A Cultural History of the Cat

Cats, it seems, are everywhere – in windows, advertisements, music videos (like Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”) and many other places. They have also found their way into over 30% of American homes. But what do we really know about this popular pet? How have different civilizations viewed the animal over the centuries? To help answer these questions, I have decided to write an essay on the cultural history of the cat.

The cat evolved in North Africa. Fossil remains of Felis cattus dating back ten to twelve million years ago have been discovered in that region. However, the domestication of the cat had to await the agricultural revolution. While dogs were tamed millennia earlier as hunting companions when humans were still in the hunter-gatherer stage, cats only proved their usefulness to man after he found them helpful at killing the mice and rats that fed on stored grains. The first evidence of a domestic cat was at a settlement in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Syria. The animal first came to prominence as part of a civilization, though, in ancient Egypt.

Because cats did such a good job of protecting the granaries, the Egyptians elevated them to the status of gods. Egypt even had its own feline goddess, Bastet, who was portrayed as a woman with the head of a cat. Images of the animal appear as well on amulets, mirror handles, and paintings, such as one of a cat on a leash near a bowl of food.

Respect for cats in Egypt was so great that upon their death they were mourned as members of the family. Cat owners would shave their eyebrows as a sign of respect for their deceased pets. Cats were even embalmed at times: in 1890 more than 300,000 mummified felines were discovered in the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis. In addition, the Egyptians held the belief that a person whose cats lived to a healthy old age would be rewarded with a long life him- or herself (having had a cat who died of natural causes at the age of eighteen – eighty-five in human years – I can only hope this is true).

Cats in Egypt became protected citizens in a sense. Anybody who killed one, even accidentally, other than for ritual purposes risked being stoned to death by an angry crowd. However, this feline adoration could work to the Egyptians’ disadvantage. In the battle over the city of Pelusia, the leader of the invading army, King Cambise II of Persia, had the ingenious idea of having his soldiers put cats on their battle shields. Because the Egyptians dared not counterattack for fear of killing or injuring their sacred animal, the Persians ended up conquering Pelusia.

The first Europeans known to possess cats were the Greeks, who got them - allegedly through trickery - from the Egyptians. Though the Greeks did not worship the cat as the Egyptians did, they respected the animal as an efficient rodent catcher – especially since it was less odourous than the semi-domesticated weasels it replaced in this role. The Greeks called the cat “ailouros,” the root of our own word “ailurophobia” (fear of cats). Some tangible evidence of felines in Greek life includes an Athenian bas-relief of a man with a cat on a leash. Cats also appeared in Aesop’s fables, one of which tells of a female cat who fell in love with a human male and asked the goddess Aphrodite (Venus) to transform her into a woman. Nonetheless, the cat-turned-woman could not shake off her original nature, for she ran after a mouse. For this Aphrodite returned her to her original form. The moral of the story: nature trumps nurture.

The next group of Europeans to own cats were the Romans. Like the Greeks, the Romans valued felines for their hunting abilities but did not consider them divine. The author Pliny the Elder mentioned cats in his Natural History. The ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii – destroyed by a volcano in 79 A.D. – contain the remains of a woman with a cat in her arms. A mosaic from that same city shows a cat seizing a duck, while a bas-relief depicts a hostile encounter between a cat and dog. So the cat and dog’s adversarial relationship was noted even in antiquity!

The Romans were responsible for bringing the cat to many of the lands they conquered or traded with, such as Britain and France. Once again the animal’s vermin-catching potential was much appreciated. For example, in tenth-century Wales if a couple divorced, the law stipulated that their first cat should go to the husband and the rest to the wife. Cats were also welcomed in monasteries. Celtic monks bred them, and an eighth-century Irish priest left a poem extolling his feline companion. One famous ailurophile (cat lover) was St. Patrick, apostle to Ireland. Cats eventually reached as far north as Scandinavia. There they became associated with the Norse goddess of love Freya, who was portrayed riding in a chariot drawn by cats. When Scandinavians later embraced Christianity, they incorporated the worship of Freya into celebrations of the Christian saint Lucy. Modern-day Swedes, for instance, bake pastries called Lussekatters (“Lucy’s cats”) on St. Lucy’s Day on December 13.

