The Cat in the Mysteries of Religion and Magic by M. Oldfield Howey. (1/2)
Title: The Cat in the Mysteries of Religion and Magic.
Author: M. Oldfield Howey.
Genre: Non-fiction, occult, animals, mythology, religion, history.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1955.
Summary: A book on the role of the cat in occult and religious ritual throughout history. The acknowledged classic in its field, the book presents a wealth of unusual material on esoteric aspects of the cat and her role in the history of mankind. Presents a rich reference of information for students of the occult, religion and mythology, as well as historians and anthropologists. (Refer to PART 2 for the rest of the quotes.)
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ The Cat, like the Serpent, conveys, though necessarily imperfectly, the thought that God is All. Such a stupendous conception involves the examination of many totally distinct, and even apparently antagonistic aspects which can only be unified by that single thought. Therefore, my readers must pardon any lack of sequence that may obtrude itself in this study. The Cat is the symbol of Good and of Evil, of Light and of Darkness, of Christ and of Satan, of Religion and of Black Magic, of Sun and of Moon, of Father, Mother, and Son.
~~from The Introduction.
♥ Although the name Bast implies "the tearer," or "the render," yet, in contradistinction to the fierce Sekhmet, goddess of war, who represented the destructive powers of the solar orb, Bast typified its kindly fertilizing heat. She was considered as embodying the beneficent portion of the elemental fire, and as the bringer of good fortune. She was also know as "the lady of Sept," i.e. of the star Sothis. Bast is a counterpart of the joyous Hathor, like her delighting in music and the dance. We may recognise her by the sistrum of the dancing women adorned with the heads or figures of cats, which she holds in her hand, and by the ægis, or by the basket supported on her arm. But occasionally she is represented without these attributes, and then it is difficult to know whether we are viewing the Cat's head of the kindly Bast, or the lion's head of the mighty and terrible Sekhmet. Bast herself is often represented as lion-headed, and occasionally the demonstrative sign following her name is a lion instead of a cat, though the latter was her particular emblem. Some of the black basalt figures in the British Museum are of Bast as a lion-headed goddess, and it is probably that these are of the earliest date, since Bast only appears with the head of a cat at a later period, and then principally in small votive bronzes.
♥ Another colossal statue of Bast bears a cat's head. This is six feet high, exclusive of the disk and the base. Sharpe gives its number as 517. It immortalises the name of Shishank, the earlier Egyptian king personally mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures. He reigned at Bubastis, which was the chief city in that part of Egypt where the Jews dwelt, both during the life of Moses and afterwards. But Shishank made himself master of Thebes, and was king of all Egypt. He fought against Rehoboam, king of Judah, about 956 B.C., as recorded in I Kings xiv. 25, where we are told that "he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all." The Kingdom of Judah is enumerated among the conquered nations listed on the walls of the Temples of Karnak. It seems to have been as the Tearer and Render that Shishank honoured Bast.
♥ This gives us an idea of the reverence in which Bast was held by her worshippers, and clearly exemplifies her dual nature, embracing both sun and moon, and all that was symbolised by them to the Egyptian mystic, especially the essential unity of the light proceeding from them both. As the Cat sees in the darkness, so the Sun which journeyed into the underworld at night saw through its gloom. Bast was the representative of the Moon, because that planet was considered as the Sun-god's eye during the hours of darkness. For as the moon reflects the light of the solar orb, so the Cat's phosphorescent eyes were held to mirror the sun's rays when it was otherwise invisible to man. Bast as the Cat-moon held the Sun in her eye during the night, keeping watch with the light he bestowed upon her, whilst her paws gripped, and bruised and pierced the head of his deadly enemy, the serpent of darkness. Thus she justified her title of the Tearer or Render, and proved that it was not incompatible with love.
Later Egyptian theology seems to have produced little original thought, but to have spent its powers in reconstructing and resuscitating the old. It lost its pristine purity, and conceptions which owed their origin to magic were admitted into religion. Because the gods had often been symbolised as birds, a bird-shape was given to the great gods of each nome. Bast was represented as a cat-headed hawk in this corrupted theology. Perhaps the metaphor was intended to emphasise her identity with Isis, for that goddess hovered over the dead body of Osiris in the form of a sparrow-hawk, and caused breath to enter into his lifeless form by the fanning of her wings, so that the dead god entered upon a new existence as king of the underworld. It was whilst Isis thus restored life to her lord that she became pregnant, and, later, gave birth to the hawk-headed Horus.
