The Mysterious, Magickal Cat
Few species have evoked such extremes in human emotions as the feline family. For centuries, felines have invoked admiration, awe, inspiration, and fear. Cats are mysterious, mystical creatures who predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and storms through their behavior, react to haunted buildings, and psyche you out by following the movement of things you cannot see. We are fascinated by cats and their behavior, their regal bearing, their intelligence. Yet we are upset by their inscrutable stare and their savage natural instincts.
Beware of people who dislike cats.
—Old Irish Proverb
Even to confirmed cat lovers, the domesticated cat is a mysterious creature who shares its affections as if conferring a royal honor, scorning attention when it feels insulted yet giving itself to total abandon when enticed to play.
Cats are first and always their own creature. No human can ever truly say he or she owns a cat. As Peter Engel and Merrit Malloy said in their book, dogs obediently come when you order them to, while cats look at you with disinterest, do the equivalent of taking a number, and vaguely give the impression of getting back to you at their convenience.1
To most people, cats are an animal they either like or dislike. There seem to be few fence sitters on the subject of cats. A cat lover is called an ailurophile, while one who fears or hates cats is called an ailurophobe.
Usually when we speak in general terms of cats, we mean the domesticated cat. However, every single cat of any size belongs to the class Mammalia, the order carnivora, and the family of felidae or felids. The cat family includes about thirty-nine species of cat, ranging from tigers to domestic cats.
Unfortunately, history (after the time of the ancient Egyptians and the most well-known of cat goddesses, Bast) and many religions have not been kind to the feline family, especially the smallest of its members—the domesticated cat. Many of the feline family have also been hunted to near extinction. Malicious, superstitious lies have been built around its character and supposedly nefarious deeds. The English word cat has its equivalent in many other cultures. In French it is called chat, in German katze, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, Swedish katt, Norwegian katt, Dutch kat, Icelandic kottur, Polish kot, Yiddish kats, Greek gata, Maltese qattus, modern Arabic qittah, Nubian kadiz, and in fourth-century Latin cattus.2 The Egyptian word for cat was miu or mau, while in China the word was (and still is) mao.
The Turkish word kedi (cat) may have been the source of our word kitty or kitten, just as the word tabby may have come from the Turkish word utabi. Many believe that the words puss and pussy came from the names of the Egyptian cat goddesses Pasht and Bast.3
The ancestors of the domesticated cat were already well established on our planet when humans appeared 30,000 to 35,000 years ago. The cat family, in one form or another, spread around the globe, with the exceptions of Australia, Antarctica, Madagascar, the West Indies, and some of the oceanic islands.
Excavations of human settlements such as Jericho have produced cat bones dated as early as 9,000 years ago. In 1983, the archaeologist Alain le Brun found feline jawbones and teeth in a Neolithic settlement in south Cyprus, which dated back to 6000 BCE.4 There were no native wild cats on Cyprus, so cats must have been brought to the island by humans. Harappa, in the Indus Valley, yielded cat bones dating back 4,000 years. Records indicate that the Egyptians had tamed and were using wild animals since about 2600 BCE.5
A cat stalks a rat in this woodcut from an early nineteenth-century spelling book.
However, other animals, such as the dog, reindeer, goat, and sheep, were domesticated long before the cat decided to live with humankind. Perhaps cats wanted to see if this new species of animal would be worth cultivating as a friend and benefactor.
Cats may have domesticated themselves rather than humans doing the domesticating. When humans began to grow and store grain, the cats may have come into the villages because of the rodent population that fed off the grain. Observing that these cats killed rats and mice, the farmers probably started feeding them in hopes they would stay around and protect the food supply. And cats, seeing the golden opportunity of plenty of food and protection from larger predators, decided to live with humans—but only on their terms.
I sincerely hope that the people of this world who are still suspicious of and hateful to cats will move beyond such actions. After all, how we treat our animal companions says volumes about our true spirituality—or lack of it.
Although I have never had a purebred cat, I have been the custodian of many cats throughout my life: Figaro, Samuel Tibbs, Muff, Gypsy, Flash, Finnigan, Callisto (Callie), Beowulf, Valkyrie, Hocus Pocus, Hexi, and Shadow Boy. I have never failed to be enchanted by members of the feline family, or the tribe of tiger. This book is a tribute to cats and cat lovers everywhere.
1. Peter Engel and Merrit Malloy, Old Wives’ Tales.
2. Richard H. Gebhardt, The Complete Cat Book.
3. F. E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, believed that all names for the cat came from the Near East and Africa.
4. Gebhardt, The Complete Cat Book.
5. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals.