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“Cat on its brain”

Here’s an old British weather tidbit: “Cat on its brain, it’s going to rain.” This expression refers to a cat’s nap pose: curled up so the top of his head touches the floor. Assume that this is as scientific asthe numerous other bits of cat-related weather folklore.

The Nativity cat

cat, who ever since has had the M—for Mary, or Madonna — on the forehead.

Wake me for the funeral

Cats are generally well thought of in eastern Asia, yet there is an old story that casts the cat in a badlight. According to the story, when the funeral procession of the Buddha passed by, all the animals turned out for mourning—all except the cat, who slept placidly through the whole thing. For this reason the cat was not numbered among the creatures under the Buddha’s protection. In another version of the story, all the animals were called to the bedside of the dying Buddha, but the cat (naturally) was asleep. Still one more version: the dying Buddha stated that the ﬁrst twelve animals to reach his bedside would be given immortality, but the snoozing cat was not among them.

“Contemptible sneaks”

people who don’t want an animal entering (or leaving) a room with no sound at all. For us cat lovers, sneakiness is part of the total appeal of the cat.

English meets native

American girl who saved the life of the English settler John Smith, who was about to be executed by the girl’s father, a chief named Powhatan. Sometime before this incident, relations between the Native Americans and the Jamestown settlers had been warmer, and at some point the English had presented Powhatan with one of the domestic cats they had brought from England. Powhatan and the other Native Americans were intrigued by the cat, which resembled the American bobcats but was, of course, amazingly tame.

The high road to China

silk, and the Chinese eagerly brought the elegant rodent hunters back home. Among the Chinese of centuries ago, the cat became a symbol of peace and family serenity.

Run of the mosque

people of Europe began to think of cats as “those things that the wicked Muslims are so fond of.”

Muhammad the cat lover

tradition goes back centuries, recalling that dogs in the ancient Middle East were loathsome street scavengers, despised by humans. (You see this in the Bible, where dogs are always mentioned disparagingly.) However, Islam, was fond of cats and had a pet female cat named Muezza. According to legend, the cat was sleeping on the sleeve of his robe, and Muhammad cut off the sleeve rather than disturb the cat’s sleep.

The Celtic rite, revisited

fire while they screamed in agony. The ancient ritual persisted for centuries in some parts of Europe and was conducted by two very different groups. One were the “neo-pagans,” who existed within the Christian culture but were still pagans “on the inside,” conducting the old religion by night, out of sight of the church authorities. The other cat burners were, at times, the Christians themselves, who associated cats (especially black ones) with Satanism and witchcraft.

Cats and Crusaders

between the Muslims and the Christians, resulted in Christians learning about Muslim culture, including becoming aware of the Muslims’ love for cats. You might say that the Crusades planted the seeds of the idea that cats were associated with a “bad” religion (Islam).

That, coupled with the fact that the old pagan religions associated cats with goddesses like Bast, Isis and Artemis, shows you why the Christian Church sometimes took a dim view of cats. To the Christians of the Middle Ages, the cat appeared to be the mascot of the old religion (paganism, which was always threatening to resurface) and of the new rival religion (Islam).

In faraway Wales

We are fortunate to possess copies of laws mandated in the tenth century by Howel the Good, the ruler of Wales. Howel’s law code stated that a newborn kitten was worth one penny, and an adult cat (able to kill mice) was worth four pennies. If a cat was killed, the owner was recompensed four pennies. Just to let you know the relative value: a mature sheep or goat was also worth four pennies, while a goose or hen was worth only one penny. If a couple divorced and had only one cat between them, the husband got the cat, but if they had two cats, the wife got one, too.

Why did the Celts do it?

people, associated cats with fertility, and so a mass sacriﬁce of cats to the gods of fertility had a certain odd logic to it. We still have a lot to learn about the Celts.

In merry olde England

island was invaded by the Angles, the Germanic tribe that gradually turned Britannia into Angle-land, or England.

Cats versus ferrets

rodents and rabbits by burrowing into their prey’s hiding places. People in the ancient world often used them as rodent exterminators, but ferrets lost favor as cats became more popular—and for the obvious reason that people have never completely trusted ferrets. Families, especially those with small children, feared that ferrets would turn vicious and bite someone (which happened at times, and still does now). Ferrets are still around, but it was inevitable that they would be eclipsed by cats.

Cat in the afterlife

It’s always touching to look at the grave of a child, and certainly this is true of a very ancient grave-stone found in France. Dating from around A.D. 100 (when France was the Roman province of Gaul), the gravestone has a statue of a young boy named Laetus holding a cat in his arms.

