"...we should forever imagine our cats to be simple pets whose highest ambition is to sleep in the best soft chair, whose worst crime is to sharpen their claws on the carpeting." ~ Robley Wilson, Jr. ~
The Black Cat Continued
The Victim: Eventually the "blackness" of the cat caught up with it. A Japanese sketch interprets a scene of final retribution showing a cat captured and tormented by rats. There is a popular Russian print which shows a triumphant procession of forty four mice dragging a bound cat on a sledge. Such situations were very popular among satirists. Misericords of rats hanging a cat are to be found in the Priory Church of Great Malvern and in Worcester Cathedral of England. Battles staged between rats and cats often show the rats getting their own back.
The cat received its consistent and most terrible persecution not from rats, however, but a the hand of human beings.
Cats have been sacrifieced for diverse reasons. No doubt the experience was always much the same for the cats, but those who perpetrated the deed it often felt quite different. It is of importance to distinguish between the various human motives involved. Because of the "lightness" of feline nature, the cat was once regarded as a god and as such was sacrificed to deity. A second reason for torturing and killing cats arose from the "darkness" of feline nature, for occultists aware of the demonic aspect of these animals believed that they were sacrificing a devil to the Devil.
The Devil was specially prone to manifest himself as a cat and, consequently, it was assumed to be one of his favorite animals. Cat familiars, like their owners, served the Devil. It was believed that cats dedicated to him were more efficient servants when their souls were disburdened of their bodies. So black cats were considered to be acceptable gifts to the Devil. They were frequently sacrificed to him for purposes of placation.
According to an edition of the
Sunday Express, pulished in January 1929, York County in Pennsylvania, USA had been almost completely stripped of black cats. The reason for this was that the countryside had been swept by a terror of witchcraft, and the inhabitants "knew" that a sure way of making peace with Satan was to plunge a live black cat into boiling water, keeping one of its bones as an amulet.
After a Sabbat, newly initiated witches made daily sacrifices to the Devil, perhaps in fear or gratitude, or perhaps to keep in contact with their new master. Sometimes they sacrificed
bloud of their owne, more often the victim of their devotion was a cat. Isobel Young, a witch tried in 1629, stated that for forty years she had
been in use to take a quick ox, with a cat, and a good quanity of salt, and to burie the ox and cat quick to the salt in a deep hole as a sacrifice to the devil. When sorcerers were molested by the Devil, they found that the sacrifice of a live cat was often the only way of ridding themselves of his presence.
Sorcerers sometimes killed their cats not directly for the benefit of the Devil, but in order to execute the evil they wished on others. Usually live cat familiars were used for this purpose, but there were occasions when a dead cat was more useful to the sorcerer than a live one. For instance, the "Dead Man's Candle" was made "...with the grease and the fat of a black Tom-Cat." Such a candle, the wick of which consisted of a dead man's hair, was placed between the fingers of a "Hand of Glory" - the right hand of an executed murderer severed from the wrist during an eclipse of the moon. This candle, it was believed, had the power of paralysing the faculties of anyone on whom its light fell.
A cat ritual, known as the Taigheirm, practiced in parts of Scotland until the end of the eighteenth century, had to be the most atrocious ceremonies in which animals have ever been used.
Cats were believed to have second sight, a reputation from their ability to see in the dark. In Scotland it was believed by many people that cats could also acquire second sight artificially, by tearing out and eating the eyeballs of corpses. After such an incident, the first person over whom the cat jumped would be struck with blindness. Any cat that entered a room with a corpse had to be destroyed in order to avoid this danger, as well as that of vampirism. Scots highly valued second sight and some who were born without it were determined to obtain it for themselves. Because it was believed that this faculty could be wrested from feline nature by mass torture and sacrifice of cats, the Taigheirn came into being.
The word "Taigheirm"" has a double meaning for, according to the way it is pronounced, it means either "an armory" or "the cry of cats." The two meanings are closely associated, since the shrieks of tortured cats were virtually the weapons used to overcome the resistance that spirits offered to human demands.
