Legendary Felines

For centuries cats have been part of mankind. They have become interwoven in humans' history, literature, folklore, religious beliefs, and art. Numerous legends have arisen from the involvment of cats through the ages - both factual and mythical.

Abuherrira's Cat:
A pet cat belonging to one of the companions of the prophet Mohammed, Abu Huraira. Such was his love of cats that he was known as "the father of the little cat." In Goethe's poem "The Favoured Beasts," his favorite cat was one of the four animals admitted to the Moslem paradise. Abuherrira's Cat, too, here purrs around his master blest, for holy must the beast appear the Prophet has caressed.

Aelwaer's Cat:
Saint Aelwaer was a satirical image meant to display attributes that were the exact opposite of the qualities of the Virgin Mary. She was described as a "demonic anti-saint, patroness of all tribulation." In a Dutch woodcut of 1550 she is portrayed riding a donkey, with a magpie on her head symbolizing immorality, a pig under her left arm symbolizing gluttony, and a cat held aloft on her right hand symbolizing the forces of evil. The cat is raised high like an emblem or ensign that is clearly meant to advertise the fact that this figure is in league with the devil, for this was the period when Europe was brutally persecuting all felines as familiars of witches and creatures of wickedness.

Bastet:
Bastet was a sacred cat goddess of ancient Egypt. Her name means literally "She of the City of Bast."

Cats played several roles in the ancient civilization of Egypt. They were domesticated for many centuries before the cult of the friendly, protective goddess Bastet started to grow and flourish. An earlier feline goddess had been far from friendly. She was a fierce, lion-headed, war goddess named Sekhmet. Blood-thirsty and terrifying, she bore no relation to the increasingly important, small domesticated cat that ridded Egypt of its detested rodent pests. With the rise of the valued companion cat, something had to change: a new, more helpful goddess was needed. Around 1500 BC, Sekhmet was joined by the new goddess Bastet and they were seen as a contrasting pair. Together they represented the two faces of the sun: Sekhmet was the cruel, searing heat of the destructive sun, while Bastet was the warming, life-giving aspect of the sun.

Bubastis, a town about 37 miles (60 km) northeast of Cairo, became the headquarters of the "Cult of the Cat." A huge temple was built there to honor Bastet. Sadly, little of this red granite temple survives today.

Beckoning Cat:
The image of the cat with one paw raised in a beckoning movement is a popular Japanese talisman or lucky charm. It is known as the maneki-neko. If worn on the body it brings good luck and wards off bad luck. Images of Beckoning Cats tied around the waist are said to protect the wearer from pain and ill health. If placed at the entrance of a building, a Beckoning Cat made of clay, wood, or papier-mache protects the occupants in a similar way. In the absence of an image, even the written symbol for the cat is alone considered to have protective value. As a protective talisman, it appears in many forms, but always with the right arm raised.

The legend of the Beckoning Cat: The temple at Gotoku-ji was a very poor one. Although the monks were starving, they shared their food with their pet cat. One day the cat was sitting by the side of the road outside the temple, when a group of Samurai rode up. The cat beckoned to them and they followed it to the temple. Once inside, heavy rains forced them to shelter there and they passed the time learning about the Buddhist philosophy. Later, one of the Samurai returned to take religious instruction and eventually endowed the temple with a large estate. His family were buried there and near their tombs a small cat shrine was built to the memory of the Beckoning Cat.

Today the temple has been swallowed up by the western suburbs of Tokyo, but it remains a popular center for those who wish to pray for their cats. The cat shrine is regularly festooned with offerings.

Black Cat:
In folklore, the all black cat plays a special role. In earlier centuries, when cats were being severely persecuted by the Christian Church, it was always black cats that were singled out for the most savage treatment. All cats were considered to be wicked, but all black ones were considered to be especially fiendish. This was because they were strongly associated with the Devil - the Prince of Darkness - who was believed to borrow the coat of a black cat when he wanted to torment his victims. When the Church organized annual burning cats alive ceremonies on the day of the Feast of St. John, the most depraved of "Satan's Felines" were strongly preferred and all black cats were eagerly sought out for the flames.

The fear of all black cats as agents of the Devil led to a common superstition that has survived to the present day. In Britain it is said that if a black cat crosses your path, this will bring good luck. This is based upon the idea that evil has passed you by. It has come close but has not harmed you; hence you have enjoyed a moment of good luck. In North America a different superstition exists. There, a black cat signifies bad luck, on the principle that it is an evil spirit and therefore dangerous merely by its presence.

Cactus Cat:
This was one of the "Fearsome Critters" invented in the nineteenth century by the frontiersmen of the American West. It was an amusement of theirs to pass the time telling tall tales. These developed into a whole cycle of bizarre animals. The Cactus Cat had thorny hair, expecially exaggerated on the ears. Its tail was branched. On its front legs there were savage, sharp blades of bone, with which it slashed the giant cacti to get at the sap within. The sap fermented, the cat then drank it, quickly became intoxicated, and then it ran off uttering horrible screams.

