Today, we’re into superstitions, black cats and voodoo dolls. Or something similar, but far less eloquently phrased (thank you for this song, Ricky Martin, you created a classic! 🙂 ). Black cats are irrevocably connected to Halloween, be it as witches’ familiars or simply a living form of the devil; but the superstitions go further back than that. The peoples of the past centuries, for instance, were often quite afraid of cats (see Cath Palug) and there are many stories that would probably make a good gory Halloween special if they were made into films.
In Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, the cat was revered as sacred, and had a positive influence – I remember one source I once came across claiming that cats placed under a woman’s chair in paintings symbolised fertility and financial wellbeing, both of which are, if you think about it, strongly connected, as good financial standing generally means good food and good food means higher fertility and better chances of normal childbirth and rearing.
In Ancient Greece and Rome, cats were relatively invisible, and they did not regain their visibility until the Christian superstitions dragged them out in witch hunts as the assistants or even main perpetrators of either completely made up or utterly misinterpreted deeds (very little can be found that is reliable as a source on this, I’m sorry to say, because the topic is often jumped on by modern day Pagans, who create their own stories, and by cat lovers, and while that creates a new behavioural pattern, it is not an academic source for past behaviours). The belief was anchored so strongly that even today, black cats are considered unlucky and are often targets of violence; they are also less likely to be adopted.
This is very unfortunate, because black cats (or any cats for that matter) are brilliant pets. Among our nine felines, we sadly do not have a single purely black cat (to be fair, I always wanted a black cat… the fur, the eyes… soooo beautiful!), but we do have a black and white and a tortoise shell whose pelt has a chocolate, orange and black combination (something referred to as chocolate panther among many cat lovers).
The superstition concerning cats transfers to humans; cat lovers are supposedly unsociable, nasty and back stabbing. Ironically, because of this belief, people who ARE anti-social do often acquire cats, because they seem to fit to the expected patterns of behaviour…but it rarely works out for the pet in that case. As a generality, cats, like all other living beings, have to be understood and communicated with properly – something that has been left quite unexplored until recently – and naturally, bad communication results in bad co-habitation. This is where Jackson Galaxy comes in; if your cat and you are having issues, don’t just shrug it off as “ah, well, cats…”, try to figure out what exactly is going wrong. I speak from experience when I say that especially kitties with bad history can have enormous amount of behavioural issues, and they need love, therapy and understanding just like humans.
Barring maladaptive exceptions, an average cat owner often owns other animals, including dogs, and dogs and cats (again, contrary to the myth and a number of resultant nasty jokes) can get along wonderfully. When we lost our dog Chichi to cancer, the cats mourned her for months, each in their own way, without cessation. Same is true of dogs – often, if a cat is lost, dogs will go into mourning much like humans and will often be inconsolable.
Life with cats can be fun, and just as sociable as if you have a dog – while cat owners of the nineties possibly spent more time socialising online, the new (and very useful) hype of cat walks is slowly moving that socialising into the real world. Of our nine, all the cats do walks, but four are very suspicious of the outdoors and have a long way to go before they overcome the fears they have acquired. Then, of course, there is Luna – while the others are all on hormonal implants as a matter of prevention, Luna is sterilised, and because she gets quite fat quite often has to do really long walks, which she often ends up boycotting (much like those motivational human fitness quotes would have you expect 🙂 ).
So life with cats really isn’t much different than life with dogs (Chichi boycotted walks if they were hot, rainy or snowy, and while I could understand the hot – she was a polar dog -, there really was no excuse for the other two with her fur 🙂 ); we still do dishes, work, go to the movies, socialise with friends, have sex and generally enjoy the life of a couple… Just with nine felines to keep us company and vice versa.
Cats, mythologically speaking, fall into the category of chthonic worlds ad beings. Chthonic is anything that is the Otherworld, night, or underground connected; the definition in the dictionary goes like this: “Relating to or inhabiting the underworld.” (from here)
As a rule, chthonic animals are connected to the lunar, the world outside the normal reach of normal humans. In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the Beren and Luthien part, there could be several parallels made with the chthonic world even outside of the dark fortresses and caverns and huge dangerous wolves; the very passage of Beren into a different land (through the so-called girdle of Melian, a magical border that separates both lands, not worlds, but the difference is subtle) could be considered in some form a chthonic experience; Luke Skywalker has an experience of seeing the figure of Darth Vader in a cavern, making it a chthonic experience; Ironman’s walking into the underground cavern within the building in Sokovia, where the Scarlett Witch hits him with the vision that influences the entirety of the story from there on is technically a form of a chthonic experience put into a modern world. (This is what happens if you have an anthropologist watching a film. 🙂 )
Odysseus travelling into the under world, Orpheus seeking Eurydica, the kidnap of Persephone, Beowulf following the monster into its lair… those are just some of the classical and much older versions of the tale, which have influenced the modern perspective.
Horses, swans and fairies or elves are generally all parts of the chthonic world; and elsewhere around the globe, other, similar legends and other animals and creatures share the category. And while many don’t even know the word chthonic, fiction keeps visiting and revisiting the theme over and over.
The very festival of Halloween is, in a manner of speaking, a chthonic world experience; so are the twelve days of Christmas, defining the barrier between the old, dying, darkening and the birth of the sun with the new year. That the dates may be a little off is of little importance – even if we consider theories about sun worship, shifts in axis tilt, speed of Earth’s movement and so on would have created slight but definite differences within how and when precisely something would be obvious to humans, and that is why there is a great likelihood of slight discrepancies with actual solar year and the perceived solar year. But what matters behaviourally is recognition and repetition – recognition of a festivity within the SCR structure of a society and the repetition of it to keep the aura of factuality of the society’s status within itself going.
If this gave you a headache, let me put it simply – to be ourselves, in good and in bad, we do things that we do ourselves. Or in other words – if what defines us as a person is how we get up, prepare our coffee, go to work, exercise, play and socialise, perceive the world around us… then it is easy to understand that this applies to society and culture too. Of course, maladaptive responses can happen in both contexts – if, as a person, we suffer from depression, we need to change that just as much as a society needs to change if its behaviour towards its members or others is maladaptive and destructive. This is the double edge of the festivities, which many anthropologists fall foul of – the wish to explore and to some extent preserve them because of interest or even one’s SCR identity or to be rational about how much can be preserved and what must never be used if human rights or animal rights are to be observed.
To finish this, let me end up with a little warning – many black cats end up hurt around Halloween, when people who act on one superstition or another seek them out and harm or even kill them. As it is, cats are among the most likely animals to be picked on by people who torture and kill animals. So keep an eye out for your furry friends. If you have a cat (especially a black cat) or know someone who does, and the cat is not an indoor cat, please keep a close eye on it this and every Halloween, so that nothing bad can happen to them because of people who could not think as far as Groucho Marx – “If a black cat crosses your path, that means the animal is going somewhere.”