The Vulture which represented Mut (the World-Mother and great female counterpart of Amen-Ra), also appears in connection with Bast where the latter is considered as a member of the Egyptian Trinity that is recognised by the composite name of Sekhmet-Bast-Ra. This figure well illustrates the extraordinarily complicated nature of the goddess, for it depicts a man-headed woman with wings springing from her arms. And the symbolism is further complicated by two vultures growing from her neck, and lions' claws that arm her feet.
It is impossible not to recognise this deity in Diana Triformis and Tergemina, who, by virtue of her three different offices is known as Luna in the Heavens, Diana on Earth, and Hecate in Hell.
♥ The dread Sekhmet, the cat- or lioness-headed goddess of Egypt, who personified the fierce consuming fire of the scorching sun, was the feminine counterpart of Ptah-the title by which the Sun-god Ra was known at Memphis. The temples pf Ptah, Sekhmet, Bast, Hathor, Osiris, and Seker were all placed in this city, and it seems probable that this proximity was not accidental, but intended to prompt the recognition of the essential unity of all these deities.
♥ The solar cult originated with the hierarchy at Heliopolis, and all the feline goddesses of Egypt were representative of the varying degrees of the sun's intensity, from genial warmth to burning devastation. This accounts for many apparent paradoxes in the Egyptian pantheon, and for such descriptions as that of Isis-Hathor in a Philæ text: "Kindly is she as Bast, terrible is she as Sekhmet."
♥ It seems fairly evident that Sekhmet and Bast must originally have been one, or at least have had a common source, and developed from a sky-goddess such as Hathor, Nut, or Neith. The name Hathor signifies "House of Horus," and is an analogue for the sky, wherein the Sun-god Horus made his dwelling. She was also regarded as a Moon-goddess, and as such was often referred to as the "Eye of Ra," which was one of the titles of Sekhmet. Hathor was said to be the mother, wife, and daughter of Ra, and to the Egyptians represented ideal womanhood. She was described as "the lady of music and mistress of song, lady of leaping and mistress of wreathing garlands," and was a personification of the female principle.
In this aspect we recognise Bast, but when Hathor was the instrument of the vengeance of Ra, we find her identified with the terrible Sekhmet, as Sekhmet-Hathor, slaying the human race, and wading exultantly in their blood till Ra himself had to deliver mankind from her hands by resorting to the stratagem of making her drunken, and so unable to continue the work of destruction.
♥ Though not lion-headed, she is represented in Egyptian art as standing upon a lion. She wears the sun and the moon on her head. Her figure is nude: in her right hand she grasps a mirror and lotus blooms, emblems of life, and in her left, two serpents, emblems of death, thus declaring the Gnostic and Manichæan doctrine of Antitheses.
♥ The mystical musical instrument known as the Sistrum, is of great interest and importance form a symbolical standpoint. Upon its apis the Sacred Cat is enthroned, as emblem of the moon, and the great goddess that planet represented. Perhaps no other instrument of music has been so generally associated with magic and religious ritual as has the ancient sistrum. But the Egyptians seem to have more especially dedicated it to Hathor (or Athor), the Egyptian Venus. This goddess was in reality but a popular personification of Isis in the role of the loving, protecting Mother of the living, and Guardian of the souls of the departed during their sojourn in the dreary Underworld.
♥ It has been suggested that the fork of the Sistrum was derived from that of the Ankh, the well-known symbol of life carried by every Egyptian deity. Or, conversely, that the Ankh was based on the Sistrum. The fruitfulness of the Cat accords with either theory. The erect oval is emblematic of the Female Principle of Nature regarded as the womb of Divine Manifestation, whilst the upright pillar of the handle symbolises the corresponding Male Principle. The Cat is the presiding Deity blessing the mystic union with fecundity and abundance.