Those who participated in the Taigheirm wore black clothing; the cats that were sacrificed had to be black, and the rite commenced in the darkness of midnight between a Friday and a Saturday. The ceremony lasted four days and nights, during which period the operator fasted.
The cats were first dedicated to the Devil, and since anguish was supposed to put them in a magico-sympathetic condition, they all had to be slowly tortured. The moment its pathetic howling ceased in death, another cat immediately took its place. It was essential, in this effort to control hell, that there be no break in continuity.
If the sacrificer was able to keep the ritual going for longer than four days and nights without getting too exhausted, it was worth his while to do so. The gift of second sight was the usual compensation and when granted, was retained by the celebrant until his death.
Cats were further victimized in their use as scapegoats. Having a well established reputation for actual and supernatural evil, they were often made to carry the burden and suffer the punishment of sins which belonged to humans.
In ancient Egypt, when a woman was drowned for the penalty for adultery, a cat had to lose its life, too. There is also a case on record of a French woman who was condemned to death for murder. She was burnt over a slow fire in an iron cage accompanied by fourteen innocent cats. It seems that when a woman committed a crime, the punishment was often divided out between her and a cat as if the animal had somehow participated in the sin.
One of the most blatant examples of a cat's being used as a scapegoat was the Shrovetide custom of whipping a cat to death. This seems to have been an especially popular practice in Shropshire village of Albrighton. An inn sign commemorated it with the couplet:
The finest pastime that is under the sun
Is whipping the cat at Albrighton.
It was at the season of confession and absolution of human sin that was customary to beat a cat to death. It is not so many years ago that on every second Wednesday in Lent, Flemish people hurled a cat down from the top of a tower at Ypres. It is said that black cats disappear every Friday, because it reminds them of Good Friday. Presumably, this was the day when cats suffered most from Christians' guilty feelings about the Crucifixion.
At the end of the eighteenth century, it was still a Scottish form of recreation to hang up a cat in a bottle or barrel which was half filled with soot. Horsemen would ride under the vessel and strike the end of it until a hole appeared. The frantic cat would then spring out, covered with soot. This caused great amusement all around. The phrase
not room to swing a cat in was derived from a similar form of torment, in which a cat would be held by its tail and swung round as a mark for so called sportsmen.
In the fifteenth century, when fear of witchcraft became a mania, the cat emerged as a symbol of evil. When Pope Innocent VIII finally legalized the persecution of witches, thousands of women were tortured and burnt at the stake simply because it was known that they had a cat. Vindictiveness became respectable; the massacre of witches and cats was considered to be the casting out of evil spirits and orgies of cat sacrifices were carried out in the name of religion.
In England, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I, a wickerwork dummy of the Pope was filled with live cats, carried with mock solemnity through the streets and flung into a huge bonfire. Protestants declared the cats' shrieks to be "the language of the devils within the body of the Holy Father."
In Roman Catholic France, baskets of live cats were annually burnt on St. John's Day in hilltop bonfires in the presence of the local mayor. This rite was still practiced at the end of the seventeenth century.
A hundred years later, a similar custom was still observed at Metz. Moncrif described in his
Lettre sur les chats:
Every year a festival is held at Metz which is a disgrace to human nature. The city fathers go in solemn process into the main square, where a number of cats are exhibited in a cage. This is hung over a bonfire which is then set alight with great ceremony. When they hear the frightful shrieks of the cats, the people believe that they are once more torturing an old witch who, it is said, once turned herself into a cat when she was about to be burned.
Even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, this barbaric practice took place in Picardy. At Hirson, on the first Sunday of Lent, they celebrated what was known as the
bihourdi. Lanterns and torches were carried through the village streets and has been described how:
...at a given signal, the inhabitants each piled their share of the kindling round a stake set up in the middle of the village, after which they danced round it, the youths firing off their guns while the fiddlers played. On the top of the 'bihourdi' there was fastened a cat which ended by falling down into the flames.
It was explained that the essential elements of this rite were a bonfire and a roasted cat.
Thus the vicious circle seems to be complete. The "blackness" of the cat was responsible for its gradually being drawn full circle into the avenging holocaust.
