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Several specific breeds of cat were connected with ancient temples and sacred lore. Among those that readily come to mind are the Birman, the Siamese, and the black cats of ancient Egypt.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
—Leonardo Davinci
Egyptian wall paintings of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago show cats with light or washed-out, broken tabby stripes, very similar to the present-day African wild cat. A painting of a cat wearing a wide collar is shown as early as the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2600 BCE) in Egypt; this is in the tomb of Ti. A tomb picture from the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1400 BCE) shows a cat in a papyrus swamp.58 From the age of the New Kindom (1567 BCE onward), there are many paintings of cats sitting under chairs, hunting birds, and in the company of other tame animals. From the Tenth Dynasty on, the cat was frequently shown in Egyptian art. The cat would have been a welcome creature in any Egyptian home regardless of its sacred designation because of the numerous rats, mice, snakes, and other dangerous Nile wildlife.
By 2100 BCE, close to the end of the Middle Empire, the Egyptians had trained the cat as a fisher and a hunter, as well as a ratter. Cats are shown in skiffs with hunters watching ducks and other water birds. One painting shows a cat holding down three birds, while another cat skillfully fishes beside it. An Egyptian tomb painting from the Nineteenth Dynasty pictures a deceased woman beside an offering table, with three animal deities hovering nearby: a cat, dog, and snake. This indicates that the cat in some manner was connected with the Egyptian belief in the afterlife. The most beautiful reproductions of cats are found in the tomb of the sculptors Apuki and Nebanin, who lived during the reign of Amen Hotep III.
By the Twentieth Dynasty, the cat held a strong place in Egyptian culture. They called the cat “Mau” or “Myeo,” a name derived from the cat’s meow. Even the poorest Egyptian willingly shared his meager meal with his cat.
A Japanese bamboo stencil.
The Egyptian sacred temple cats, as well as those of Babylon, were believed to act as the host for a human soul; this same belief was found much later among the Burmese and Siamese. Any human soul blessed by co-existing with a sacred cat would gain a high spiritual level when the cat finally died.
The city of Bubastis was founded in the Twenty-second Dynasty, when peace and prosperity were temporarily restored to Egypt.59 During this period, the cat began to watch over temples, a task formerly reserved for lionesses.
The cat-headed goddess Bast or Bastet was a deity of maternity and all feminine things. The domestic cat became her special animal, and was deeply honored in her city of Bubastis. Cats were also sacred to her mirror-sister Pasht. In the temples of Bast-Pasht, the priests carefully watched the behavior and attitude of the cats living there; they gave predictions by the changes in behavior and actions.60
All Egyptians, royalty and commoner alike, could have a cat. They revered cats so much that there was a death penalty for anyone who killed one. When a cat died, the family shaved off their eyebrows and went into mourning. Depending on their financial status, the family would embalm or bury the deceased cat.
The city of Bubastis, sacred to the cat goddess Bast, was the burial place of hundreds of thousands of mummified cats during the ancient Egyptian culture. These cats were carefully preserved, their eyes piously closed, wrapped in linen bandages, then buried in special cemeteries.
During the middle of the nineteenth century the sacred cat cemetery at Beni-Hassan was excavated. Unfortunately, both early archaeologists and the later Egyptian people themselves seemed to think these mummified remains were of no importance. In the late 1800s, boatloads of mummified cats61 were taken to Europe, where the vast majority of them were pulverized and used as fertilizer. The Egyptologist Flinders Petrie himself gave 190 cat skulls to the English Natural History Museum. The three largest skulls have been identified as belonging to the jungle or marsh cat, Felis chaus.
The origin of the black cat can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where it (as were all cats) was considered especially sacred to the goddess Bast. Bast was often portrayed as a black cat. The black cat’s European reputation for bringing good luck and healing comes from the ancient Egyptians’ reverence for this cat.62 For centuries, a pure black cat could be sold for a huge sum, equivalent to many thousands of dollars today.
The Phoenicians, who were the shady used horse- and car-dealers of the era, decided to trade in cats, a rare commodity and one the Egyptians firmly refused to sell to them or anyone else. Black cats were extremely rare, as most Egyptian cats were of a reddish, fawn, or yellowish color. The Phoenicians managed to steal a few of the sacred cats and sneak them out of Egypt,63 roaming great distances along their trade routes; ancient tales from Britain and western France say that these seafarers brought rare cats with them from the Mediterranean.