♥ The Sistrum is the symbol of the world's harmony. The heads of Isis and Nephthys which adorn its handle signify birth and death. The shaking of the four bars within the circular apis represents the agitation of the four elements within the compass of the globe, by which all things are continually destroyed and reproduced, and further figures that all creatures must move in a fixed order as does the moon, whose orbit embraces all that is on earth.
♥ When in use the Sistrum was held in the right hand and shaken, from which circumstance its name is derived (aera repulsa manu. Tibullusm I. 3, 24). ..It was really a kind of rattle, and generally consisted of a metal frame pierced by four brass iron rods, which were either loose, or fitted wit loose rings. Apuleius describes it as a bronze rattle, consisting of a narrow plate curved like a sword-belt through which rods were passed, that emitted a loud shrill sound. He seems to suggest that the shakes were in trios, thus making a sort of rude music. He says that the sistrums were sometimes of silver, or even gold.
♥ In this case it would probably be considered as an implement of Hathor or Isis in her warrior aspect personified by the terrible Sekhmet, for, like the Serpent, the Cat is a constant reminder that extremes meet, and that All is embraced by One. The Goddess inspires or destroys according to the angle from which she is contemplated. Mistress of the Heaven and Regent of the West, in her celestial character-she is the Eye of Ra, the Sun, and the solar deities Shu and Tefnut are her children; but her terrestrial presentation may be that of the goddess of youth, and pleasure, and beauty; like the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love, or may show us the cruel and destructive Sekhmet, whose counterpart was Bellona, goddess of war.
♥ [Sistrums] were used in the Circle Dance of the Sebasian Mysteries, the origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity, though they are thought to have been derived from the Mithraic Mysteries. The dance symbolised the motion of the Planets around the Sun. The Sistrum is said to be used to-day in Abyssinia and Nubia.
♥ An analogous musical instrument used by the singing-girls of Japan is known as the Samisen, and its strings are made from cat-gut. Not so very long ago the geishas of Tokio subscribed for a Mass for the souls of the Cats whose lives had been brought to an untimely end in order to provide the material which was an integral part of the instrument. Such honour and recognition suggests that the connection of the Cat with the music of the geishas is not entirely a fortuitous one, but possibly owes its origin to the same conception as that which placed the Cat on the Sistrum of Isis.
♥ The Cat and the Serpent must be numbered among the most ancient glyphs of Egypt, and, in its original form, seems to have been identical with the symbol of the Virgin and the Dragon. Because the Cat is the emblem of the time-honoured ideal of Virgin-Motherhood, the Egyptian Great Mother Goddess, variously invoked as Isis, or Atet, or Mout, etc., assuming feline form. Atet is said to have taken this shape when she conquered and slew the serpent of evil, and the myth gave rise to the Egyptian belief that cats possessed the power to heal those bitten by asps or other venomous creatures.
♥ During a solar eclipse a terrific battle would take place-a titanic combat between darkness and light, evil and good. Fearful of the issue, mankind breathlessly watched the peril of the Sun-god, shouting, and shaking the Sistrum to terrify the serpent foe. Suddenly the Celestial Car would leap upon the deadly reptile with fiery eyes and bristling coat, and Apap would fly, bleeding and torn, to the depths of darkness. After the eclipse was thus ended, the veneration of the Egyptian people for the sacred animal was always intensified. At other times priestly interference might save the slayer of a cat from popular vengeance, but after an eclipse even the power of the priesthood could not rescue the guilty person, however high a position he might hold. The Sicilian historian, Diodorus, who travelled in Egypt during the first century B.C., recorded how a Roman soldier, stationed at Alexandria, slew a cat, and in consequence was seized and executed by the mob, notwithstanding his privileges as a Roman citizen, and the entreaties of King Ptolemy who feared the vengeance of Rome.
♥ But possibly a more convincing explanation is that we are here up against one of those apparent paradoxes that are so numerous in Egyptian mythology. We must remember that the serpent not only represented evil and darkness slain by the Divine Cat of the Sun, but was also actually the symbol of the Sun-god himself, especially when the solar orb was personified as Ra-Tem, the setting sun entering the underworld of darkness; whilst the Cat, when considered as the representative of Sekhmet, the spouse of Ra, was the personification of destruction and chaos. Read has pointed out that some passages in the Book of Amduat (or, the "Book of that which is in the Under-world") seem to suggest that those who had not rendered due homage to Ra on earth shared after death in the punishment he inflicted upon Apep; and it would appear that the later Egyptians, at any rate, so understood the texts, for when they embraced Christianity their conceptions of Amenti were clearly transferred to the Hades of their new faith.
