Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [57]
Witches and sorcerers had made a contract with the Devil, their souls in return for favors, usually money, making the possession of money questionable in itself (though the lack of it didn’t exonerate you; you might have it hidden). The Devil was invoked by various chantings, and appeared in the form of, naturally, a black cat, to work out the agreement by which he would be your servant in exchange for your soul. The contract was signed by a mark on the new witch’s body, generally a cat’s paw print in blue or red, reminiscent of the guardian cat tattoo in Egypt. This mark was insensitive to pain. Inquisitors looked for it on witches, and if it wasn’t visible it could be located by stabbing the suspect all over with needles until, perhaps exhausted, she stopped screaming, which meant the Devil’s mark had been found.
The Devil’s access to money made him a popular figure to invoke. Pious folk tortured and killed cats to please God, but the impious did it to summon the Devil. Since the cat was his own creature, if he heard its screams of pain he might appear and offer you gold and silver to let it go. He can’t have done this very often, but a surprising number of people kept trying. Their faith seems a bit irrational in hindsight, but everyone must have heard of the cousin of a friend of a friend to whom it had actually happened.
The most tiring diabolic invocation appeared in the Scottish highlands. The Devil was to be summoned in the form of an enormous black cat and the summoners were ordinary black cats. The ceremony began at midnight on Freya’s Friday. The supplicant roasted a black cat alive, turning it on a spit, as slowly as possible to prolong the howls of pain. The tricky part was that the instant the cat mercifully died and stopped howling it had to be replaced by another black cat and this procedure had to be carried out over four full days and nights, ninety-six hours, during which the petitioner paused for neither food nor rest; “keep the cat turning,” as they still say in the Hebrides. The ritual must have used up an enormous number of cats, no matter how slow the fire. If it was astonishing that cats survived at all, that the black genes endured and there are still black cats around today seems nothing short of miraculous, or perhaps diabolical. The last recorded performance of this rite was undertaken in 1750 by two brothers named Maclean, and according to the record it worked; at the end of the fourth day the huge black cat appeared and gave the brothers wealth and heirs.
It was scarcely necessary to sell the Devil one’s soul if he could be blackmailed into doing one’s bidding, and the notion was enduringly popular. In York County, Pennsylvania, during a witch alarm in 1929, a newspaper reported that you could bully the Devil into leaving you in peace by plunging a live black cat into boiling water and, having cooked it down, keeping the last bone of its tail as a protective amulet.
The connection of the black cat with money from the Devil lived on more benignly after the Devil had lost his grip; even in the Middle Ages money cats turn up without satanic connections. After all, cats had once been in charge of the prosperity of good crops, so why not the prosperity of cash in a cash society? Puss-in-Boots, who made his master rich beyond imagining, is a tale of ancient and cloudy origins that first surfaced in sixteenth-century Italy, and surely no one doubts that Puss was black. In the fourteenth century Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, doesn’t seem to have recorded the color of the cat who made him rich, though contrary to legend he wasn’t poor to start with; being real, she may have been a perfectly ordinary gray tabby with a white bib. Stories of cats that bring their masters fortunes go back at least a hundred years before Whittington, in places as far apart as Denmark and Persia. And in parts of twentieth-century