Cait Sith:
According to folklore of the Scottish Highlands, there exists a fairy cat called the Cait Sith. It is larger than a domestic cat, black in color and with a white spot on its breast. It has an arched back and erect bristles in its fur. Unlike other fairy creatures, this one is believed to have a solid physical presence. It is thought to be a transformed witch.

In reality, the Cait Sith is almost certainly what is now known as the Kellas Cat - a large black hybrid between feral domestic cats and Scottish Wildcats. Specimens of these impressive hybrids were examined scientifically in the 1980s.

Castle Cat:
Many British castles still house resident cats whose official duties include reducing the rodent population. However, since most of these great buildings have become tourist attractions, complete with restaurants, snack bars, and picnic areas, their feline occupants have enjoyed unexpected softening of their lifestyle. Sumo, the huge ginger and white tomcat who patrols the castle grounds and 35 acres of gardens at Hever Castle, where Henry VIII so ardently courted the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, has become so well fed that the waterfowl around the castle moat completely ignore his approach.

Cat-a-Mountain:
Marco Polo reported the existence of a predatory cat in the Far East with the body of a leopard but with a strange skin that stretched out when it hunted, enabling it to fly in the pursuit of its prey. The Cat-a-Mountain appears to be an imaginative amalgam of a big cat and a large bat, but later authors frequently used it simply as a name for a wild cat. By the seventeenth century some authors had abbreviated it to the Catamount (Mountain Lion or Puma).

Catarina:
Edgar Allen Poe's pet cat was the inspiration for his story The Black Cat. When Poe's wife was dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1846, the couple were destitute. A visitor found the stricken woman lying on a bed of straw "wrapped in her husband's great coat with a large tortoiseshell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth."

Cat Art:
Many great artists have included cats in their work. Some have made them the main subject of particular paintings or sculptures. The include Leonardo da Vinci, Boucher, Watteau, Delacroix, Gericault, Rebens, Monet, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Courbet, Renoir, Vuillard, Bonnard, Gauguin, Franz Marc, Marie Laurencin, Paul Klee, Picasso, Giacometti, Balthus, Lenor Fini, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhokm, and David Hockney.

Cat Organ:
In the days when cruelty to cats was an accepted form of public entertainment, there were several loathsome inventions to facilitate this callous pastime. One was the cat organ. This consisted of an instrument designed to make music from the terrified cries of group of captive cats.

The cats were separately confined in narrow cases, in which they could not stir. Their tails protruded from the top and were tied to cords attached to the keyboard of the organ. Pressure on the keys caused the cords to raise and the tails of the cats were pulled to make them mew.

Sadly for the cats concerned, the cat organ became a popular spectacle and improvements were made. The cords attached to their tails were replaced by fixed spikes at the end of the keys, which prodded the poor cats, causing them to mew piteously. This form of feline torture remained in vogue for at least a hundred years, but eventually disappeared and was replaced by strange feline musical performances. The difference was that the pain inflicted on the cats was hidden, so that onlookers could enjoy the strange "concerts" without being confronted by the obvious animal torture of the infamous cat organ.

Cat Racing:
Competitive cat racing seems highly improbable as a serious sport, but in the nineteenth century it took place annually in Belguim. It does not reflect well on the Belgian attitude toward their feline friends at the time. In the first major cat book ever published (1889), Harrison Weir quotes a publication, The Pictorial Times of June 16, 1860:

Cat racing is a sport which stands high in popular favour. In one of the suburbs of Liege it is an affair of annual observance during carnival time... The cats are tied up in sacks, and as soon as the clock strikes the solemn hour of midnight the sacks are unfastened, the cats set loose and the race begins. The winner is the cat which first reaches home, and the prize awarded to its owner is sometimes a ham, sometimes a silver spoon. On the occasion of the last competition the prize was won by a blind cat.
Cat racing resurfaced briefly in England in the 1930s. In a brave bid to imitate greyhound racing, a cat racetrack was opened in 1936 at Portisham in Dorset. The competing cats were set to chase an electric mouse, which they pursued down a 220 yard (202 metre) course. Another display of organized cat racing was apparently staged in Kent in 1949. Not surprisingly, both enterprises were dismal failures and serious cat racing has never been attempted again.

Cat's Only Trick:
The "cat's only trick" is to climb a tree when in trouble. An early fable about the cat and the fox tells the story of how, one day, the fox was explaining to the cat that it had a hundred different tricks with which it could survive. The cat replied that it had only one trick. Just then a pack of hounds appeared and the cat quickly climbed a tree to safety. The fox went through its repertoire of a hundred tricks, one by one, but in the end was caught and killed by the hounds. The story is well known all over Europe from Greece to Lapland.