♥ These paradoxes of imagery were not accidental, or the result of confusion of thought as might appear to a casual reader, but are a constant feature in occult symbolism, and had a deep purpose. By thus portraying extremes in unity, the priestly initiator prepared the mind of the understanding aspirant for the reception of spiritual truths and mysteries otherwise unutterable. When we endeavour to interpret such sacred and ancient symbols it is essential that we take into account the context and environment in which they are found, and the fact that they almost invariably bear an esoteric as well as an exoteric significance.
♥ To fully comprehend the tremendous powers which were anciently attributed to witches we must continually remember that they were originally the priestesses and votaries of the Moon-goddess Isis, Diana, or Luna, the Queen of Heaven, and Great Mother of all life. As such they claimed, and were credited with, power to wield the forces supposed to emanate from the planet over which their deity presided. These were numerous and far-reaching in their effects. The ancient alchemists taught that the human body was a microcosm, in which the heart represented the sun, and the moon the brain. Consequently the lunar orb was regarded as responsible for mental derangement, which belief is yet perpetuated in such words as lunacy and lunatic. Endless instances are recorded by physicians of all periods to prove that the insane become more violent when the moon is at the full. But the brain was not the only human organ to be affected by lunar changes. The very marrow of men's bones, and the weight of their bodies were said to suffer increase or diminution in sympathy with is modifications. In fact, hardly anything escaped the subtle influence of our satellite. The circulation of sap in trees, the quality of the vintage or the harvest corn were alike placed to its account. Therefore timber had to be felled, the juice of the grape expressed, and the harvest gathered, when the appearance of the moon indicated that the right time had arrived. Otherwise failure would follow. The influence of lunar motion upon the tides was observed long before it was explained, and gave countenance to the idea that the moon was responsible for weather conditions. It would be easy to fill a volume with accounts of the planet's supposed powers, so many directions were they believed to extend in. And all these varied potentialities were held to be within the control of witches and wizards, the degenerate and wicked survivors of Luna's once great hierarchy.
Shakespeare refers to this conception in "The Tempest":
"A witch; and one so strong
She could control the moon-make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power."
That such occult forces might actually be seized upon, and controlled by human beings was a belief as widespread as it was ancient, and the student of religion will have no difficulty in tracing it to its source. Water is everywhere the symbol of the motherhood of God. Whether this be personified as Venus, or as Mary, the essential characteristics are the same. The Mother of the God of Love is the queen of the sea, and the patroness of sailors. Her colour is the ocean blue. The Power of God moves upon her waters, and is reflected therein, causing material phenomena to be manifested. The name of Buddha's mother, Maya or illusion, conveys the same idea of unsubstantiality, and is perfectly symbolised by the seemingly actual forms imaged in the bosom of deep water which are not only unreal, but inverted. Many other examples might be given, but these will suffice. The sacred element was believed to be obedient to the priests and priestesses who served the goddess personifying both water and the moon that controlled the tides.
♥ Reginald Scott tells us it was believed that witches "could sail in an eggshell, a cockle or messel-shell, through and under the tempestuous seas." But their favourite vessel was certainly the riddle or sieve, which was one of the emblems of Isis, and as such is often depicted on Gnostic gems. It will be remembered that it was upon a riddle the goddess collected the scattered limbs of her husband Osiris, after he had been slain and dismembered by his enemy Set, known to the Greeks as Typhon. The Christian Church, following her settled policy of placing the Gentile gods in Hell, transferred the Sieve of Isis to Satan, who, in is own person, she made representative of practically all the ancient deities other than Jehovah, whether they were male or female. An article so readily available, and with such a history as the ubiquitous riddle, was naturally regarded as a most favourable instrument for bearing the devotees of Satan-formerly the priestesses of Isis-upon the waters which were her sacred symbol, and even for raising the devil himself.
