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| Old Maids at a Cat’s Funeral, John Pettit, 1789 |
The idea of a cat who turns into a woman is found in the legends of all countries and peoples.
—Fernand Mery
"There was once a black cat, and every night she would crawl up through a dark well deep below the ground. Then she would shed her cat skin and go to the owner of a nearby house in the form of a woman. They would savor the joys of love night after night until morning prayer at which time she would disappear below ground again. Every morning when he awoke he would find some money she left for him in appreciation of their time together. Through the years their friendship grew so strong that she helped his daughter go on pilgrimage to Mecca."
—Moroccan folktale
Unlike similar stories from Christian lands, the Moroccan tale came from a culture that esteemed cats prior to the advent of Islam, and continued to do so afterwards. By contrast, here are three story plots from Christian Europe: (1) A man realizes that his demure young bride is really a cat when she drops to all-fours and chases a mouse. (2) A man awakens to find that a cat is lifting the latch to come into his bedroom. He cuts the cat's paw off with an axe, and realizes that his wife is not in the room. She comes home days later with a missing hand. (3) A man surprises a coven of black cats in the midst of a Satanic ritual. He slashes the leg of one of the cats with a sword, and his wife comes home the next morning with a sword wound in her leg.
Why cats, and why only female cats? Why not dogs? One night, Peggy had an erotic dream about our blue heeler (a beautiful dog with a delightful musk), and I learned from decades of walking dogs that the first thing people ask is whether it's a boy or a girl. Members of both species can be sensuously beautiful, and humans clearly care about their gender, so why are there no erotic stories about dogs becoming women and marrying men?
In pre-Enlightenment Christendom, stories about cats that could adopt the form of humans and humans that could adopt the form of cats accompanied the church's brutal subjugation of anything that represented mystery and sensuality. Although roosters and billy goats were also said to be consorts of Satan, they were comedic failures compared to the grace, beauty, and sensuality of cats and women. It was quite another story in the Muslim world. The following is from the Wikipedia entry Islam and Cats:
"In Islamic tradition, cats are admired for their cleanliness. They are thought to be ritually clean, unlike dogs, and are thus allowed to enter homes and even mosques... Food sampled by cats is considered halal [clean] and water from which cats have drunk is permitted for wudu [ceremonial cleansing]."
According to Islamic legend: cats won't walk across a Koran; they seek out people who are praying; they land on their feet because Mohamed blessed a cat by touching its back; the letter M on the forehead of tabbies is the imprint of Mohamed's fingers; Mohamed cut off his sleeve rather than disturb his cat, Muezza, who was asleep on it; Mohamed re-routed his army because a nursing cat was in their path. The following words of Mohamed are from the Hadith (a Moslem text second only to the Koran): "Affection for cats is a part of the faith;" and here are a few other other examples of the affection Muslims feel for cats: a 13th century sultan, al-Zahir Baybars endowed a still extant cat sanctuary in Cairo; cats are welcome in mosques; and there was even a Medieval era cat hospital to which people brought food in the belief that doing so would win them the favor of Allah. I could go on.No living thing fared well when Christianity dominated Europe, but when it came to unbridled cruelty, only heretics were persecuted as viciously as cats and women, and no women suffered more than "old maids," who, after being tortured, were often burned to death along with their cats. In what is surely the supreme irony of all time, Christians suspected that cats were causing the Black Death, and did their utmost to destroy the one animal that might have saved them.
For decades, the city of Paris held yearly spectacles in which French monarchs presided over a religious celebration in which cranes hoisted iron cages filled with screaming cats above bonfires so the people could "...have the pleasure of seeing the violent movements and hearing the frightening cries that these poor unfortunate beasts are forced to make" (the words of Jean Meslier, a French priest of the period who, upon his death, was found to have been an atheist). If the Bible is God's word, why didn't God insert a verse to stop all this, something like, "Upon pain of hell, thou shalt never, for any reason, kill or torment any person or other creature wantonly or in my name"?