The Roman goddess Liberty

Americans were not the ﬁrst people to have a Statue of Liberty. To the ancient Romans, Liberty was worshipped as a goddess. Appropriately, the goddess’s pet was the most freedom-loving animal, the cat. The goddess Liberty was often depicted holding a cup in one hand and a broken scepter in the other, with a cat lying at her feet.

Soldiers and cats?

Yes, the Roman armies that marched through and conquered much of Europe and northern Africa carried cats with them and kept them at their forts, which has been proven by archaeologists who have dug up cat remains. While Roman men in general liked dogs, cats were useful for keeping rodents out of the soldiers’ food supplies and from gnawing on bowstrings and other leather goods. The Roman troops apparently admired the cats as predators, and perhaps they saw themselves as cats, preying on the “barbarians” as cats preyed on the troublesome rodents.

Morphing to cattus Felis

The early Romans used felis to refer to the domestic cat, but in time the word cattus replaced it. When did the change occur? We can’t be certain, but we do have a clue, since we know that by the sixth century A.D., one unit of the Pretorian Guards (the emperor’s personal bodyguards) was known as the Catti, meaning “cats.” We can assume that these soldiers did not see anything negative—certainly nothing feminine—in applying the name “cats” to them selves.

Pet name “Kitten”

You might recall the adorable daughter nicknamed “Kitten” on the old TV sitcom Father Knows Best. Well, “Kitten” was around as a pet name for a girl long before television. Among ancient Romans, the Latin names Felicla and Felicula were popular among women, and both names mean “little cat” or “kitten.” There are tombstones with Felicla or Felicula carved in them, and some of the tombstones even have a ﬁgure of a cat carved into them. The names Catta and Cattula—both meaning “cat,” of course were also used for Roman women. And though they were more rare, the names Feliculus, Cattus and Cattius were also borne by some Roman men.

From ancient Pompeii to today

Some things never change. If you have a birdbath in your yard, you’ve no doubt seen your cat hungrily eye the birds in it and probably try to climb it. (A good birdbath is unclimbable, of course.) Archaeologists have dug up a similar scene from Pompeii, the Italian city famously destroyed by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius. A mosaic from the ruins of Pompeii, dating from about the year A.D. 79, shows a spotted cat eyeing three long-tailed birds in a bird-bath.

Roman tomcats

The ancient Romans have a well-deserved reputation for their lax sexual morals, which is evident in their literature. The dramatist Plautus (circa 251–184 B.C.) wrote numerous comedies, and some of them deal very bluntly with sexual themes. Some of his plays, written in Latin, use the term feles virginaria. Translated literally, this means “cat of the virgins,” but Plautus used a different meaning, “cat who preys on virgins”—that is, “tomcat,” the human male seducer of women. Other Roman plays refer to a man who is a feles pullaria, “cat of young women,” which, again, refers to the seductive male human.

Etruscan cat decor

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a bowl dating from the sixth century B.C. that was produced by Etruscans who dwelled in Italy. We can safely assume that Etruscans not only had cats but were very fond of them, for the bowl’s rim is decorated with the carvings of four cat heads.

Greeks go Italian

The ancient Greeks were a seafaring people, they acquired cats through trading with Egypt. As Greeks traveled, they took their cats with them, including to their colonies in southern Italy. Archaeologists have found coins in that region, dating from around 750 B.C., showing a man (the colony’s founder) seated in a chair, while a cat on hind legs plays with something in the man’s hand. Another coin from about the same period shows a man with a cat seated behind him.

Bosomy and catty

The temple of the goddess Artemis in the city of Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Artemis, as already noted, was a virgin goddess—but also a fertility goddess. You can see the fertility aspect clearly in some of her statues found at Ephesus, where she is depicted having dozens of breasts. Some of these images show her body engraved with images of cats, and the cats themselves bear large (and very human-shaped) breasts.

Crossing to Europe

How did cats get to Europe? Historians think that the ancient Greeks learned about cats through their trade with Egypt. The Greeks were pleased to see that Egyptians had found a perfect rodent exterminator, and an attractive, clean companion to boot. To the Greeks’ dismay, the Egyptians had no interest in sharing cats with the rest of the world, so the Greeks did the obvious thing and stole several pairs and took them home to become the ancestors of Europe’s cats.

Pagan to Christian

Egypt has been a Muslim country for so long that we forget the country followed Christianity long before Islam even existed. As Christianity spread from its home in Palestine, Egypt gradually changed its religion from pagan to Christian. Old habits die hard, and some people were slow to give up worshipping their old gods, including the cat-headed Bast.

