Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [58]
The cat’s connections with eyes and seeing, in addition to money, held fast in the underground culture. In The Once and Future King T. H. White offers us a recipe used by the sorceress Morgan le Fay. It called, as most such recipes did, for an entirely black cat without a white hair; the cat must be boiled very slowly until all the meat falls from its bones, and a certain small bone, when held in the mouth, makes the cook invisible. In a simpler process from L’Evangile du Diable (The Devil’s Bible), invisibility is produced if you only put the cooked meat in a new dish and throw it over your shoulder.
The flesh, bones, blood, brains, ashes, and fat of black cats all had magical properties. Even the afterbirth was useful; the Talmud offers a complicated long-range plan for seeing evil spirits, in which you take the afterbirth of a black female that is the firstborn kitten of a black mother who was also the first-born of her mother, and burn it and rub the ashes in your eyes. In Cornwall, a sty can be cured by stroking your eye with the tail of a black cat, which, mercifully, can remain attached to its owner. Topsell’s 1606 Histoire of Foure-Footed Beastes has a recipe that cures blindness and all eye diseases with a powder made from the burnt head of a black cat.
On the other hand, if you intend to cheat or steal from someone, the ashes of a blind cat thrown in his eyes will blind him to your plans. In the British Isles if a cat has jumped over a corpse, or even been in a room with one, the next person who sees it will go blind.
If black cats were in charge of black sorcery, it seemed reasonable to some that white cats were good magic, though this didn’t always work to their advantage: evil spirits could be warded off by throwing the head and tail of a white cat into the fire.
White cats were always popular in the Orient. In the early Middle Ages in Japan, a whole cat cult grew up out of the mystical occasion when a white cat, imported from China, produced five white kittens on the tenth day of the fifth moon. They were cosseted like princelings, and the fashion spread. For centuries cats were spoiled and kept indoors or walked on leashes and tempted with delicacies, while mice wrought havoc among the silkworm cocoons. Unsuccessful attempts were made to frighten off the mice with pictures and figurines of cats, until, regretfully, in 1602 decrees were passed sending the cats back to work.
In World War II, when the Allies entered Burma they found the local population hostile after intensive Japanese propaganda until a resourceful British colonel had white cats stenciled on all the Army’s jeeps and trucks; the Burmese were so impressed by this powerful talisman that they abandoned their Japanese connections to cooperate with the Allies.
Three-colored cats also enjoy a special position in the East, and Japanese ships have always carried them for their usefulness in predicting storms, succoring the souls of the drowned, and guiding ships to safety.
The cat’s sovereignty over storms, weather, and the sea continued. In the British Isles and other seagoing northern countries, shipwrecking storms could be created by throwing cats into the sea. A witch-cat washing its ears could cause thunderstorms; in modern times it still means rain or frost is coming. The way a cat sleeps