The cat's bad reputation among Christians originated in its high esteem by pagans. What Christianity couldn't appropriate (it made Christian saints out of pagan gods, and Christian holy days out of pagan feast days), it sought to destroy, and the cat's position was worsened by the fact that, unlike its predecessors, Christianity denied that non-humans had a soul. Because cats reminded the Holy Catholic Church and its Protestant off-shoots of women, the way was paved for stories in which, through the help of Satan, cats could become women and vice versa.
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| Cat in Arabic |
Since every member of the cat family is referred to as "she" simply by virtue of being a cat, the threat to men that is posed by cats would not appear to come from any notion of women preferring cat masculinity to human masculinity, but rather from the fact that women and cats have a long history of being equated. I suspect that it would be hard to find a male cat hater who regards women as his equals, and when a 200-pound man proclaims his loathing of a ten pound creature that is scarcely aware of his existence, his first feeling wasn't hatred; it was the terror that came from having his self-image threatened by any creature's refusal to acknowledge his superiority.
Some relevant books, textual links, and a Youtube video that constitute a partial list of sources:
The Life, History and Magic of the Cat by Fernand Mery
Cats of Cairo: Egypt's Enduring Legacy by Lorraine Chittock
Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives by Barbara Holland
http://www.thegreatcat.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_cats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Meslier
http://muslimheritage.com/article/cats-islamic-culture
https://www.animalsinislam.com/islam-animal-rights/dogs/
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF7pTSCP4UM)
https://www.dailysabah.com/life/2016/02/01/peaceful-cohabitation-inside-istanbul-mosque-with-cats-worshippers-enjoying-each-others-company
18 comments:
There are similar stories about foxes transforming to women (though from memory the foxes are evil) and of course seals.
Until your post I had never thought about absence of tales about men transforming into animals. I will ponder that one today. Perhaps one of your commentators will know of one.
"is this the origin of the word 'pussy' being used as a synonym for vagina?"
Do you have reference to the fact that both entities are soft, warm, furry on the outside, and tasty in the center? I'm sure I wouldn't know.
"And Lot’s wife didn’t listen and looked back anyway and God turned her into a pillar of salt."
She's still there, you know, which is why only a stupid, conceited, vainglorious, and completely puffed-up atheist, would have the effrontery to deny the truth of God's Holy Word:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&tbm=isch&q=dead+sea+salt+pillars&chips=q:dead+sea+salt+pillars,g_2:lot%27s+wife&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKjojf9KvaAhUDXawKHfZCCpsQ4lYIKigA&biw=1601&bih=881&dpr=1.09
"She just looked at today and how nice it was without those awful Sodomites"
Nasty old fags! Thank God they're all rotting in hell, Dick Sergeant, Raymond Burr, and, more recently, Jim Nabors, among them!
"So, when some southerner calls you “Sugar,” know that it’s an homage to that very first “Sugar"...
My sister used to have two cocker spaniels (this was before they died), one named Sugar and the other named Honey (both of them neurotic as hell). As you might have guessed, people here in the Willamette Valley (home to atheists, queers, cats, and not much else) almost never call people they don't even know "sugar" (this being the main reason I came here), but some few do, and, particularly if I'm drunk, I'll feel like slapping her (or him, it being a faggedy-ass sort of area), but I've thus far managed to forebear and forswear because such behavior could (and probably would) be construed by a pansy-ass liberal jury as an overreaction.
"There are similar stories about foxes transforming to women (though from memory the foxes are evil) and of course seals."
Foxes being the only other animal I know of that Christians used to regularly enthuse over burning alive, and it's a custom that I don't trust that they wouldn't revive today if given the chance. For instance, try Googling "Christians and cats," and see what kind of nuttiness comes up on the very first page. Take, for example, the Jehovah's Witness site, which says that, although the Bible didn't exactly SAY that cats were present at the beheading of John the Baptist (actually, the Bible doesn't mention cats at all, which seems darned strange for a people that "came out" of Egypt), they PROBABLY were, and do you really want to own a pet that could lead you into that sort of sin (I should think not!).
"Until your post I had never thought about absence of tales about men transforming into animals."
I would just bet that mythology is full of such stories, but the question for me is whether they married women. BTW, did you know that it is thought by many that the stories about mermaids were inspired by manatees.
I did know about the manatee/mermaid link and have always wondered where mermaids reputation for incredible beauty came from.