In order to increase their product, the Phoenicians began to breed the cats. Soon they discovered that, although all their cats were valuable, the black ones brought the highest prices. They sold cats all around the Mediterranean, first in Greece and then on to Rome. However, they advertised the black cats as the most efficient mousers because their coloring made them almost invisible in the dark.
Later, the domesticated cat spread throughout Europe as pets and were taken along with the Roman families to new colonies. In these new European areas, the domesticated cat encountered the European wild cat and began to interbreed. The resulting offspring produced the first full tabby coats with thin, dark lines.
The present-day Abyssinian cat has the look and reddish color of some of the cats pictured in Egyptian paintings. There are two groups of thought about the origin of the Abyssinian cat. One group thinks that the Abyssinian is descended from Egyptian sacred cats, which were worshipped more than 4,000 years ago. The other group thinks the breed originated in the jungles of North Africa. Both agree that the Abyssinian was brought to England during the late 1860s by soldiers returning from that area of the world.
Several centuries into the Common Era, Asian countries began to import domestic cats. India was the first to include the cat in its religion. For a very long time, Orthodox Hindu rites have stipulated that each family should care for at least one cat.
No one knows the origin of the Siamese cat for sure. It may have been established by Pradgadipok, the father of a Siamese king. Pradgadipok confined his cats to his palace and guarded them. The boys who guarded these cats ignored the death penalty and occasionally stole one from a new litter, selling the kitten in Shanghai to tourists. The first Siamese pair reached England in 1884, the same year a pair showed up in France. The first Blue Point Siamese was bred in England in 1894, and the first Chocolate Point was a male brought to England in 1897.
At one time Siamese cats were noted for the kink in their tails.64 The legend behind this is a quite charming story. The royal princesses of Siam needed someplace safe to leave their rings when they went each day to bathe, so they slipped the rings over the tails of their Siamese cats. The cats, to keep from losing the rings, kinked their tails to keep the jewelry from slipping off. Thus the kink became permanent in the tails of Siamese cats.
Another tale of the kink says that the Siamese once tied a knot in its tail to remember something, but forgot what it was.
Another delightful tale of the Siamese explains the crossed eyes, once common but now rare. The crossed eyes, legend says, came from the diligent concentration of certain Siamese cats who were set the task of watching and guarding a certain sacred vase.
There is very little information about the rare Temple Mark found on Siamese cats. A very few highly purebred Siamese will have these sooty-looking marks, and they are considered to be especially sacred. The marks look like someone with soot-covered hands lifted the Siamese rather low on the neck. The legend says that a god once picked up a Siamese cat, leaving the shadow of his hand on the cat’s back; this mark was passed on to its descendants.
Another Asian cat is the Birman, which is the sacred cat of Burma and is a different breed from the Burmese cat. It was greatly honored in Burma because of the Burmese legend saying that deceased priests returned to their temples in the form of these cats. These sacred longhaired cats lived in certain holy places, one of which was the temple of Lao-Tsun, on the side of the mountain Lugh. This temple was located in west Burma between China and India.
Long ago, a priest named Kittah Mun-Ha lived in this temple. He was a great, pious Lama with a golden beard. Each night he would kneel in worship before a statue of Tsun-Kyan-Kse, the blue-eyed goddess who ruled over the transmutation of souls, a process that allows a spiritual person to relive the span of his next life within the body of a sacred animal. Each time Mun-Ha prayed, he was joined by a sacred cat named Sinh, a golden-eyed cat with white fur and dark-colored ears, tail, nose, and paws.
One night invaders from Siam stormed the temple, and Mun-Ha was killed. Immediately, the cat Sinh stood with his paws on the dead Mun-Ha and faced the statue of the goddess. As he stared at the statue, a wonderful transformation took place. The cat’s fur changed to a beautiful golden color down his spine, while his feet remained a brilliant white; this white showed the purity of Mun-Ha’s soul. Sinh’s yellow eyes changed to a deep, sapphire blue. For seven days the sacred cat remained at his post before the statue. At the end of that time Sinh died, taking with him the soul of the priest Mun-Ha. When Sinh died, all the sacred cats in the temple were transformed from their original white color to that of the seal point, just like Sinh.