The Christian writer Clement, writing about the year A.D. 200 in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, mocked the old religion and its worship of animals and animal-headed gods. He wrote of the huge temples, each with an inner sanctum, and in that inner sanctum, curled on a purple cushion was . . . an animal, often a cat. Clement, like many Christian writers, claimed that Christians were wiser in worshipping their invisible God than pagans, who were fools to build a temple to honor a cat or crocodile.

Ancient images: cats, or big cats?

cheetahs? In some cases, you can’t tell, because of the poor condition of the object—pieces broken off, weathered by time or otherwise damaged. But one general rule helps: domestic cats did (and do) have triangular-shaped ears, while leopards, cheetahs, lions, and most other big cats have rounded ears. This is reflected in ancient art—usually. Ancient craftsmen had talent, but they weren’t always sticklers for details.

The lynching

In ancient Egypt, as we’ve already noted, killing a cat was a capital offense. Thanks to the adoration that people felt for cats, there rarely had to be any kind of judicial trials, for the people gladly took justice into their own hands, killing an offender without waiting for the slow wheels of the legal process. As you might imagine, this kept the killing of cats to a minimum. A person who killed a cat by accident was in an awkward situation, but he could avoid lynching by running as far as possible from the dead animal and, once someone discovered the body, joining in the loud lamentation.

The cat in the moon

Did you know that the ancient Egyptians associated cats with worship of the moon? The cat was sacred to the goddess Isis, who symbolized the moon. The cat too was believed to be a symbol of the moon, partly because cats are more active after dark, partly because the pupil of the cat’s eye reminded people of the waxing and waning of the moon. A cat’s pupils can change from the narrowest slits to the widest circles—exactly as the moon does.

Herodotus in Greece

The Greek historian Herodotus visited Greece in the ﬁfth century B.C. and, happily for posterity, wrote about what he saw there. He described the worship of the cat-headed goddess Bast, whom he (and other Greeks) identiﬁed with the Greek goddess Artemis. Herodotus witnessed a Bast pameran at the city of Per-Bastet, attended by some 700,000 men and women. As Herodotus describes it, the “worship” turned into a veritable orgy, with lots of wine being consumed, frequent “lifting of the skirts” and a general “girls gone wild” atmosphere—which makes sense, since cats were associated with fertility and reproduction. According to Herodotus, the Bast pameran drew more people together than any other pameran in Egypt.

Cats and sistrums

goddess Bast found in Egypt, she is often depicted holding a sistrum, a musical instrument (or, more appropriately, noisemaker) similar to a maraca. Worship in ancient times often involved a lot of ritual dancing and music, and in the worship of Bast, large groups of women would have been dancing and rattling their sistrums. The sistrums themselves were often carved with cat images.

Ruling from Cat City

country from the city of Per-Bastet, or Bubastis, a city especially sacred to the goddess Bast. In fact, the city’s name means “house of the goddess Bast.” Not surprisingly, one of the pharaohs of Shishak’s dynasty actually ruled under the name Pamiu—meaning “Tomcat,” a highly appropriate name for a ruler who expects to be protected by a cat-headed goddess.

Ra, the Great Tomcat

sun the following morning. Numerous paintings have been found showing Ra, the “Great Tomcat,” using a knife to slay Apophis.

Cats in dreams

ancient Egypt. If you dreamed about a cat, it was a good omen but not related to sex. It was a sign of prosperity to come—speciﬁcally, a good harvest. This makes perfect sense: cats were the exterminators of rodents, which were always a threat to human food supplies, especially grains. If you dreamed of a cat, it meant your harvest—and thus your fortune—was in good hands (or good paws).

Sacred and four-legged

Travelers to ancient Egypt got the impression that the Egyptians literally worshipped cats. Did they? Aside from the love they showed to their own pets, they did have an even higher respect for “temple animals,” the animals kept at the temples of the Egyptians’ many gods, one of whom was Bast, the goddess with the woman’s body and cat’s head. The temples of Bast had, naturally, cats on the premises, and they were worshipped—or, more accurately, they were honored as the earthly representatives of Bast herself. Bast herself was far away in heaven, but humans could honor her—and deﬁnitely did—in the form of the temple cats.

The cat charm

sound made by cats, but also meant “to see.”

Snake hunters

rodent killers. Various types of poisonous snakes live in Egypt, notably the infamous asp (the species Cleopatra used to kill herself). True, a venomous snake can kill a cat as well as a human, but it appears that the ancient Egyptians learned quickly that cats’ claws, teeth and swift reﬂexes made them competent snake killers. And, obviously, the cat’s sensitive hearing and sight made them watchful for snakes entering human habitations.

