Nothing makes me giggle like the Cat Lady memes traveling across the internet. J.D. Vance picked on the wrong part of the population. Re-arr. And Meow.
I’ve talked about the symbolism of cats before, primarily care of my ride or die Barbara Walker (I love all her books, but I believe this came from The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, which looks like it’s back in print). As she explains, the cat is indelibly connected to the feminine. The cat is a symbol of the goddess—and obviously a mainstay, along with the housewife’s cauldron, of the witch. Here’s Walker: "The Teutonic Mother Freya rode in a chariot drawn by cats. Artemis-Diana often appeared in cat form...The willow sacred to Hecate became a pussy-willow that bore ‘catkins’ in the spring.” She continues to explain that cats were mega-worshipping in Egypt, so sacred, that if a man killed one he could be condemned to death. And that the "Medieval belief in the cat's nine lives probably stemmed from the Egyptian Ennead, via the mythic figure of the Ninefold Goddess. It was often said any witch could assume a cat's shape nine times in her life."
I am an ardent animal lover—and while I have had chickens, dogs, gerbils, mice, and horses, cats have been a mainstay. We have three now—two sisters named Penny and Pebbles that we adopted last year after our girls Dot and Fletch passed, and then a little boy who we adopted last Thanksgiving. August has three legs and we thought he would struggle, but not so fast. He is a maniac and a menace and definitely the boys’ favorite.
I started another piece on the archetype of the cat this Spring after reading Jungian therapist Helen Luke’s The Way of Woman, and was thrilled to have an opportunity to dust it off and finish it. Thank you Mr. Vance. (I wrote about Luke in the newsletter, “We Need Privacy.”)
As Luke points out, it’s rare to find an animal that evokes such a reaction. While we like to assume two camps—dog people and cat people—I don’t think this is quite right. People are avowedly not cat people, though you don’t really hear cat owners forswearing dogs in the same way. Luke writes of the irrational emotion that cats evoke, only really shared (in the negative) by snakes, spiders, rats, and bats. “The extreme reaction to these is nearly always one of revulsion only, except in the case of a very few passionate snake-lovers. They have one thing in common: they are all creatures of the dark, of the night, and carry the mystery and mana of the unknown. The snake is the most powerful of all animal symbols, the incarnation of evil, the Devil, or of light and healing, the Christ (‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up’—John 3:14), and the legends of the cat also have this double nature.”
But that’s not the full story. People complain that cats are cold, aloof, judging—that they lack a dog’s kindliness, sweet acceptance, and complete devotion. But I don’t really know where that comes from either, as I have never found this to be true. My cats greet me when I come home and are generally physically attached to me all the time, following me around the house and jumping in my lap. But as Luke points out, the cat occupies a binary: “She has the extreme patience and swiftness of the hunter, and her complete power of relaxation is unique among the animals close to man. Above all she is the only domesticated animal which has retained through all the centuries her qualities of wildness and independence.” Unlike a dog, she will not heel; outside of her exquisite cleanliness, she refuses to be trained, to submit, or beg.
And, of course, cats are nocturnal. Luke again: “The cat’s capacity to see in the dark connects our conscious values to the life of the unconscious. In this aspect she is an image of the instinctive intuition of the woman, the mediumistic Sybil quality, which can either be a dangerous possession by the dark forces or a great gift of insight and sympathy. In Egypt the name for cat means ‘to see,’ and Bast, the cat goddess, was identified with the eyes of Horus, the sky god. Horus had a sun-eye and a moon-eye, which stood for healing and protection.”
Luke, being Luke, takes it a bit farther than this, and here I sense a bit of Vance and his dog whistling (interesting juxtaposition, right?)—specifically as the “pounced upon” victim of the cat (and those witchy, childless cat ladies).
“We have great need of the ‘holy cat.’ In the personal sphere, there are people who identify with the mouse mentality. They are the ‘pounced upon,’ the constantly ‘victimized,’ filled with self-disgust and really wanting the worst to happen. Others are ‘pouncers’; identified with (not related to) the cat and pouncing on everyone weaker than themselves. The first kind have the destructive cat in their shadow, the second are ‘mice’ underneath their aggression. All of us have a degree of this cat-mouse symbiosis and need to find the holy cat’s eye within us to bring things to light.”
As always, it’s about realizing the shadow, bringing all to balance, recognizing we are each two sides of a single coin. To that end, I wish men like Vance could recognize that they are terrified of the feminine—and then work directly with this fear. I would argue he is most afraid of his own feminine nature—not me and not you and not childless cat ladies across the internet, but his own anima. Most hyper-patriarchal men are scared of their own internal depths and then find targets for this anxiety in the wider culture—but that’s a newsletter for another day.
Those of you who have read On Our Best Behavior know that I’m fascinated with the witch craze in Europe—and its long-tail cultural effect. We feel the intergenerational trauma in our bones and still find its remnants in the discourse today. As I was looking for interesting cat bits from Walker, I found this line in The Crone, which perfectly encapsulates the deep, dual-sided ambivalence leveraged at women: “Our very language demonstrates that men expected women’s sexual attractiveness to depend on trickery, or witchery. An alluring woman still ‘casts a spell’; she is charming, enchanting, bewitching, entrancing, tempting, fascinating; or she is glamorous, a word that came from the magic of Morgan-the-Crone, Goddess of Glamorgan.” We are both sides of the goddess: “Glamorous” and gorgon, the goddess Kali with skulls strung around her neck who stands for both creation and destruction. Even the definition of feline offers this binary: “resembling a cat: such as a. sleekly graceful; b. sly, treacherous; c. stealthy.” There’s fear of the feminine right there.
So, again, meow. (BTW, have you ever seen what a cat can do to a couch?)
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In my early 20s, I went on a life-changing journey with psychedelic mushrooms. During the peak of my trip, I was lying in front of a fireplace and looked down at the blanket covering me. There, I saw a pattern of cat faces with halos above their heads. I remember telling my friend beside me that cats are angels and protectors for humans. It’s something I haven’t forgotten even almost 20 years later. Meow.
My mother called me pussycat as a little girl, and I have been reclaiming that nickname this past week! A bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul.. in my experience, women seem to understand this better than men