Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [59]
The cat’s jurisdiction over matters of sex, marriage, and home life also persisted. In the Middle East black cats have always had aphrodisiac powers. In Europe Freya’s lusty powers moved easily from orgies to marriage. A black cat is a lucky wedding present. A girl will be lucky who hears a cat sneeze on her wedding day. A black cat around the house ensures that all the daughters will marry well, but a girl who steps on a cat’s tail won’t marry for at least a year. In France, it rains on the weddings of those who have mistreated cats, and in the Netherlands it’s bad luck if the cat sits by the door on the day of the wedding, meaning it wants to leave because the bride hasn’t treated it with proper respect.
So the cat emerged from its centuries of diabolic association and Church persecution with quite a lot of its Egyptian and pagan powers intact. Death and eternity had been taken over by the Church, sickness and health by doctors, and the sun and moon by men with telescopes, but the cat remained the open line to money, crops, eyesight, weather, and sexual and domestic felicity.
Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cat fires raged, but there were breaks in the gloom here and there. Cardinal Wolsey, who became Henry VIII’s lord chancellor in 1515, was powerful enough to keep any pet he pleased, and carried his cat to the dinner table and to the cathedral when he officiated at services. A hundred years later Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, had fourteen cats that he was deeply attached to, and let them sit on his desk and play with the wigs of his distinguished visitors. He made generous provision for them in his will, but unfortunately when he died in 1642 his Swiss guards, more typical of their time, collected and burned them all.
In the 1660s in England, Samuel Pepys kept a cat, and was no crosser than the rest of us when he had to get up and let it out at night; nor did he wonder where it was going. It’s hard to imagine Pepys dancing around a fire of cats, much less worshipping a cat-shaped devil. He was an educated man of active scientific curiosity, fond of theater and pretty women and making money; his religion was confined to thanking God at the end of every month when he totted up his accounts. A god with a personal interest in one’s profit-and-loss ledgers has changed somewhat from One who liked cats burning. Cats still burned, but Pepys was the wave of the future.
It would be nice to think that the Church recognized the error of its ways and absolved the cat of evil, but more likely the torturing of cats was simply, finally, going out of fashion. In the European cities of the late seventeenth century, education was becoming less clerical and educated men more visible. Scientific experiment was a fashionable hobby; superstition was for country folk, for crones, for the ignorant and old-fashioned. The pagan threat had withered. The old gods shriveled into fairies with gauzy wings, wee folk in funny hats, goblins to be tolerantly ridiculed in cities; the corn god shrank back into his shrinking fields. Like witches, these rural sprites can still do mischief if displeased, but it’s a mild bucolic mischief, souring milk or borrowing your horse by night and bringing it home muddy. Although these gods have become quite separated from the feline, it’s still taken for granted everywhere that they can be placated and made into useful guardian spirits with regular saucers of milk or porridge left on the kitchen floor or on the doorstep by night.
The cat and the Devil were parting company, and by the middle of the eighteenth century Christopher Smart could write:
For I will consider my cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning