Lore of the Cat: The Virgin and The Talisman ~ Pawprints and Purrs

"It is said that a cat is the only domestic animal that can look a person in the eye without flinching. Perhaps this is because cats consider themselves to be our equals - or even our superiors." ~ John Richard Stephens, Author

The White Cat Continued
The Virgin: The cat is the cleanest of all animals. It spends hours grooming itself and its kittens with its tongue. Any suggestion of contamination by human beings is followed by urgent and strenuous licking.

The only way in which a cat can possibly be thought of as virgin is if the word is used in the broadest sense, for although it is usually taken as referring to a person innocent of sexual intercourse, more deeply it means somone who is unpossessed and has remained unsullied by sex. The Immaculate Womb of the Virgin Mary has been thought of as a abyss in which nothing leaves a stain. Although it gives birth to all things, as the queen of heaven gives birth to the sun, moon and stars, it remains eternally virgin and spotless. The fertility goddesses were always considered to be virgin, for the Great Mother was a personification of the womb of nature. To this goddess, the male was an anonymous fertilizing agent, and the temple prostitutes, who were priestesses of the Great Mother, although prepared to give themselves to any man, belonged to no man.

In spite of the fact that Bastet was a goddess of fecundity, love, maternity and of the birth chamber, she was also, like the Greek cat goddess, Artemis, worshiped as a virgin. The cat moon was the purifier of the night, cleansing it of dark shadows and thieving mice. The emblem of Mut, the mother goddess with whom Bastet has often been identified, was a vulture. But the vulture was a symbol of virgin motherhood, for it was popularly believed to be parthenogenetic.

When the tide of Christianity swept all before it, the Madonna took possession of the sanctuaries of the old fertility goddesses. Bastet, Isis, Demeter, Cerridwen (all of whom had taken cat form), were the virgin mothers of the spirit of corn, and the Virgin Mary who superseded them appeared as the Divine Mother of the "Bread of Life."

Baroccio's painting of the "Madonna of the Cat," shows a ginger and white cat being tantalized by the young John the Baptist who has a bird in his hand. Several artists have included a cat in their Holy Families, probably as a reference to the Christian legend of a cat who gave birth in the Bethlehem stable at the same moment as did the Virgin Mary. Leonardo da Vinci produced numerous sketches of the Virgin and Child with a kitten, and a cat appears in many paintings of the birth of the Virgin and of the Annunciation.

Cats, as we know them, are essentially home loving animals. Through-out the winter, they are apt to take possession of the hearth. In Rome the guardian of the hearth and home was Vesta, a virgin goddess whose priestesses, the famous vestal virgins, tended the sacred fire in a Roman sanctuary. A virgin always to be found on the hearth in folk tales is Cinderella (or whichever variant of her name is used), and she is closely associated with the cat. The tale exists in many different languages and, although it varies considerably in detail, is basically always about a good natured girl whose beauty is hidden and who is ill treated by her family. Eventually her beauty is revealed, her goodness is rewarded, and she makes a marriage which is the envy of all. The oldest version of the tale is Italian, and in this the despised stepdaughter who lives on the kitchen-hearth is know as "Cinders-Cat."

In the English fairy tale called "Catskin," the unwanted maiden warmed herself at the kitchen fire, covered from head to foot in a catskin. Although she spent her days sweeping cinders from the hearth and cleaning pigsties, when the king gave a ball, she managed to slip out and appeared among the nobility as a shining beauty. A handsome young nobleman fell in love with her and, realizing that, although cat without, she was queen within, he married her.

In a Danish version, a cat asks the ill treated heroine for a saucer of milk and, in spite of having been thrashed twice before for doing so, she feeds the animal for the third time. The cat then swells and pushes off its skin, which the maiden uses as a cloak. Later the cat provides her with beautiful dresses, and finally is itself transformed into a handsome prince who is a brother of the king and soon marries the heroine. There is an Irish version which the fairy godmother is a cat; and an old tale from Brittany, which the cat provides the ragged girl with beautiful dresses and is eventually transformed into a prince.

The most popular version of the story, and the one with which we are all familiar, bears the English title, "Cinderella," and is based on Perrault's "Cendrillon." In this version there is no mention of a cat - only of a virgin on the hearth and of mice and rats. In Sicily, the cat which keeps the house free of vermin, is sacred to St. Martha, the patroness of domestic virtue. Another account of this story is called "The Hearth Cat."

When the virgin cat goddess is darkened by smoke and ashes, she reminds one of those black Madonnas that are to be seen in French and Italian churches.

Some people have believed that after death, the souls of "old maids" take possession of black cats. In the thirteenth century, cats were the only animals allowed in English nunneries, for the Ancren Riwle of 1205 instructed: Ye, my dear sisters, shall have no beasts but a cat.

Symbolically, the virgin is an independent woman. Cats are famed for their independence, which distinguishes them from all other tamed animals. Although they have associated with human beings for centuries, they are still as self-possessed as they were in the jungle. Unlike much larger and stronger animals, they have never become servile, but remain indifferent both to man's will and his favors. They accept the comforts but reject the bondage of domesticity. They hunt and wander alone, not in packs, and are not gregarious. Their solitariness and detachment have been immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in The Cat that Walked by Itself. In Chinese Buddhism, the cat appears as a symbol of self-possession.

At various times the independence of the cat has led to its official use as a symbol of human liberty. The Roman goddess of liberty has a cat lying at her feet. Roman legions setting out to defend their freedom had cats blazoned on their banners: one marched with a green cat on a silver background and an alpine troop bore a cat with one eye and one ear.

In Switzerland the cat was also a symbol of liberty; and the Dutch, who had struggled so long to gain independence, chose the cat as their ensign. The first French Republic placed the cat at the side of their statue of liberty and added it to its shield of arms. Prud'hon, the Republican artist, painted an allegorical picture of the French Constitution which now hangs in Dijon. In the painting, Liberty holds a broken chain and a pike surmounted by a Phrygian cap, while at her feet sits a large, handsome cat. Many artists copied Prud'hon in depicting Liberty with a broken chain and a cat, but the reign of the cat as a symbol of French liberty, ended with that of the Republic.

The cat, through its independence, also became associated with the law, as an instrument designed to liberate the oppressed. St. Yves, the patron saint of lawyers who was represented giving alms to the poor, sometimes was shown with a cat. The Egyptian figures of Bastet were often decorated with the "feather of Maat" who was the goddess of law and order. A magical text in the Book of the Dead states: O Bastet, who come forth from the sanctuary, I have not winked at injustice.

The Talisman: Cats protected Egyptian houses and farms from rodents and poisonous snakes. Egyptians had great faith in the cat's capacity to protect them, in both this world and the next, from natural and supernatural evil.

The Chinese believed that cats had the power to detect evil spirits and put them to flight. It was because of this reputed faculty based on the cat's ability to see in the dark, that a cat spirit was worshiped in some parts of China. In sixth century Japan, sacrifices were made to the "Guardian of the Manuscripts," a sacred cat whose responsibility was to guard papyrus rolls stored in temples against mice and rats. Russian peasants used to put a cat into a new baby's cradle to drive away evil spirits from the infant.

In Europe tri-colored cats were thought to have the power to protect households against destruction by fire. Many cats have been walled up in new buildings, allegedly as safeguards against catastrophe.

The tailisman is a magical image which has the power to avert or repel evil. Where the cat was believed to give powerful protection and to ward off unpleasantness of every kind, its image became widely used as a talisman when no living cat was available. Cats carved over Theban temples gave them protection. The Japanese used cat images to guard mortuary chambers against rats. A famous seventeenth century wood carving of a cat shows it sleeping among peonies over the door of a shrine in the temple of Nikko. This cat was credited with having driven all vermin from the temple.

Cats were widely used by the Chinese for protecting silkworms. When the season came for feeding the worms, silkworm farmers bought up all the cats they could find, believing their presence was in itself sufficient to keep off the rats. In the absence of live cats, they stuck pictures of "silkworm cats" on their walls, in belief that the image had the same power as a live cat to protect the worms.

They also used clay pictures of sitting cats with staring eyes to keep evil influences at bay. The pictures were placed on top of walls or beneath the eaves of houses, and the picture of a magic cat is still to be seen repelling demons from the roof of a rest house in Shanghai.

The cat amulet was more widely used in Egypt than in any other part of the world. People in all classes of society wore little pierced or ringed images of Bastet's cats suspended round their necks to safeguard them wherever they went.

Some amulets seem to have depended on the image alone to give protection, for the cat image was itself dynamic, whether standing or sitting as a goddess laden with her emblems, or enshrined, or combined with the god of fertility, or just being a mother surrounded by her young. To other cat amulets, the power of the word was added.

In Egypt the power of the word was considered to be very great. It was believed that a substantial bond existed between a man and his name, so that it was virtually a part of him. Primitive peoples have always been reluctant to disclose their names, for if their enemies knew them they could, by the use of magic, injure people through their names. The name was also regarded as expressing the nature of a thing, and the name of a deity was believed to be his manifestation and was treated with great veneration. Since kings and deities were focuses of power, their names inscribed on amulets added the power of royalty or divinity to that inherent in the image. Furthermore, power was contained not only in single words but also in rhythmic groups of words - hence magical formulae, spells and incantations. Spells often took the form of invocation of dieties who were chosen because of incidents in their own lives, as in the case of the spell to cure a scorpion sting, in which Bastet was invoked and reference made to her personal experience of a similar nature.

Cat amulets, the power of which has been strengthened by incriptions, include lion-headed goddesses inscribed with the name of Bastet, scarabs engraved with a cat combined with the name of Bastet, and cat families bearing an invocation to Bastet as a mother deity, which were used for protection of children. There is a talisman consisting of a seated cat wearing a collar of beads and inscribed with the magical formula: May Bastet, Lady of Ankh-taui, give protection. In all of these, the power of the image of the cat has been increased by the addition of the cat divinity's power.

The Egyptian talisman was also used to protect the dead. There were the sacred eye amulets (utchats) which put the deceased under the protection of the sun and moon, both of which were personified by the cat deity. Utchats full of cats, and small faience or bronze cat figures, guarded the deceased. Cat-headed ivory wands evoked the protection of the gods engraved upon them. Many amulets found on mummies were inscribed with words of power, and with spells which would prove useful to the deceased in the hereafter.