The Bible lists the Ten Commandments that Moses Brought down from the mountain. In most versions #5 is Thou shalt not kill. It does not specify which living creatures shall not be killed.
I'll have you know that I never once referred to our old yellow one-eyed tomcat as "she" although he was simple by virtue of being a cat.
"I...always wondered where mermaids reputation for incredible beauty came from."
The trouble with their supposed manatee origin is that manatees are NOT pretty creatures. As for why mermaids were considered beautiful, when you have a lot of young, horny, heterosexual men who are at sea for weeks or months with nothing but one another to look at, and they start scanning the water for mermaids, those mermaids are not going to be envisioned as homely.
"The Bible lists the Ten Commandments that Moses Brought down from the mountain. In most versions #5 is Thou shalt not kill. It does not specify which living creatures shall not be killed."
Which, as you implied, makes it pretty much useless because based upon the text alone, it would even apply to sacrificial animals. That said, I doubt that anyone thinks it was aimed at anything other the murder of human beings--not killing people in war, not stoning them to death when the broke the law; just murder. Christians tend to extol the Ten Commandments as history's greatest guide to morality, yet the first five have only to do with the Jew's relationship with their deity. The sixth says to honor your parents (with no exceptions given in the case of parents who tend toward violence, drunkenness, and/or rape), not because it's the right thing to do, but so "your days may be long." The rest of the ten are "thou shalt nots," some of which the Israelites broke often and freely upon God's command. The final one (thou shalt not covet) is interesting in that it lists a man's wife along with items of property, implying that wives ARE property. What's more, because this final commandment is aimed at men, it leaves the road open for women to covet all they please. it's okay for. As you know, I belong to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, whose job it is to combat the efforts of religious people to cram their religion down the throats of others, and one of the main examples of this is placing ten commandments statues in front of schools, courthouses, and in public parks. Now, in response to its recent school shooting, the state of Florida is planning to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Along with "thoughts and prayers," it's the kind of thing that government officials who were bought and paid for by the NRA commonly do in lieu of something that might actually help, and while officials don's commonly turn to prayer alone to fix other problems, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi (Tony Yarber), did tweet the following: "Yes....I believe we can pray potholes away. Moses prayed and a sea opened up. #iseeya #itrustHim #prayerworks"
"I'll have you know that I never once referred to our old yellow one-eyed tomcat as "she"
I'm always touched by your willingness to open your heart to me and my readers in this way, and I will respond in kind. It's not even unusual for Peggy or I to refer to one of our cats or another by the wrong gender. I consider it doubtful that we would have done this when we were younger.
A brilliant post. How I wish I could express my thoughts as well as you do. Here you have put down many of my own thoughts (and theories) far better than I can even in my mind. I have little regard for the kindness of Christians to lives other than their own. How strange, I think to myself, they would look down on other species as lower than themselves and feel this gives right to torture them in all horrid fashion when they believe God is a higher species than they are. The irony is killer. I will say over decades I have warned friends, male and female, against friendship or closer, with cat haters. They're often control freaks with severe self esteem issues that may turn them to domestic violence. The hatred exhibited by some men especially towards cats is beyond comprehension when they simply do not need to have one in their home. There is something about cats that threatens them to the core.
Terrific post, again! You put a huge amount of research and work into your posts - wonderfully informative and truly interesting. I thought the Arabic word for CAT was a great piece of artistic lettering; it so looked like a cat too!
There's a sickening side to this topic, I'm sad to say. Some time ago I read reports from a local Croydon newspaper of a person who was killing cats in that area of south London by decapitating the poor things. It now seems that more than 400 cats have been slaughtered in this horrendous way: https://ind.pn/2HnauVB
Perhaps the same fate should befall the vile perpetrator of this heinous crime?
"I have warned friends, male and female, against friendship or closer, with cat haters."
