Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [53]
Northern Europe, which had maintained contact with Egypt through the Amber Trade Route since a thousand years before Christ, worshipped a major goddess named Freya (or Freyia, Frieda, Feyda, Frigga, Freja, or Frigg), with noticeable overtones of Bastet. In Greenland, women worshipping Freya wore gloves of white catskin with the fur side inside, a haunting glimpse of white-gloved lybica back in the homeland of sacred cats.
Freya was originally a three-way goddess, in charge of sex, motherhood, and destruction, with the power to give and take away life, and the cat was closely associated with her in all these aspects. In the early Norse mythology her chariot was pulled by two cats, and by the fifteenth century in Scotland their numbers had increased, as cats’ numbers will, to twenty. Gradually her motherhood jurisdiction withered away and left her with the two opposing aspects of sex and destruction, of love and marriage and of disease and death. She was the foremost of the Valkyries, and she and her cats prowled the battlefields deciding who would die, and escorted them to her underworld.
On the other hand, Friday was the preferred day to get married because, being her sacred day, it promised fertility: Freya was always promiscuous. In the myths she had affairs with most of the male gods, and her festivals were public orgies that may have seemed more prurient in the iron-gray north than under the blue skies of the beneficent Nile. What the Church could not abolish it tried to adopt, but it found no equivalent to Freya. She and her cats were clearly unassimilable in the new religion, and a basic and surprisingly durable enemy.
The Church had better luck absorbing other matters. The two main celebrations of the pagan year, the winter and summer solstices, were converted to the respective birthdays of Christ and John the Baptist, but they brought with them to their new respectability their raucous old ceremonies, dancing, feasting, games, improper songs, and bonfires. Regrettably, some of the bonfires were made of live cats.
The cat’s association with fertility had always been a mixed blessing for the cat; cat sacrifices in the interests of a good crop had sprung up in many cultures. With the absorption of pagan practice into Christian ceremony the custom flourished under new auspices, and the Church set up official cat-burnings of its own to underline the message that these were basically Christian, not pagan, occasions and had nothing to do with crop magic.
The druids seem to have patented the wicker cage that held live cats over the flames, and later iron cages came into fashion for their greater durability, prolonging the excitement, but more casual sacrifice needed only a good fire and some cats.
Cats were burned alive at the beginning of spring, which was now called Lent, or buried alive in the fields to protect the crop from evil spirits. In southwestern France a kitten would be buried alive to clear the weeds from a patch of ground, a horticultural practice I can’t recommend as I don’t think it would work, and cats were buried alive around apple trees to increase the yield, which might indeed work. In Russia, Poland, and Bohemia a black cat was buried alive in the freshly plowed fields. Shrove Tuesday and
Lent’s first Sunday were popular occasions for burning cats, but on all Lenten Sundays and Wednesdays it was especially pleasing in the eye of Heaven, culminating in some areas in an enormous Easter Sunday cat fire. In Denmark a live cat was put in a barrel on the eve of Shrove Tuesday, and horsemen tilted at the barrel with spears to run it through. In parts of England a cat had to be whipped to death on Shrove Tuesday, and in Roxburghshire one was put in a barrel of soot and the barrel beaten with sticks until it fell apart; the maddened cat, trying to escape,