looking for mice became a witch, transformed by incantations to the Devil, and bent on evil errands. She soured milk, spoiled crops, brought illness, caused afflictions.

Throughout Europe cats were burned, boiled, impaled, hanged, flayed, gutted, buried alive, dropped from towers, stoned, and stabbed with righteous fervor and pious fear. The whole gruesome performance was not only sanctioned but raised to the level of religious significance by being incorporated into the celebration of holy days. Many a Shrove Tuesday, Lenten Sunday, and Easter in those times rang with the screams of tortured and dying cats.

(It is interesting to note that less than 300 years after her arrival the cat also had fallen from grace in Japan. From being the pampered pet of the rich, she had become an evil demon in legend and folklore.)

The survival of the cat seems to have been due to her own resourcefulness and to the courage of her few remaining human friends. For it was literally worth a person’s life to own a cat when the murderous frenzy was at its height. Old ladies in particular needed only to keep a cat to convict themselves of witchcraft.

Millers and sailors stayed loyal to their small helpers, to some degree; some tough old dames managed to protect their hearthside companions; and writers and statesmen began to be numbered among the folks who traditionally and fundamentally liked cats. Some of these, fortunately, were quite influential. The great political cardinals, Wolsey of England and Richelieu of France, both had a succession of pet cats and were neither bewitched nor bedeviled.

It is impossible to estimate how much this kind of support helped. By the eighteenth century, the tide had begun to turn once more in favor of the cat.