During a rebellion in Burma in 1916, a British officer, Major Gordon Russel, helped some of the priests escape to Tibet with their sacred Birman cats. The priests sent Major Russel a pair of Birman cats in gratitude.
The first Burmese cat (not the same as the Birman) arrived in the US in 1930. She was a brown female named Wong Mau. Her owner, Dr. G. C. Thompson of San Francisco, mated her with a Siamese.
From about the time Buddhism was introduced to Japan (c. sixth century CE), there have been at least two cats in every Buddhist temple. This action was primarily taken to protect the manuscripts of moral treatises from being chewed up by mice.
Cats in Japan were considered so valuable that they were pampered and kept indoors; only the wealthy could afford to purchase a cat. The example for this devotion may have been the Emperor himself. In 999 CE, a white cat brought from China gave birth to five white kittens in the court at Kyoto. The Emperor decreed that these cats would be brought up and protected as if they were young princes.
It wasn’t until centuries later that the cat was allowed outside, and it became possible for the lower ranks of citizens to have a cat. In 1602 the destruction of silkworms by mice reached a danger point. The Japanese government passed a law that all adult cats had to be set free so they could kill the mice. It was forbidden to even buy, sell, or make a gift of a cat.
Today, deceased cats have their own temple, Gotoku-Ji in Tokyo, built about 200 years ago. This charming temple is still served by priests wearing sacred garments and chanting for the cat souls buried there. On the altar at the heart of this temple are many portrayals of cats on paper and cloth, in porcelain and bronze. Each of them is shown with an upraised paw, raised to the heighth of its eyes.65 This peculiar position represents Maneki-Neki, the little female cat who is thought to attract good luck and happiness. Around this altar are the graves of beloved cats, all covered with tablets on which are inscribed prayers to Buddha for their souls.
Originally, the temple of Gotoku-Ji was only a poor thatched hut run by poverty-stricken Buddhist monks. The head priest, however, had a little cat with whom he shared his meager food. Wishing to help the monks, the cat went to the roadside one day and waited until a troop of Samurai came riding down the road. The cat raised its paw to its ear as if beckoning, and the curious Samurai stopped to look at the cat. As the cat continued to beckon and move closer to the poor temple, the men followed.
The head priest gave them tea and talked about the Buddhist doctrine as a heavy rainstorm kept the men inside. After this, one of the Samurai, Lord Li, regularly visited the priest to hear about Buddhism. He finally endowed the temple with a large estate, which is the Gotoku-Ji temple of today.
In China, the god of agriculture was Li-Shou, who was worshipped in the form of a cat. After the harvest was reaped and stored, the people made sacrifices to this god so that, in his cat form, he would protect against rats and mice. A parallel European minor deity was very similar: known as the Corn Cat, this deity had both a human and a cat shape and was linked with good harvests and protection of crops.
There is no definite way to determine exactly where the cat first became considered sacred, although archaeology points to ancient Egypt. However much methods of spirituality changed over the centuries, the cat remained mysterious, mystical, and sacred to one degree or another among a great many cultures. The cat has been considered a powerful totem animal or familiar in several religious paths. Perhaps those people who seem to enjoy harming or torturing cats today are reacting to the subconscious knowledge that the feline family was once of great importance in guiding humans along a positive spiritual path, and that they still hold that power.
58. Champfleury, who wrote Les Chats in 1870, and others have traced domestic cats back to the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt.
59. Bubastis was built in Lower Egypt on the east branch of the Nile, a branch now silted up. Today this site is called Tell Basta.
60. Fernand Mery, The Life, History & Magic of the Cat.
61. In fact, twenty tons of these bodies were shipped to Liverpool, England, alone. Farmers bought them for £4 a ton.
62. The black cat’s healing powers were connected with the goddess Pasht, the mirror sister of Bast.
63. The Egyptians prevented this export of cats for at least a thousand years after they accepted them as sacred pets. In fact, records hint that the Egyptians brought back to Egypt any cats they found during their travels.
64. Siamese are now bred for straight tails in the US and Britain. However, in the Orient, kinked-tailed Siamese are valued. Milo Denlinger, The Complete Siamese Cat.
65. This “beckoning” cat is considered to be a powerful good luck charm that draws prosperity. A figure of this cat often decorates the entrances to Japanese shops and restaurants.