Like you, I have no interest in the friendship of people who hate cats--or dogs--or with people who treat them like objects. I know a man who, on the rare occasions when he comes to see me, and one of my pets goes up to him in greeting, simply looks at my pet with no expression, no kind words, and no physical contact. I only feel a little less bad about him treating my pet this way than I would feel if he treated Peggy this way. Imagine how Mr. Spock might have treated an animal, and that's what this man does. He's the one I wrote about who left a box of kittens by his office door so people could take them away. I'm sure he would have preferred that those kittens go to good homes, but he made no effort to see that they did, and, of course, he didn't spay their mother. There's something missing or broken about this man. He's the kind of person who I would expect to say, "It was only a cat," to someone who was in grief over a dead cat. There are a lot of people like he was. If they have a dog or a cat, they'll feed it regularly and possibly take it to the vet when it's sick, but they will make no effort to meet its emotional needs because they will regard it as little more than an object. I used to feel badly toward Peggy's parents because they would get a dog, put the dog in their backyard, never take it for a walk,, and show it no affection. They treated their dogs like ambulatory yard ornaments, it not being their dogs that they loved but their image of what it meant to have a dog. It was as if they were trying to find the right elements to populate a Robert Frost painting, and had concluded that a yard with a dog in it looked more homely than a yard without a dog.
"...cat haters. They're often control freaks with severe self esteem issues that may turn them to domestic violence."
People who commit violent crimes against people almost always started by committing violent crimes against cats or dogs while they're still children. As you'll probably recall, my non-hunter father was foolish enough to buy me a combination shotgun/rifle (the gun had two barrels) when I was eight, and for the next several years, I went about the woods all by myself killing animals. When I look back and try to understand why I behaved this way, I really don't know. I suppose it had something to do with thinking that that's what men did, and I wanted to be a man, but whatever led me to do it, I stopped, and now I wonder if many boys grow up killing as I did, only to eventually conclude that it represented a serious ethical problem. Certainly, a sadist or a psychopath wouldn't stop, or if he did stop, his reason for stopping would have nothing to do with conscience or compassion. I also wonder about people who continue to hunt into adulthood, whether their enjoyment of killing might not be due to arrested development (a belief held by Thoreau). The older I get, the more appalled I am by violence, and the extent to which my society promotes violence. We could make our world so good, so why do we go to such lengths to make it bad?
"The hatred exhibited by some men especially towards cats is beyond comprehension..."
While still in Mississippi, I was friends with a man named Ken who disapproved of his girlfriend's (her name was Carol) relationship with her cat, saying that the cat bullied Carol. One night, Ken took the cat and threw it in the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I have no good explanation for why I continued to be friends with Ken, but even at the time, I wondered if, even in his own mind, he really meant to defend Carol, or if he simply saw the cat as a competitor for her affection (which might have been how the cat saw him, and was therefore the reason the cat misbehaved when Ken was around--assuming that Ken was telling the truth about the cat's behavior). Now I wonder about Carol; was she really blind to the fact that Ken hated her cat? I find it hard to imagine that she didn't see that there was a problem.
"Perhaps the same fate should befall the vile perpetrator of this heinous crime?"
I find it hard in my own mind to distinguish between justice and revenge. I also don't know if, for example, this cat killer was legally decapitated, it would make for a better or a worse society. I do think that when someone kills cats in this way, he not only hates cats and wants to make them suffer; he hates people who have cats--at least outdoor cats--and makes them want to feel terror lest the same thing happen to their cats. We keep our cats indoors for various reasons, but protecting them from cat-haters is surely high on the list. I often encounter a friendly outdoor cat, and I wonder if the person who has the cat is naive or callous that they would expose their cat and the local wildlife to the many dangers of the outdoors, especially in this neighbor that is so heavily frequented by people on foot or on bikes.
There was less plague in Rome as the cats were allowed to roam the ruins eat the rats though I don't know if they had made that connection then.
I will try to think of a story that a man turns into an animal versus turning into the devil. There are a few instances of that
And another thing. The first sentence I ever learned in Spanish was in the beautiful Mrs. Sue Nichols’s fifth-grade classroom when she decided that we should all have our horizons broadened. So she taught us to say Este es el gato which in case you didn’t know means “This is the cat” and please note that el gato is a masculine noun even though many cats are obviously female or pretty soon there wouldn’t be any more cats. I have no idea whether there is such a phrase as la gata in Spanish to be used when referring to female cats but I rather doubt it. If there is, I don’t want to know. If Mrs. Nichols ever taught us how to say other things in Spanish I have no recollection of it whatsoever. She did have a big pink lamp mated wall map of the Korean peninsula, however, and I was given the task of keeping the ever-changing front lines up to date with a piece of purple chalk. Perhaps thinking of Mrs. Nichols again will help me to remember any prepubescent memories I may have repressed somewhere in my psyche.