The oldest cat art

Precisely when the ancient Egyptians began domesticating cats is in dispute, but the oldest artwork depicting a cat dates from around 1950 B.C. Found at Beni Hasan, this wall painting shows a cat crouching beneath a woman’s chair. Roughly about this same time, cat ﬁgures began to appear in hieroglyphics, the Egyptians’ form of picture writing.

Deep mourning

ancient Egyptians did when a pet cat died. The whole family would go into mourning and, as an obvious outward sign of grief, shave off their eyebrows.

Sterile tom, false pregnancy

One curiosity about neutered tomcats is that some of them still seek out a female in heat and go through the motions of mating, even though these toms are sterile. Even more curious is that the female’s mind and body may both “think” she has been impregnated, and thus she experiences a “false pregnancy.”

No kittens are growing inside her, and she doesn’t gain weight, of course, but she “feels” she is pregnant and may produce milk and seek out a secluded spot to bear the kittens—kittens that don’t exist, that is.

Ancient Egyptian humor

sacred or as beloved pets of the household—but not always. Humans have always had a sense of humor, even in ancient times. There survives from ancient Egypt, land of the sacred cat, a drawing on papyrus dating from about 1150 B.C., showing a large lady mouse and her brood, being waited on by a bevy of cat servants.

Ritualized mating

queen (who is in heat, naturally) is delivered in a carrier to a special queen pen in the stud house. This separates her, via wire or bars, from the male, though they can sniff each other and the queen can size up her potential partner.

Usually the ﬁrst nose-to-nose encounter involves a lot of hissing and growling on her part, and the wire that separates them is for the male’s protection. Eventually she shows she is ready for the male by ceasing the growling and by rolling on the ﬂoor and producing a more welcoming sound. At that point she is allowed into the stud’s area, but not before a coarse “mating rug” is laid down for the two.

The stud recognizes this as “his” rug, one on which he has mated before. It provides the female a warm surface to grip for stability during the brief mating procedure. When the deed is done, the queen is put back in her own pen—but the two are later allowed to repeat the process, on the assumption that pregnancy is more likely to occur with more than one mating session.

Cat-head and lion-head

goddess. Bast was sometimes called the Lady of the East (meaning the east side of the Nile River), while Sekhmet was the Lady of the West. Over time the two similar goddesses were thought to be one and the same, both regarded as symbols of fertility, motherhood, hearth and home.

The old cat-woman dog-man cliché

The world has changed a lot, but one old cliché still lingers: women like cats, men like dogs. We all know exceptions to these stereotypes, but we all also know there is a bit of truth to them. The cliché goes back centuries, even to the very starting place of domestic cats: ancient Egypt.

Tomb paintings of wealthy Egyptians have often shown the happy family at home, with a cat sitting under the wife’s chair, a dog under her husband’s chair. We can safely assume that husband and wife played with each other’s pets, of course, but the stereotype is still there: cats for the women, dogs for the men.

Did the Egyptians really worship cats?

animal.

Cat mummies

Egyptians believed that the afterlife was essentially like earthly life, they mummiﬁed mice to place in the tombs as food for the cat mummies. In 1890, over 300,000 cat mummies were found at one site in Egypt. Most were in cases of engraved wood, with the bodies wrapped in colored bandages. The world’s museums display cat mummies along with the human mummies.

No fang, no mate

During mating, the tomcat always sinks his canine teeth—the fangs—into the neck skin of the female. This isn’t optional, and if for some reason the tom is missing one or more of his canines, he won’t be able to breed, even though he and the female are otherwise willing and able.

Love bites

Cats, like most animals, have sex strictly for reproduction, and so it only takes place when the female is fully fertile. Part of the brief ritual of mating (calling it “lovemaking” would not be appropriate) involves the male biting the nape of the female’s neck before the sex actually takes place. This love bite is actually a kind of fertility test, because the female would not submit to this bite unless she was in full heat. That is, if she submits to the bite, the male can proceed knowing the female is as fertile as she can be.

The Sunshine State cat

Florida is the very rare Florida panther. Scientists debate whether the panther is a subspecies of the cougar (see 437) or a separate species. The Florida panther certainly has a distinctive look, for although it generally looks like a cougar, it has a kinked tail, white spots and a distinctive swirl of fur in the middle of its back.

The biggest

striped, and though we assume they are all orangey in color, their color varies widely depending on location. Tigers in Russia and northern China are very light in color, and some are almost white. A male tiger may weigh up to ﬁve hundred pounds and stand ﬁve feet tall at the shoulders. Tigers do not have the beautiful manes that male lions possess, but older male tigers do have long spreading hairs on their cheeks. Tigers are good swimmers, but unlike most cats, they seldom climb trees.

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