Lore of the Cat: The Mother and The Seed ~ Pawprints and Purrs, Inc.

"Few animals exhibit more maternal tenderness, or show a greater love for their offspring, than the cat." ~ Rev. W. Bingley

The White Cat Continued
The Mother: Cats, generally speaking, have a strong maternal instinct and appear proud and happy with a litter of kittens. They lie contentedly suckling and purring with pleasure, and will protect their bright-eyed balls of fluff with great courage. A Hindu sect of southern India believes in what is known as the "cat doctrine," which is contrasted with the "monkey doctrine" found in northern India. These doctrines are based on the natural habits of the animals with their young. Adherents to the cat doctrine believe in "salvation through grace," and are taught that God saves man as a cat takes up its kitten in its mouth without consideration of the free will of its young. The teaching of the monkey doctrine is that man, in order to be saved, must embrace God as a baby monkey does its mother: the doctrine of "salvation by works."

Egyptian amulets consisting of cat families were very popular. Faience cats with blue and green glazes support an avalanche of kittens. The mother often sits hunched up with kittens perched on her head, tumbling down her back, squatting on her flexed forepaws, peeping out from between her legs, and there may be suckling kittens tucked away underneath her. Some have the mother extending a paw and resting it on the head of a kitten crouching in front of her. Bronze cat families tend to be more statuesque. The mother usually sits perfectly poised, with four kittens sitting in an orderly manner at her feet. Whereas the homely faience groups have a strong human appeal, the stylized bronze families inspire reverence for the quality of motherhood. Some bronzes are inscribed with an invocation to Bastet as a mother goddess.

Cat family amulets were specially popular in Egypt among young married couples. Newlyweds would decide how many children they wanted, then find a cat amulet with the appropriate number of kittens. The wife would either wear this symbol of motherhood suspended from a cord round her neck, or would hang it on a wall in her house or nearby temple. She regularly prayed to the mother cat, as a representative of Bastet, the cat goddess, asking to be sent the same number of babies as she had kittens.

Cats are very fertile animals, and queens are exceptionally highly sexed. When in season, the female rolls about on her back and yowls for hours until all the toms in the neighborhood have formed a circle around her. She will then satisfy each of them in turn.

Bastet became associated with all the mother goddesses - those personifications of female productivity. She was identified with Isis as Mother Nature and parent of all living creatures of the earth, sea, and air; at Thebes, she was worshipped as the World Mother, Mut, whose temple was approached through a magnificent avenue of sphinxes. Some texts inscribed on the walls of the temple of Bubastis refer to Bastet as mother of some of the pharaohs. When the temple was first built, in the sixth dynasty, it was written of the reigning pharoah that his mother, Bastet, has nourished him. Mut was queen of the gods and Egyptian queens wore her symbol, a vulture, on their crowns to represent their royal motherhood. Where Bastet was worshipped as Mut, her cat head was replaced by that of a vulture.

Although Bastet was worshipped as the feminine principle of nature, later periods of Egyptian history celebrated her as a goddess of fertility and generative power. The cat goddess was the female counterpart of Prah, the sun god and ancient "giver of life" whose rays produced fecundity in nature.

Bastet and Isis, like the Greek Demeter and the Celtic Cerridwen, were earth goddesses who gave birth to the spirit of corn, and all four deities took the form of a cat. In New Guinea, where yams were a staple food, the ritual game of cat's cradle was played to promote the growth of crops. Everyone joined in, the children imitating the adults, and when the cat's cradles had been completed, the strings were used for tying up the yam stalks. Pieces of these cat's cradle strings were hung on the first few sticks, or people just scattered them carelessly over their gardens. The purpose of the rite was always the same, for it was intended to ensure, by sympathetic magic, that the yam leaves spead, and that their stalks intertwined to the best advantage.

As a goddess of the fields, Bastet was also indentified with the Nordic Freya, a sun goddess of fruitfulness and love. Freya, who travelled through the country in a chariot drawn by a pair of cats, caused the seeds to swell and sprout. She blessed and gave special protection to the harvests of those farmers who put milk in their cornfields for her divine cats.

Freya blessed all lovers, and Friday (Freya's Day) was the most auspicious day for weddings. Cats are still believed to foretell whether or not a marriage will take place, and their appearance on wedding days is still considered to be auspicious.

Egyptian cat family amulets were not only believed to promote fertility, but also to give protection to pregnant women and to those children already born to them. Bastet excerised a special influence over the birth chamber. It is not known exactly what such goddesses did. Some acted as midwives and others as nurses, but many seem only to have presided. Bastet was often depicted near a couch in a lying-in chamber, and her presence was obviously considered important to both mother and child.

In her identification with Hathor, the cow goddess, Bastet established herself as a great nourisher, for it was the white moon cat, like the white moon cow, who gave and sustained vegetable life, nourishing the crops with her fructifying rain.

During periods of drought, primitive people resorted to magic as a means of producing the rain so essential to their lives. Cats have been widely used as rainmakers. In southern Celebes rain was ritually produced by tying a cat into a sedan chair and carrying it three times round a parched field. It would be drenched with water trained on it from bamboo squirts, and when it mewed the natives chanted, O Lord, let rain fall on us.

Cats were also used in a Malayan rainmaking ritual. A woman first placed an inverted earthenware pan on her head, then set it on the ground, filled it with water and bathed a cat in it till it nearly drowned. Similarly, in Java, cats were bathed or ducked into pools in order to produce rain, and those taking part were carried in procession to music.

A black cat was used as a rainmaker in Sumatra. The color of the cat was significant, for it was believed that, by sympathetic magic, the blackness would darken the sky with rain clouds. Village women waded into the river, taking with them a black cat which they threw in and forced to swim. Eventually the beraggled animal was allowed to escape to the bank, but it was pursued all the way by splashing women. At Kota Gadang, there was a stone believed to have the power to draw water down from the sky, simply because it resembled a cat. During periods of drought, this cat stone was smeared with the blood of fowls, then rubbed and perfumed with incense while a charm was uttered over it.

In many parts of the British Isles, cats are still believed to foretell rain - when they sneeze or wash themselves behind their ears with a wet forepaw.

The Egyptian cow goddess not only nourished the living, but the souls of the dead. In the underworld, Hathor leaned out of the trunk of a sycamore tree and offered food and drink to passing ghosts. Isis, with whom Bastet was also identified, was the loving, protecting mother of the dead.

The Seed: The tom cat is an animal of considerable sexual activity. The phallic aspect of the cat is emphasized in its identification with the fiery asp of the sun. It was believed that penetrating rays of the solar cat produced fecundity in nature. The solar cat is both father and son, for it enters into the earth and fertilizes it, then emerges from the ground as the spirit of corn.

When Osiris was identified with Ra, the solar cat, he was worshipped as the deity of vegetation. A bronze group in the Cairo Museum shows Osiris enthroned between Nefertem (Bastet's son) and Horus the child, with a female cat lying at his feet and a worshipper kneeling in front of them. It has, however, been suggested that it was Sekhmet who originally occupied this throne. Osiris personified the corn spirit and was commonly known as "The Seed." In the temple of Isis at Philae, the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks of corn springing from it, which are being watered by a priest with a pitcher. The myth of Osiris tells how the god was murdered by Set, the devil, and pieces of his body were scattered throughout Egypt. In an annual harvest ritual commemorating the death, dismemberment and resuscitation of Osiris, he was often represented by a cat - an animal with which he was closely associated through his daughter, Bastet, and which seems to have been suited in many ways to incarnate the spirit of the corn.

In European vegetation rites Osiris, the corn spirit, and the cat were one. Sometimes an imaginary cat was used (the close of the harvest being known as "killing the cat"), but more often a live cat was placed in the last bundle of corn, where it was thrashed and struck dead by the flails. The body of the animal would be cooked and eaten sacramentally by the harvesters as the body of the murdered god.

In the Vosges mountains the crop was known as "the cat," and was described as fat or lean according to whether the corn was abundant or poor. The man who cut the last handful of grain was regarded as the "catcher of the corn cat," and was presented with a bouquet or a small fir tree decorated with ribbons. In Scotland, a handful of reaped grain or straw, which has been laid on the ground without being bound into a sheaf, is known as a "cat."

In Dauphine, when reaping began, a cat was decorated with ribbons, flowers and ears of corn, and named "the cat of the ball skin." If a reaper was injured, the cat was persuaded to lick his wounds. When the reaping was over, the workers danced and made merry round the corn cat, until the girls would ritually strip it of all its decorations. In Silesia, the reaper who cut the last corn was the "tom cat," while a second reaper was called the "she cat," and both were enveloped in ryestalks and provided with long plaited tails. It was then their privilege to chase and beat everyone in sight.

In Amiens a cat was sacrifieced to ensure the welfare of the crops the following year. When the harvest was about to be completed, the word went round the fields, They are going to kill the cat, and the reapers repaired to the farmyard and watched a cat put to death. In Bohemia, a cat was sometimes killed and buried in a cornfield to prevent evil spirits damaging the next year's crops.

According to the Chinese book Book of Rites, the Li Ki, Chinese farmers worshipped a cat god called Li Shou. After the crop had been gathered in, peasants indulged in an orgiastic harvest festival and made sacrifices to the cats who had devoured rats and mice which would otherwise have injured the crops. Osiris was also a protector of the corn as well as a personification of it.

The phallic aspect of the cat was powerfully emphasized in a polytheistic Egyptian bronze which appeared in a sale some years ago. This figure had a winged body which stood on a crocodile, and its emblems included those of Osiris and Bastet. Distinguishing it from all other such figures was a cat's head in the place of sexual organs.

During one of the earliest stages of cultural development, when people worshiped earth and lunar deities, the moon was thought of as masculine. Women believed that if they exposed themselves to moon beams, they were liable to become pregnant. Khensu, Bastet's moon son, was said to make women fruitful and to casue the human seed to grown in the womb.

The surpreme deity of the Mochica people, who lived along the northern coast of Peru, was a god called Ai apeac, a feline being developed from an ancient cat god. Ai apeac was usually portrayed as a wrinkled faced old man with long fangs and cat's whiskers. Mochica pottery vessels show his human and feline faces back to back. Ai apeac was a farmer, hunter, fisherman and physician. In particular, he presided over human copulation, ensuring that it bore fruit.

An Egyptian papyrus states that when the moon is up "couplings and conceptions abound." Certainly cats appear to be the most passionate at the full moon. Osiris and Bastet were both lunar deities - the cat, as their representative, was held responsible for human fecundity as well as for the fruitfulness of the earth.

Perhaps the cat's association for the belief that black cats turning up at weddings are omens of good luck. There is a Scottish superstition that, if a tom cat ejects semen while jumping over food, any woman who unknowingly eats it will conceive kittens. Hence perhaps, the expression, I nearly had kittens! In 1654, a Scottish court tried the case of a woman who confessed that she had "cats in her bellie," and had made unsuccessful attempts to procure abortion. It appeared, in those days, that pregnant women in pain were often worried by witches who assured them that their misery was due to having kittens in their wombs, and that this condition could be remedied by use of magical potions.