"I tell you, cats are the queer articles. They seem to be different to every other class of animals. In the old days there were some foreign peoples who worshipped them, and it is not to be greatly wondered at, when you think of the intelligence of cats." ~ The King of Cats - excerpt from an old British tale
The Black Cat Continued
The Bewitcher: Watching a cat with its prey, there are moments when one feels the victim could still escape, but it appears to be paralysed or apathetic. It is as if cats, like snakes, almost cast a spell on their prey.
Cats are generally unpopular in Japan because they are believed to have the power to bewitch people. The word cat is sometimes applied to a geisha. The grace and beauty of a cat's lithe and sinuous body are associated with that of the "singing girl," who has the power of bewitching the opposite sex. The geisha's victim has been represented as a "catfish," for he allows himself to be captured and subjugated by a beautiful and fascinating creature.
There is a Buddhist fable which attempts to illustrate the belief that women resemble cats in that they seek to ruin anyone who comes within their power. The Buddha had taken the form of a cockerel living among many other cocks. A she cat, who had succeeded in hoodwinking all the other birds so that she could eat them, turned her wiles toward the Buddha incarnated cock. She offered him perpetual youth and beauty, and the choice of a simple slave girl or an honored wife, yet he withstood her attractions and drove her away. Said the enlightened cockerel: For there is no honor in your heart when you are wooing me.
The power of the legendary cat to bewitch seems to have focused on its tail. It was claimed that forked or double tailed Japanese cat demons had doubly strong bewitching powers. The Irish had two tailed and ten tailed magical cats. The cat o'nine tails was an emblem of power, although in this case the power was that of royalty. The Japanese maintained that, although cats had a natural tendency to become demons, this could be checked by cutting of the tails of kittens.
In Mme D'Aulnoy's The White Cat, it wasn't until the tail of the white cat had been cut off and flung into the fire that the princess and her court were released from the bewitchment which they had suffered for so long.
A famous story of the severed tail of a cat, though no mention of bewitchment, is one which accounts for the taillessness of the Manx. The oldest version of the legend describes how the cat was the last of all animals to enter the Ark for it wouldn't go without taking a mouse with it. When Noah had all the other animals safely inside and the rain was beginning to fall, there was still no appearance of the cat. She finally arrived half-drowned as he slammed the door shut - she squeezed in, losing her tail in the process.
The Traitor: There is a dark aspect to the cat's reputation which is not based on belief in its supernatural power, but from its observed natural behavior.
Cats are notorious for their fickleness and unpredictability - an added reason, perhaps, for associating them with geishas. Egyptians punished faithless women for their adultery by tying them in a sack with a cat and flinging the sack into the Nile. The same fate befell inconstant Icelandic wives, the sacks being flung into a "Drowning Pool."
The nature of the cat's eyes aptly expresses this aspect of its character. The semi-precious stone known as the cat's eye is so called because it possesses chatoyancy - this is a change ability in luster and color like the eyes of a cat in the dark.
To turn a cat in the pan means to be a traitor or a turncoat. As Bacon explains in his essay Of Cunning:
There is a cunning which we in England call the turning of a cat in the pan which is, when that which a man says to another, he lays it as if another had said it to him.
The phrase derives from the French
tourner cote en peine (to turn sides in trouble), but the fact that we have chosen this corruption and that it has stuck, is probably because of cats.
At the time of the first French Republic, the cat was a symbol of liberty; later it came to represent perfidy. The frontispiece of an old volume entitled
Les Crimes des Papes shows a cat at the feet of the Pope, where it symbolizes treason and hypocrisy.
It was traditional in Italian art to introduce a cat into paintings of the Last Supper. Often the cat appears at the feet of the traitor, Judas Iscariot. A fresco by Ghirlandajo shows Judas sitting apart from the other Apostles with only a cat to keep him company. One of Cellini's bas-reliefs shows a cat at the feet of Judas.
