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.
Posted by Jeanne on May 18, 2009
It started in Egypt
The first tame cats that anyone knows anything definite about showed up in Egypt about 3000 B.C. They were descended from an African wild cat and were very much like today’s house cat in size and proportion. They were short haired and gray in color with black stripes and spots on the body and legs. The Egyptians adored them and rarely, if ever, have cats had it so good again.
The cats, as always, made friends first with the grain farmers, whose storehouses they protected from rats and mice. This service proved so valuable that eventually the cat was elevated to Egypt’s large family of deities. She became Pasht, the Goddess of Light, and was worshiped at temples built in her honor. (The Egyptian word “mau” meant both “cat” and “light.”)
Cat holidays were celebrated with parades and revelry in the streets. Household cats were adorned with jeweled collars and earrings. Killing a cat became a crime punishable by death.
When a cat died, it was embalmed, wrapped in burial cloths, and buried in a special cat cemetery. Especially solicitous cat owners even embalmed a few mice so that Mau would not go hungry on her journey to the afterworld.
Cemeteries discovered by archeologists in the nineteenth century were found to contain hundreds of thousands of cat mummies. And, this being a practical era, the mummies were promptly sold by the ton for use as fertilizer.
The Egyptians excessive admiration for the cat eventually played a part in Egypt’s downfall. It is said that when the Persian king, Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, was besieging Pelusium in his classic invasion of Egypt, he threw live cats over the wall of the city. This heartless hailstorm of sacred mousers sent the Egyptians into a panic. While they were distracted and unnerved, their stronghold was overrun.
Cats and conquerors have rarely got on well together, incidentally, and Cambyses was a typical tyrant in this regard. It is probably too simple to say that mighty monarchs can’t stand the cat’s bland refusal to take any sort of loyalty or fealty oath, but the fact remains that Alexander the Great and Napoleon were cat haters and that Louis XVI of France took part in celebrations whose high point was the torturing of cats by burning.
How and when cats spread around the world is a matter of conjecture. Apparently, however, their emigration from Egypt began shortly after the Egyptians made it illegal to export them. Phoenician traders are sometimes credited with introducing cats to Italy. And, undoubtedly, pioneering cats began to jump ship at various ports as soon as their now-traditional friendship with sailors was established. In any event, the cat was known in Greece and Rome before the Christian era.
Once on the continent of Europe, the Egyptian tabbies evidently mated with the European wild cat, and the progress of the race was assured. The remains of cats have been found at Roman villas in Great Britain. By the fifth century A.D., the cat was comfortably situated in China, in Scotland, and in the Netherlands.
By the seventh century, the Prophet Mohammed. was renowned, among other things, for his fondness for cats, and the legend persists that he once cut the sleeve off a gown he wished to wear rather than disturb the cat sleeping on it.
By the tenth century, the cat was everywhere and greatly esteemed. In Saxony, Henry the Fowler ruled that anyone who injured a cat should pay a heavy fine. An early Prince of Wales, Howel Dda, enacted laws in 936 that set rates and values for cats of various ages and rat-catching abilities.
In the Far East, those relentless borrowers, the Japanese, having already obtained their written language from China, added the cat to their list of imports. Mao, as the Chinese called her, was so rare and so expensive at first that the Japanese decided that a cat-killer and his family would live under a curse for seven generations.
It appeared that the peaceful, hard-working cat had found her place as man’s ally in his endless battle against the marauding mouse and rat.