Cat's Paw:
A sixteenth fable in which a cunning monkey, wishing to take some roasted chestnuts out of a hot fire, does so by using the paw of a friendly cat. As a result, the term "cat's paw" was applied to anyone who was a tool of another.

Cat that Walked by Himself:
The Cat that Walked by Himself is the title of a tale by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) in his Just So Stories (1902) in which he creates a fable to epitomize the personality of the domestic cat - part tame companion and part independent spirit. After the dog, the horse, and the cow have agreed to become domesticated, the cat holds out for the wild life. But then it finally appears at the human den and says, "I am not a friend, and I am not a servant, I am the cat who walks by himself and I wish to come into your cave." Some hard bargaining follows in which the cat promises to catch mice "for always and always and always; but still I am the cat that walks by himself."

Ccoa:
Ccoa is an evil cat demon, greatly feared by the South American Indians of the Quechua tribe in Peru. He is about three feet (a metre) long, with dark stripes down the length of his body. He has a large head with glowing eyes. He controls hail and lightning, with which he ruins crops and destroys people. He has to be appeased by regular offerings to prevent him causing havoc.

Cheshire Cat:
In Chapter Six of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), a large cat is encountered grinning from ear to ear. When Alice asks why he is grinning, the only answer she gets is "It's a Cheshire cat and that's why." There is no explanation why cats from that particular English county should be prone to smiling. A clue comes with the final disappearance of the cat, when it slowly vanishes, starting with the end of its tail and ending with the broad grin, which remains some time after the rest of the animal is gone. It is this disembodied grin that some authorities claim explains the source of Carroll's image. There used to be a special kind of Cheshire cheese that had a grinning feline face marked on one end. The rest of the cat was omitted by the cheesemaker, giving the impression that all but the grin had vanished.

Carroll may have seen these cheeses, but he may have taken his reference from an even earlier source. The Cheshire cheesemakers saw fit to add a grinning cat to their product because it was an abbreviation of "grin like a Cheshire Caterling," which was current about five centuries ago. Caterling was a lethal swordsman in the time of Richard III, a protector of the Royal Forests who was renowned for his evil grin, a grin that became even broader when he was despatching a poacher with his trusty sword. Caterling soon became shortened to "Cat" and anyone adopting a particularly wicked grin was said to be "grinning like a Cheshire Cat." Carroll probably knew of this phrase, but because he refers to the grin outlasting the rest of body, it is more than likely his real influence was the cheese rather than the swordsman.

In reality, the true origin of the saying is much older; it was merely borrowed and made famous by him.

Convent Cats:
In Cyprus, the Byzantine convent of St. Nicholas of the Cats today houses only five nuns but has a feline population of over 200 cats. Although the animals are traditionally tended by the nuns, most of them live semiwild. The convent is situated near the British military base at Akrotiri, on the south coast of Cyprus, not far from Limassol. The feline community there is an ancient one, dating back to the fourth century. At the beginning of that century, there had been a disastrous drought on the island, which had decimated human population. When St. Helena of the Cross, the mother of King Constantine the Great, visited the island in AD 328, she became aware of this problem and persuaded her son to take action. He appointed Calocaeus, the chief of his camel corps, as Governor of the island. Calocaeus arranged for a special group of serpent killing cats to be brought there from Egypt. The cats were taken to the Akrotiri peninsula, which is still known today as the Cape of Cats (Cape Gata). There they were cared for by the monks of the then active monastery of St. Nichols. According to legend there were soon over a thousand of these snake hunting felines.

The cats apparently carried out their duties efficiently and survived well over the centuries. A Venetian monk, who visited the island in 1484, recorded that the monks summoned the cats to eat by tolling a bell. After their meal, they then trooped back outside again to continue their ceaseless battle with the venomous serpents.

A century later, in 1580, Father Stephen Lusignan wrote that Basilian monks who originally occupied St. Nicholas of the Cats were presented with all the surrounding land, on one condition, namely that they should be under obligation to maintain always at least a hundred cats and to provide some food for them every day in the morning and evening at the ringing of a bell, to the intent that should not eat nothing but venom and that for the rest of the day and night they should go a-hunting for those serpents.

With the Turkish conquest of Cyprus in the sixteenth century, the monastery fell into ruins and many of the cats died of starvation. After a period of abandonment, the present Greek Orthodox convent was established to give new life to St. Nicholas of the Cats, with nuns replacing the monks in the role of cat protectors and providing a continuing sanctuary for the descendants of the feline survivors of the ancient monastery.

Despite the best efforts of the nuns, however, by 1994 the cat population was in poor condition. Many of them were diseased and others were emaciated and suffering from malnutrition. The colony was breeding so fast that it was impossible for the Sisters to keep up an adequate food supply. Tourists visiting the convent were horrified by the condition of the cats. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) was called in to help. They caught the cats, medicated them, treated their wounds, spayed 63 females, and then released them all again. Regular food supplies were also arranged and at last the famous Convent Cats of Cyprus were healthy and secure for the future.