And when we refer to Satan's activities on the waters, we are reminded of another link between ancient cosmogony and the devil of Christian dualism. For in his familiar cognomen, "Old Nick," we recognise the ocean and rived god Nicksa, or Nixas, who possessed the attributes common to Neptune and Isis, and was formerly worshipped on the Baltic shores. Amid the terrible tempests that tore those gloomy seas, their presiding deity naturally loomed forth as an enemy to mankind, and was readily identified as the Prince of the Power of the Air, who led the witches and warlocks in their wild flights, and delegated to them the ruling of the storm.
The earliest ecclesiastical law in England, the Liber Penitentialis of St. Theodore (Archbishop of Canterbury 668-690), was directed against those who by invoking fiends (i.e. the ancient gods) cause storms.
In the Capitaluria of Charlemagne, more than a hundred years later, the death penalty is decreed against such as byt means of the the devil disturb the air and excite tempests. And Pope Innocent VIII in his Bull (Summis desiderantes affectibus) of 1484 explicitly charges sorcerers with such practice.
♥ From the earliest ages to the present day the terror of the Great Unseen has haunted the lives of primitive peoples. The destructive forces of Nature and the many troubles of man have suggested that the course of events is governed by demons, or at best, by hostile deities. The spiritual foe is invisible, and cannot be fought by material means, so spiritual weapons must be devised, and the art of magic is evolved. The weapons of spell and incantation are formed, and adapted to meet the emergencies of every day, and since the protective formulæ soon become so numerous that only the most essential can be memorised by the ordinary man, the priest magician is called into being with specialised training and knowledge. Under his influence demonological religions sooner or later pass into dualistic form, and good as well as evil spirits are recognised. Then the gods arise from the darkness, and are invoked by the magician to aid him in his battle with the powers of inferno. The divine aid is granted and gladly accepted, by man, having tasted of power, will not be subservient even to a god, and devises new, and more scientific weapons to control the greater beings whose presence he now recognises.
♥ It was believed by the Akkadian Chaldean that by means of certain ritual and incantations man could command the demons, and even constrain the lesser deities to obey his will, and that the supernatural power necessary for the control of the spirits might be derived at his discretion from divine or diabolic sources. Indeed, he recognised that at the fountain-head good and evil were one, for in the fragmentary records that still preserve the ancient creed we see "odious demons, like Namtar, and propitious gods opposed to the demons like Nin-dar, both emanating from Mul-ge" (Lenormant). When the Akkadian sought divine aid he applied to the priests who derived their power from the greater gods. This power was obtained by supplication, to compulsion, and was directed solely to beneficent ends.
♥ The Magic Magism of the ancient Medes was largely based on the Chaldaio-Assyrian religion, and helps us still further to understand the foundation on which mediæval witchcraft was built. For the Medians not only postulated two deities, representing the good and evil principles, as emanating from a common parent, Zarvana-akarana-but paid equal homage to them at the altars. Incantation and sorcery were greatly developed in this creed. A book attributed to the Magus Osthanes was circulated in Greece about the time of the Median wars, which, from what we know of it, seems to have taught, as the supreme secret of the caste of the Magi, invocation of the dead and the infernal spirits.
♥ Lenormant has pointed out the striking connection between Chaldean and Median Magism and Finnish mythology and magic.
..Finland can help us to penetrate the mists of time that obscure the magism of Chaldea. As in Akkadia, the priest of magic was distinguished sharply from the malevolent sorcerer who was thought of as abusing the supreme secrets and misusing them. An absolute power, for good or for evil, was thought to reside in incantations and magic rites. "The earth and the air, the visible and invisible regions, water and fire, were subject to the power of spells; they brought the dead back to torment the living; even even acted upon the most powerful gods, neutralised their influence, or exercised a sort of constraint over them.
In Finnish poetry describing hyperbolically the effects of these sorceries we meet with the Cat, and, as was so often the case in later witchcraft, it is the means of transportation. That it should be so regarded in occultism is certainly remarkable, since everything in ordinary life contradicted the possibility of employing the Cast as a beast of burden. Its small size alone negatives such an idea, and even if we imagine it suitably enlarged, its temperament and intense love of freedom would prove an insuperable obstacle. But the explanation is that because of its supposed power of clairvoyance it represents the flight of thought.
