Have you ever found yourself cuddling protectively behind a pillow, heart hammering, breath swallow and eerily still; the very atmosphere thick with ominous foreboding, glued to the television set as some fictional figure of blood and vengeance stalks the innocence victim through the fog of a shadowed night?  When suddenly some unearthly, scathing din makes your flesh jump from its bone and adrenalin snatches an abrupt, hysterical, self-reproaching laugh from your throat as a red herring cat scuttles away from an upturned dustbin only to be replaced by a sudden flash of glinting knife and blood-curdling scream?

Or have you been working away absently, a desk lamp struggling against the black pitch of night, your fond tabby curled in a ball on your lap when sharply the feline seems to spring to attention, fraught with tension and staring, unblinkingly at a obscured dark corner?  You feel the hairs of your neck tickle to life and fear as some sixth sense of trepidation, blind to the mortal eye but not your oversensitive feline, makes you quake in your boots before shrugging off the feeling and glaring at the cat?

There is such mysterious excitement and curious anxiety attached to the realm of the unknown.  People live day in and day out with beloved pets in affectionate companionship and yet they are strangers, developing a clumsy mood of communication through leg rubbing and meows and yet owners can’t see through their eyes to how they perceive the world, can’t glimpse their dreams when they twitch and mewl in their sleep.  Do they see in black and white or colour?  Do they have a language, values or morals like that of mankind? 

Many terrifying tales are spun around seemingly innocuous objects in our daily lives like china dolls, computers, bats, clowns, mannequins, and cats.  A silent sleeper enemy in your own home; trusted and yet never understood.  In a way it’s a compliment to feline friends as it’s the personification of them as individuals with feelings and motives that lead to these questions and doubts, a love and desire for closeness. 

Cats are clever, unmistakably so, as Charlotte Gray phrased it, “After scolding one’s cat one looks into its face and is seized by the ugly suspicion that it understood every word, and has filed it for reference.”  But there is also something almost other worldly about them.  The ancient Egyptians recognised this as they witnessed the golden flash of lion’s eyes in the descending twilight, as the glassy orbs of many a domestic cat has startled a late night walker, and they believed that the Sun god, Ra was behind this phenomenon. 

Ra presided over the skies during the day, beaming down heat, life, creation and prosperity but each night he rode his chariot to the depths of the underworld dying until he was born anew for the rising dawn.  In the dense blindness of night, Ra was vulnerable to attack by his enemy, the great Serpent Apophis and so appointed these big cats as his protectors.  Gazing at his brilliant light all day they held some of his rays in their eyes come nightfall and would hunt their serpentine prey using the vision of Ra.  Thus the iconic image of the Sphinx was born, half lion and half Pharaoh.

Sekhmet (depicted with the head of a lion and body of a woman) was the violent, vengeful daughter of Ra who fiercely protected her mother whilst Bast, also said to be the daughter of Ra, watched gently over the smaller, domestic cat, blessing their carers with happiness and good fortune.  Referred to as “Bastet the Beautiful” in the “Book of Troth” the cat was revered as the ultimate perfection of the female form.  Children were consecrated to the goddess, their arms sliced and laved with the blood of a cat and slaying this animal was punishable by death.  Also when a beloved pet died its owners physicalised their grief by the shaving of eyebrows.

When trade routes developed in the modernising world, the legend and love of the cat was integrated in many a culture and tantalising tale.  The Norse goddess Freyja (christening the first, awaited day of the weekend, Friday) was the enigmatic mistress of Seidh magick and coasted on a chariot rained by giant, grey cats and in Islam the Prophet Mohammad was claimed to have torn the sleeve off his robe rather than disturb the feline nestling in his lap when it was time for prayer. 

When a Siamese king passed from the coils of mortal life in this world, it was believed that for a short time he possessed the body of a Siamese cat so that he could watch his successor being crowned before transcending to the heavens and a Siamese with a kinked tail is a descendant of a loyal companion to a princess who deliberating curved its tail just so, to allow her to thread her jewelled rings upon it for safe keeping while bathing. 

The Korat (a blue-grey cat) of the Orient was used by farmers in a rain making ritual and in the Ozark Mountains of Tennessee and Arkansas, an indecisive maiden plucked three hairs from a cat’s tail in answer to a marriage proposal leaving the poor puss’s fur in a napkin by the door and trusting the mischievous hands of fate as to whether the three straight hairs formed a ‘Y’ for ‘yes’ or ‘N’ for ‘No’. 

The “beckoning cat”, much replicated in gaudy, Japanese sculpture with a waving paw, descends from a legend of a beneficent cat mimicking this ‘come hither’ gesture to a passing feudal lord at the doors of the Gotoku-ji temple and saving his life as on following the feline, a thunderous lightning bolt scorched the earth where he once stood.  This beckoning beast was hence associated with the goddess of mercy and is still seen gracing the counter of many a business as its ceramic presence is thought to bring success. 

Even the Christian traditions spin fanciful tales of Noah’s Ark, of the Manx cat who was late to the party and inadvertently got it tail trapped in the door by a hasty Noah and God in his wisdom birthing fully fledged domestic cats from the eyes of a lion to conquer the devil’s troublesome vermin on board that had bred, well like rats, and tried to sabotage the vessel by gnawing at its wooden prow.  In Ireland, guests kissed the household cat upon arrival and Celtic folklore was born around them but somewhere along the twisted, Chinese whispered echoes of folklore and myth, the cat fell from fortune and encountered ‘the Witch’.

The Salem Witch trails have gone down in history as a bleak and tyrannical time of irrational terror and literalism that spread suspicion and paranoia through the fragile, God fearing hearts of man and demanded appeasement through the sacrifice of once trusted neighbours and friends.  Witches, now portrayed comically perhaps in an attempt to laugh at one’s fears, are more at home now in garish, ghost train rides at amusement parks with their wizened skin, warts, crooked noses and triangled hats but they were ordinary men, women and even children, both old and young. 

Believed to be agents of the devil, possessed demonic cats were thought to be “familiars” - unholy helpers in the pursuit of the dark arts so much so that in 1233 Pope Gregory IX condemned cats to burning executions for their Satanic crimes which, in a jaded form of justice, lead to the over population of disease carrying rats.  Also, in the questionable ‘facts’ of legend, Lucifer was kicked out of heaven at the time coinciding with the “Blackberry Season,” landing on a prickly bush and this is when many sweet kittens were born.

There are hundreds of stories and superstitions revolving around these well loved or much maligned, proud pets.  It is amazing to realise that cats, unquestionably, have had a great influence in the history and evolution of mankind.  It is perhaps wise to pause a moment the next time you gaze into the bright, luminescent eyes of your pet and stare in awe at it’s struggle and persistence throughout centuries for justice and truth, as a silence witness incapable of defence or voiced opinion and maybe then agree with Mark Twain when he said, “Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”