Secrets of the Cat by Barbara Holland

Author:Barbara Holland [Holland Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-06-202501-2
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1988-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

7

Cats and the Church

The cat is useful for catching mice, and affectionate toward affectionate people, but there’s something else, something odd about the cat, something more than meets the eye. Everyone’s noticed it.

The cat, always and everywhere, has been a means of getting in touch with something unreachable by humans—the Egyptian Land of the Dead, the Norse World Serpent at the bottom of the sea, the future, the Christian Hell, spirits good and bad, and uncontrollable factors like the weather, love, shipwrecks, and wealth. A cat has always been what the computer people call a “communications tool.”

In one of the sections in A Certain Lucas, Julio Cortazar announces his realization, in the middle of a business meeting, that cats are telephones, cordless telephones, who have been trying since antiquity to communicate messages to their biped subscribers. Unfortunately, even if humans do discover that the cat is indeed a telephone, we have no way of understanding the message it has to convey or its origin, but the cat continues to try. Sometimes its silken discourse and sentences as smooth as glycerine concern hunger, at which times the cat is simply a cat, but at other times the cat has no personal needs to explain and is speaking purely as a telephone from elsewhere. “Clumsy and pretentious, we have let millennia go by without answering the calls, without wondering where they were coming from or who was on the other end of that line which a twitching tail grew tired of showing us in houses all over the world.”

A stable and self-confident society can take a few domestic animals walking around like open lines to another world; a society in transition is touchier. A society of innumerable major and minor deities among which the citizens may pick and choose can take their come-and-go in stride, but monotheistic Christianity, jealously exclusive, marched across Europe hand in hand with patriarchy and brought bad news for cats, goddesses, and the unofficial mysteries.

In the fourth century the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the state religion of a good deal of the civilized world. His nephew, Julian the Apostate, made a rebellious effort to restore pagan tolerance, but it didn’t last; after his death his heirs decreed uniform Christianity and launched the long campaign to stamp out competition. The Roman Empire fell, but the Christian empire grew and spread.

At the same time, in Arabia, Mohammed was building up another monotheistic religion, but this was a less ominous one for cats. The Koran stated that while dogs were unclean creatures, cats were the very essence of purity. At Bab-el-Nasz a cat hospital was established, and contributing food to its patients was an act of piety. Cats were most especially never to be chased out of the mosque. In a recent television program on Islamic Africa, rows of the white-robed faithful are prostrating themselves in the mosque as a fine striped cat with white gloves strolls past the camera and on beside their bowed heads, tail on high and fluttering with confidence, a traditionally welcome guest.

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