♥ There is no trace in the Egyptian writings of belief in the elementary spirits that the Chaldeans attempted to propitiate, or exorcise, or control. The magic of the Egyptians had an entirely different basis, and developed from the doctrine of an Infinite One from whom proceeded a graded hierarchy of beings, each approaching nearer to earth than the last. According to this system it was possible for man by occult science and purgative ritual to rise towards Divinity, and become so identified with it as to obtain control of the powers of the lower emanations.
♥ The Egyptian placed great faith in the power of a living cat to protect him from all kinds of evil, natural or supernatural. But if he was so unfortunate as not to possess one of these animal amulets, he had resource to charms and spells and words of power, or in later times to invocation of the gods. Since any demon might annoy or injure him in his unprotected state, he prayed to Ra, who in the form of a cat had destroyed the wicked Apep, to ward off the evil spirits; and he informed that deity of their misdeeds.
As he meditated on the pantheon of the gods, he was often led to make his appeal to a particular deity, by recalling some episode on the divine one's legendary past that formed a sympathetic link with his own problem.
♥ The Egyptians considered spoken words as powerful weapons which could be wielded by the dead as strongly as by the living. Budge tells us that "The Kau, or Doubles, of the dead who had learned to utter words correctly, and who knew the proper tones to employ in uttering them, were in a position to go where they pleased and to do what they liked, for no god, spirit, fiend, or devil, and no inanimate object, could help obeying the commands which they turned."
Therefore the Egyptian formulæ were directed not only to securing the good things of this life, but to making sure the safety and happiness of the disembodied soul. In the text of Unas, which was written towards the end of the Vth Dynasty, many such spells may be found, and several chapters of the Theban and Saite Books of the Dead consist wholly of spells and incantations. As the Nigritian protects himself with amulets hung around his person ere he will set forth on a journey, so when the Egyptian departed this life, amulets were placed upon his embalmed body and his soul set forth on the unknown path fortified with incantations learnt on earth. Since the best results were thought to be effected by combining talisman and incantation, numerous small steles were made of granite and basalt, and engraved with magical formulæ were made for the protection of both living and dead. Towards the close of the XXVIth Dynasty it became customary to use these as house talismans, and upon them was sculptured a figure of Horus the Child, who, thus invoked, was believed to protect the household. Many examples of this talisman may be found in European Museums. They are generally known as the "Cippi of Horus." The Cat incantation ..is engraved on the largest and most important of these Cippi, usually called the "Metternich Stele," which was dug up in Alexandria in 1828, and was made during the reign of Nectanebus I, between 378 B.C. and 360 B.C. Budge says: "This stele represented the power to protect man possessed by all the divine beings in the universe, and, however it was placed, it formed an impassable barrier to every spirit of evil, and to every venomous reptile." Either alone, or together with the Cat of flesh and blood, the stele protected the household from all ill.
♥ The sacred cat is described as possessing "the head of Ra, the eyes of the Uræus, the nose of Thoth, the ears of Neb-er-tcher, the mouth of Tem, the neck of Neheb-ka, the breast of Thoth, the heart of Ra, the hands of the gods, the belly of Osiris, the thighs of Menthu, the legs of Khensu, the feet of Amen-Horus, the haunches of Horus, the soles of the feet of Ra, and the bowels of Meh-urit." (Budge).
♥ Here the Cat would seem to be Isis in her feline form as Bast. The "mighty word" is, therefore, probably the secret name which she conjured from Ra on that occasion when, by means of a magical spell, she created a serpent whose bite caused him an agony she alone could cure. Ra had many names, but it was his hidden title that Isis thought, and finally forced from the suffering god. This name with all the supernatural powers its possession conferred passed from his breast to hers, still concealed from all other gods, even as it was from men. The legend of Ra and Isis was probably an effort to explain the newly accepted Chaldean doctrine that since even the gods were subject to law, it was possible for the man who gained knowledge of law to bend the higher beings to his will. Isis herself had shown the way. The Alexandrian writers say that Egyptians claimed to be able to constrain the gods to obey their wishes, and manifest themselves to sight. The gods could not resist the effect of their evocations and magic formulæ if he were called by his true name. "They not only called the god by name," says M. Maury, "but if he refused to appear they threatened him."
