Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [55]
Very likely the cat in Europe would have been completely exterminated during the Middle Ages if it hadn’t had an ironically lucky break from the enemy Church itself; returning Crusaders brought back a new kind of rat in their ships, the black rat. This Palestinian import was smarter, hungrier, and more prolific than the few native rats, which it quickly supplanted, and within fifty years it had swept through Europe, spreading plague and destroying as much as half the harvested grain. Cats were badly needed for their ancient purpose in farming areas and around mills; sheer common sense in the countryside saved enough of them to keep the populace from starving and the cat itself from vanishing.
Not all cat killings were connected with the Christian calendar and anti-Christian sorcery. A particular highlight of the coronation of Elizabeth I was the burning of a huge wicker effigy of the Pope, stuffed with live cats to provide appropriate sound effects. Throughout northern Europe and the British Isles cats somehow retained their benign connection with hearth and home, so that when you built a house it was wise to bury a live cat under the threshhold, and when you moved into a house it was customary to roast a cat on its hearth, to ensure domestic happiness. In the footings of the walls and towers of castles and churches cats were buried alive as guardian spirits and to make sure the building would stand stoutly; even august Westminster, during later repairs, gave up its withered feline body. Cat sacrifices attended the building of bridges; cats were particularly associated with bridges, and all sorts of odd and complicated stories survive about cats and bridges and the devil.
A bright cat would have done well to emigrate from Christendom altogether. Eurocentric scholarship shapes the records, but Buddhists do not torture animals, and Hindus have always been instructed to keep and feed at least one cat in the home. In Japan, the killer of a cat was to be cursed by ill fortune for seven generations. The Islamic world kept its traditional respect for cats, and in 1280 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria left provision in his will for a garden for homeless cats, where they were to be freely fed and cared for. Ghetel-Quoth, it was called, or Orchard of Cats.
It’s restful to the mind to turn away from the agonized feline screams of six hundred European years and think of the Orchard, and sleek cats in it lazily watching butterflies in the sunshine, licking their shoulders and looking forward to dinner. The cat will endure, even in Europe, though just barely.
Devil worship in Christendom was not a myth. The Church was not utterly paranoid. It was battling the remains of a tradition from prehistory that found animals spiritually important, and trying to supplant it with an invisible manlike God who paid no attention to the ancient preoccupations of birth and farming and held that only man was possessed of spirit, or soul, or immortality, or any sort of meaningful reality at all. Back in the fourth century, Saint Ambrose had protested that the doctrine of animal soullessness was leading to frightful cruelty, but the Church’s main concern was its war against pagans, and spiritual animals were a pagan concept. Cats harked back to Freya, whose underground cult was still very much alive. They harked back to pagan preoccupations