Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [54]
Perhaps the most successful Lenten ceremony, Cat Wednesday, took place in France, at Metz. Held on the second Wednesday in Lent, it was first mentioned in 962, not long after King Hywel Dda had established the high value of Welsh cats and Henry I of Saxony had decreed a fine of fifty bushels of corn for killing a cat. Cat Wednesday became the heart of a famous festival that continued until 1773, with a grand bonfire attended by the governor and chief magistrate; all the civil and military authorities helped in the burning of thirteen cats in a wooden cage over a fire while everyone danced. The cats were said to be disguised witches, and this seems to be the first definite mention of cats in connection with anti-Christian sorcery. Worse was to come.
Midsummer, now called the Eve of St. John, occasioned the greatest cat fires of the year, and the most persistent; the event wasn’t discontinued in the province of Meurthe until 1905. In Paris great numbers of cats were packed into a barrel or basket and swung from a pole over a roaring fire in the Place de Greve; afterward people took home scraps of ash and scorched bone for good luck and protection from lightning. A specialized vocation was the collecting of cats for the fire, and the record shows that a Lucas Pommerieux was paid a hundred Paris sous for supplying, over a period of time ending on St. John’s 1573, all the cats “necessary” for the Paris fire plus a large canvas sack to contain them. The king attended the event; in 1648 Louis XIV lit the fire wearing a wreath of roses.
Midsummer still had its unsettling ambiguities, though. At Aix-en-Provence, up until 1757, the area was scoured for the very finest tomcat, who was wrapped in swaddling clothes to represent the infant Jesus, adored at a special shrine, and taken on procession in a litter with flowers strewn in his path. Then at noon on June 24 he was put in a wicker basket and thrown into a large bonfire in the city square, while bishops and priests sang accompanying anthems.
After St. John’s, the next important cat event was the harvest, now All Saints’ Day. Throughout France and Germany a fine plump cat would be decorated with garlands at the beginning of the growing season and pampered until the harvest, when it was eaten. In France a cat was buried under the last bundle of wheat before it was threshed, and when the threshers’ flails had killed it, it was roasted, to be eaten on the following Sunday. It’s hinted that even today in remote places a cat is ritually burned alive to celebrate the last of the harvest home, or buried alive at the entrance to the barn; getting in the last of the crops is still called “killing the cat” in some countries. The cat, a male cat here, descended from the Great Cat Ra, had assumed the duties of a kind of corn god, and it had to be propitiated for the next year’s growing season by decking it in ribbons and worshipping it, or by killing it, or both.
The effort to assimilate and sanctify the season with All Saints’ Day was never entirely successful; the end of October retains an unhallowed air, and the witches of the night before seem more present than the saints of the day. The truth is that Christianity was never as deeply concerned with field crops as the pagan cults were, and had nothing solid to offer as a substitute, so cats continued to be more involved than priests in farming and fertility matters.
Least important for cats was Christmas, and sometimes only a single cat sufficed to celebrate it, usually tied alive to a stake and roasted slowly. In parts of central Europe black tomcats were buried in the fields on Christmas Eve to keep evil spirits away from next year’s crops, but in general it was a time of truce until February, when witch-cats associated with Saint Agatha were killed for appearing abroad, perhaps on the assumption that any cat not sensibly in front of the fire at that season must be driven by demonic business. Then it was Lent again.
Throughout the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the identification