♥ The ancient Scandinavian goddess of Love and Beautiful known as Freya, was the daughter of the Waen-god Niorder, and the Earth-mother Nerthus, and was the sister of Freyer, or Fro, the god of sunshine, whilst her husband was Odur, the summer sun. She was blue-eyed and golden-haired.
"The loveliest Goddess she in Heaven, by all
Most honoured after Frea, Odin's wife."
("Balder dead," Matthew Arnold)
She has been identified with Venus, and to her worshippers she was pre-eminently the goddess of fruitful love. Therefore her car was appropriately drawn by the most affectionate and fecund of all domestic animals, the Cat, and it is significant that a pair of these creatures is employed. Her connections with the sun, of which the Cat was the symbol, should also be noted. As the goddess of Love and Beauty she blessed all lovers who sought her by prayer and sacrifice. Her temples were numerous, and maintained by her votaries until comparatively recent times, the last, which was in Magdeburg, Germany, being destroyed by Charlemagne.
♥ Like the Cat, Freya, although so closely connected with love and beauty, was not merely a pleasure-loving, ease-seeking being, but when aroused, could don her armour and fight with the best. She often led the Valkyries to the battlefield, and when she headed their ranks was known as Valfreya, and claimed the right to choose half of the slain, leaving the other half as Odin's portion. The joys of the heaven to which she transported her chosen heroes were so intense that their wives and sisters often braced the horrors of battle to share with them the hope of being among the selected dead.
♥ But in southern Germany [Freya] was known as Hel, or Holda, and, though still kindly, and beautiful, represented the winter season, covering the earth with her shining, icy armour to shield it from all harm in the months of trial. In this aspect she was not only the goddess of Life, but also of Death. But Death was not to her worshippers a ghastly, grinning skeleton, but a loving mother recalling her tired children to sleep in her bosom.
♥ The Edda of the Scandinavians contains but few and scattered references to this once great goddess, but from it we may learn how Odin gave her power over the nine worlds, or, according to another version, over the ninth world.* Being goddess of both life and death, she was pictured half corpse-like, half life-like in colouring, much as was the Brahmanical goddess of Nature, Kali, the Mother. Originally, even in her darker aspect, she was no destructive power, but merely reigned over her abode in the lower world, and there received the spirits of the dead, when, after a long and weary journey, they arrived in Haljar.
* May we see an allusion to these nine worlds in the fabled nine lives of the cat?
♥ Christianity completed the degradation of Hel. The new creed acknowledged no goddess of death, but identified Hel with its own hideous place of punishment, transforming the deity into an abode. Freya herself, like most all the ancient divinities, was branded as a demon, or witch, and banished to the mountain tops of the lands that had formerly held her sacred. She figures in mediæval German stories as old and wrinkled, insatiable and cruel. Her priestesses share her doom. No longer the beautiful daughters of the Mother of Life; they are now deformed, withered, and wicked, fit offspring of Hel. But even so they are not unrecognisable, for the cats that once drew Freya's chariot have become the steeds on which the witches ride through the air, or their companions in daily life, which are said by the Christians to be attendant devils.
♥ We need not here recount how the priesthood of the new religion by torture and murder destroyed the last faithful followers of the older creed. So thoroughly did they carry out their work of extermination that its very tenets are obscure and doubtful to-day. But lingering Superstition still points her finger down the smoke-dimmed pathway, and here and there a distorted form is faintly discerned amid the gloom. One such has been noted by the Rev. R. Walsh, who, when travelling by water, found his messmates "were firmly persuaded of the ominous import of four things in a ship," the occurrence of which they considered as "inevitably connected with disastrous consequences-sailing form port on a Friday, having on board a black cat, and taking as a passenger either a pregnant woman or a clergyman." Mr. Walsh interest himself to enquire the reason for antipathies to such apparently harmless and inoffensive things, so unconnected with evil effects, and he was "generally informed that they were known to be unlucky; but they could assign no reason except for the last, and that was that Satan, being 'the Prince of the Power of the Air,' had of course the direction of the winds, and as a clergyman is his greatest enemy, he always visits the crew who receive him with all the infliction of his elementary agents-calms, contrary winds, and storms."
