It’s no secret: witches love string. In fact, I think it’s safe to say they love it almost as much as their cats do. Medieval witches were believed to work spells with the aid of aiguillettes, knotted loops of string. Add a few feathers to a length of string and you have a witch’s sewel or wishing rope. You could even steal a person’s shadow just by measuring it with a piece of string. So prevalent was this string magic that, as Christianity worked its way north into Europe, the church issued special edicts against the tying and untying of knots. The oldest piece of string we have dates to 15000 bce and was apparently dropped by one of the famous cave painters of Lascaux. While it might have been used to work magic, it’s a little thick to have been used for Cat’s Cradle, which is the subject of this article.
It’s possible you are not familiar with the term “Cat’s Cradle.” When I recently came upon my daughter’s nine-year-old friend “Natalia” (I’ve changed her name in the interests of being mysterious) with that familiar web of string between her fingers, I said, “Oh! Cat’s Cradle!” And she said, “What?”
“This,” I said, inserting my thumbs and forefingers into the figure and attempting to transfer it onto my own hands the way you’re supposed to.
“I didn’t know you called it that,” said Natalia as the intricate figure sagged and lost its shape. (I’ve never been good at Cat’s Cradle.)
“Well, what do you call it?” I asked Natalia.
“It’s just string.”
String figures, as the anthropologists like to call them, are an ancient phenomenon. When we sit down with a friend to make the “cat’s cradle,” we are engaging in an activity that dates back to the days before there even were cats. Of course, it’s not always called Cat’s Cradle. The Chukchi of Siberia like to make a “house” while the Australian aborigines make a “drum.” Originally, they were used to illustrate stories, much like Hans Christian Andersen’s on-the-fly paper-cuts. The Navajo used the same figures to represent the shifting position of the Pleiades in the night sky, while among the Inuit, the time for making string figures is just after the summer solstice, the idea being to trap the sun inside the figure and keep it from disappearing as it will in the winter. (Yes, that’s why I’ve chosen to write about string figures for Midsummer: that and the fact that it’s a fun game to play while sitting on the stoop of a summer’s evening.)
In Japan, string figures in general are known as ayatori. My highly sketchy command of Japanese does not allow me to provide you with a literal translation of ayatori, but one of the signature figures in ayatori is the neko, which means “cat.” Instead of lying down quietly in its cradle, however, the cat turns into a nekomata, a “wild cat,” on the next move.
It’s clear that the making of string figures used to be, and in some places still is, much more than a game. We’ve managed to keep the figures themselves here in the west, but what happened to the stories, spells, and lessons that used to go with them? I have a feeling it had something to do with those early church edicts. Like nursery rhymes, our string figures must also have held some deep, dark secrets.
In our house, my sister was the mistress of Cat’s Cradle, so I decided to call her up and pick her brain, forty or so years after the fact.
“After the Cat’s Cradle,” she explained patiently, “you make it into Scissors, and the two players can pull the string back and forth to make it look like the scissors are cutting. Oh, yes, and then there was Water. There were four parallel strings, like a river with the banks on either side. No, wait, wait … that was Chinese Jump Rope.”
For those of you born after the early seventies, Chinese Jump Rope is a bungee-like band, usually brightly colored (wasn’t everything in the seventies?), that one stretched between the legs of two chairs and then jumped in and out of. Like Cat’s Cradle, there were all different figures you could make. Is it ancient? Is it even Chinese? I have no idea.
“Why is it called Cat’s Cradle?” I asked my sister, for surely she could tell me that much.
“I have no idea.”
The name may originally have been “Cratch Cradle,” with “cratch” being an old word for “crib,” which would give us a meaning of “cradle, cradle,” which seems silly to me. Natalia’s mother told me later that she had played the game as a child in Nepal. It had no name. “Everybody just knew it. Everybody did it.” She was amazed when she found out kids did it here; just as I had assumed it was a seventies thing, she had believed it was played only on the streets of Kathmandu.
If you don’t yet know how to play Cat’s Cradle, YouTube awaits. If, like me, you’d rather look at archival photographs of children playing it all around the world, I would direct you to search for Cat’s Cradle in the Smithsonian Collections Blog. My favorite is “Two Girls in Informal Costume Sitting on a Mat and Playing Cat’s Cradle with String on Snow, no date,” which shows two little Ainu girls bundled up against the cold, their fingers artfully entwined.
This just in from our old friend Mother Goose: she says if I wanted to give the children something exciting to read on Midsummer Eve, I should have written about “Here We Go ’Round the Mulberry Bush.”
But, Mother Goose, there are no “cold and frosty mornings” at Midsummer, not even in England, I would guess.
Nevertheless, she tells me, in England it was customary for girls to dance round a mulberry bush, which is really more of a tree, on Midsummer Eve. Thank you, Mother Goose.
Well, while we’re at it, we might as well check in with the Norns. Looks like they’ve gotten tired of playing Nine Men’s Morris: Urd has gone back to her spinning, and what’s that Verdani and Skuld are concentrating on so hard? Of course, they’re playing Cat’s Cradle!