From Egypt cats spread to places other than Europe. One of these was the Arabian Peninsula. The Prophet Mohammed supposedly owned a female cat named Muezza. Legend has it that she once fell asleep on the sleeve of his robe. Having to go to prayer but not wishing to wake her, he cut the sleeve so she could continue snoozing (as a cat owner myself, I understand the Prophet’s dilemma: when a feline is dozing so contentedly it’s tempting just to “let sleeping cats lie”). In the Hadith, a collection of sayings attributed to Mohammed, he berates a woman for abusing her cat, thus further confirming his love for the animal.

Through trade routes the cat was introduced to India and China. The Buddhists in the latter country believed that cats possessed divine powers and that a dead feline could intercede on its owner’s behalf with the Buddha himself. In the early 1990s the British magazine The Economist showed a picture of a cat in a Buddhist temple in Thailand standing “at attention” on her hind legs. Some people took this behaviour as a sign that she was the reincarnation of a human being – though the magazine said she was in many ways just an “ordinary mother of three.”

Cats were brought from China to Japan at the beginning of the eleventh century after Christ. There they soon became the “pampered poodles” of the Japanese nobility, who excused them from their previous duty of killing vermin. The Japanese thought they could ward off mice and rats simply by putting paintings and other images of cats in places where rodents congregated. Alas, this trick failed, so eventually felines were allowed to hunt again in order to curb the mouse population. Today the cat is considered a symbol of good luck in Japan.

Back in Europe, cats’ fortunes took a nosedive in the Middle Ages, when they were seen as creatures of the devil. Even literature did not treat the animal kindly during this period. The twelfth-century collection of French fables Roman de Renart, for example, features a malicious cat named Tibert (sort of like the Persian cat Duchess in the movie Babe). Cats were sometimes viewed as accomplices of witches and burned at stake along with their owners, or simply tossed into fires. These large-scale feline massacres may have been behind the emergence of diseases carried by rodents, such as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of Europe’s population in the 1300s. Afterwards cats regained some favour as people realized that without a sufficient number of natural predators, mice and rats would increase exponentially and more epidemics ensue. But the cat still had its fans in that era. One was the fourteenth-century Italian writer Francis Petrarch, who described his feline friend as his greatest passion after Laura (the woman he loved and wrote about).

Despite Europeans’ ambivalent attitude toward the cat, during the Renaissance they greatly expanded the feline’s territory by bringing it to their newfound colonies overseas, just as the Romans had done earlier within Europe. They introduced the cat, together with other domestic animals like the horse, cow and sheep, to today’s Americas, Siberia, and Australia and New Zealand. Sailors found it wise to take cats on long voyages, as the animals provided a good defense against the mice and rats that feasted on the crew’s precious food supplies and gnawed on the wood with which the vessels were built. The story of one ship’s cat, Emma, was profiled in the book It Happened in Canada. Once when the ship stopped ashore, Emma could not be coaxed back on, even though she had given birth to a litter of kittens there. The ship later crashed on route to its destination and all the passengers perished. I admit to a certain skepticism as to whether Emma actually had supernatural powers; I’m tempted to attribute her reluctance to re-board to pure chance rather than extrasensory perception.

Today cats are found virtually all over the world. And as this essay shows, whether demon or divinity, these animals have played an important role in human history.

Note: Much of the information in this essay has been taken from Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Cats by Gino Pugnetti, The Royal Canin Cat Encyclopedia by Bernard-Marie Paragon and Jean-Pierre Vaissaire, and The Illustrated Cat’s Life by Warren and Fay Eckstein.

- Emily, 17, Canada