Crazy computer Again; lamp mated was supposed to be laminated.
"There was less plague in Rome as the cats were allowed to roam the ruins eat the rats..."
PBS runs a good program from time to time regarding how diseased ancient Rome was, partly because: it was jam packed with people; sanitary facilities were seriously lacking; it was the center of the Western and Middle Eastern world and therefore frequented by people from many places; and finally, the public baths were enjoyed by absolutely everyone, including people with contagious diseases, among them contagious skin diseases (as in, "You pop my pustules, and I'll pop yours"). As for when cats came to Rome, that would have been about the time of Julius Caesar, the Egyptians having done their utmost to keep all the cats to themselves.
"please note that el gato is a masculine noun even though many cats are obviously female."
Obviously (my Scully is far too beautiful and dainty to be a man cat). When I googled la gata, the first thing that came up was a movie by the name, and this led me, for the first time ever, to suspect that you might have committed a factual error. Here's a video that gets into the subject of masculine and feminine as it applies to cats and other animals (go to MINUTE 10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fre-Vd438Ok& (it WILL be worth your while to watch this final a couple of minute). Maybe I mentioned having a sister who got her doctorate in International Studies with an emphasis in Spanish. If she didn't have family in Pensacola, I think she would move to Mexico. As it is, she goes to once or twice a year to San Miguel de Allende for an extended stay. So, you ask, whence came her interest in Spanish? It started with an infatuation with a Cuban psychiatrist for whom she worked while in college. Her love continued even after that nightmarish second day on the job when she arrived at work to find him and his colleagues laughing uproariously over her transcription from the first day. In it, she (being fresh out of rural Mississippi) had consistently mistaken the word paramour for power mower.
"Perhaps thinking of [pretty] Mrs. Nichols again will help me to remember any prepubescent memories I may have repressed..."
Shall we expect a series of 30 posts on the subject, followed by an elopement with Mrs. Nichols (who will have lost none of her looks) and a messy divorce?
Hi Smnowbrush.
Thanks for your comment on my blog.
I/we - Gosh, how difficult it is to get into the I-mode - were cat lovers, when we retired and moved to the country we adopted several dogs. Millie, the last dog, is old now and I may adopt a cat or two when she goes.
I am not a great one for religion, whether Christianity or any other version, so I tend to live by following what Christians consider Christian values but are, in reality, the values of any decent human being. Not harming, torturing, neglecting, and definitely not killing, any other living creature is very much part of that.
I enjoyed your resume of cat lore, the fact that Islam values cats so highly was new to me.
Honestly, in general like dogs better than cats, but I sure liked OUR cat, Sassy, who warmed our home for 17 years. I think I know the answer (maybe you've mentioned it before?) but ... are you a vegetarian?
"I tend to live by following what Christians consider Christian values but are, in reality, the values of any decent human being."
You don't live in America where Donald Trump's primary support comes from evangelical Christians. These are NOT decent human beings. These are unconscionable hypocrites of the stipe that apologetically supported the Third Reich.
"I enjoyed your resume of cat lore, the fact that Islam values cats so highly was new to me."
It was all new to me too. My wife, Peggy, is an avid collector of clothing buttons who has learned much about history, mythology, manufacturing, and various other things from collecting buttons, and so it is with studying cats.
"I sure liked OUR cat, Sassy, who warmed our home for 17 years."
What a cat! I have FOUR cats (count them--FOUR), but I still need a furnace, a ductless unit, AND and a fireplace insert, although I live in the relatively warm Willamette Valley. I feel so cheated.
"... are you a vegetarian?"
I've been a vegetarian since 1984ish. In 1987ish, I went back to eating fish, and I never did give up eggs and dairy. Why do you ask? Is it because I have share my home with creatures that are "red in tooth and claw"? If so, I was reading just last night about a notion from the early 20th century that the best food for cats is raw potato peelings. I don't believe this, but it was a popular belief of about the time I was born.
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