..Clearly, the reason is a deeper one. Those who embark on the mystic Water, Mother of Life, on the sacred name-day of its presiding deity (for Freya is one with Venus), carrying on board a woman who bears within her a concrete manifestation of the Life Principle personified by the goddess, or the animal sacred to Creation and Reproduction, or the priest consecrated to the service of the Divine Mother (whether she be named Mary, or Venus or Isis, is immaterial), have, consciously or unconsciously, invoked the Mysteries. Not only have they to combat with evil. Far more than the mere negative goodness is required of them, and if they fail, retribution quickly follows their presumption. Prudence obviously forbids such tempting of the Unknown Power, and the sailor prefers not to tamper with the sacred symbols of the Great Mother on whose bosom his life is spent.
♥ It is a remarkable fact that the Cat is never mentioned in the canonical books that compose the Bible, but we may suppose the omission to be partially explained by the intolerant hatred of the Jews for everything their Egyptian rulers and task-masters had venerated as sacred. Or we may attribute it to the wandering life the peculiar people led so long, which made it impossible for them to know cats as household friends. But more probably some trait of their national character was responsible, for there is not a single instance recorded in the Bible of the Jews making a pet or companion of any animal, though the nations which surrounded them did so.
♥ It has been plausibly suggested that our English word "Puss" is derived from the name of the goddess "Pasht," a form of the Egyptian Isis, and that we therefore pronounce the sacred name whenever we call our feline friend by this title.
♥ The mediæval artist, Baroccio, had perhaps been contemplating this paradoxical parable when he was inspired to paint his conception of the Madonna, entitled "Our Lady of the Cat," and by its means to point a finger that should direct the student's gaze to the essential unity of past and present faiths, however greatly they may differ in outward form. We may learn form his direction how the ancient symbolism of the lunar Virgin Mother, and her solar Son, whom she cradles in the crescent of her arms, or lays to rest in the night sky, was freely adopted and adapted by the Christian Church so that to-day the chief emblems of the Virgin Mary are the Sun, Moon, and Stars (Rev. ii I: Cant. vi, 10).
♥ As the Moon-goddess of the Athenians, Pallas is sometimes represented as riding on a lion, the head of the feline tribe, and holding her infant son in her arms, and she was invoked in her festivals as the "One Mother of God." We may compare this with the titles accorded by the Christian Churches to Mary, and the identification of Jesus with "the lion tribe of Judah," and the "Sun of Righteousness."
♥ It has been suggested that the world-wide game known as Cat's Cradle took its rise from the Christian Mysteries, and that the name is a corruption of "cratch cradle," meaning manger, or rock cradle, and referring to the manger wherein the Holy Child was laid; but it is certain that the game is far older than Christianity, and it seems probable that it originated in an ancient solar rite. Everywhere the underlying purpose appears to have been to control the Divine Cat of the Sun by means of sympathetic magic. In hot climates the cradle of string invited him to rest from his activities, whilst in Arctic regions its meshes were a trap to entangle his feet, and so postpone his dreaded departure. Professor Starr collected over sixty different designs in Cats' Cradles from among the Congo tribes, and Professor Fraser has described how the Esquimaux of Iglulik play the game when the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinks lower and lower in the Arctic sky, with the object of preventing his disappearance. Missionaries to certain parts find a knowledge of it essential since the natives are not only experts in the game, but regard it as a test of intelligence.
The parable of the Virgin and the Cat may be also recognised in the old folk-tale of Cinderella, which, in some of its variants, is entitled "The Hearth Cat."
The heroine represents the Roman modification of Diana known as Vesta, the goddess who guarded hearth and home, or the priestess, who impersonated her. We find her robing herself in a mantle made from cat-skins-just as the witches of later times arrayed themselves for the performance of their mystic rites-and thus being enabled to attend the ball, i.e. the Sabbat gathering.
The story of Cinderella's early fate shows her darkened by smoke and ashes, and seems to point to an aspect of the Virgin which has not received the consideration it deserves. The text from Canticles, "I am black, but comely," has been held by certain devout writers to describe the Virgin Mary, who, as the womb of Nature, is black, like the Night sky that gives birth to the moon and stars. The imagery helps us to understand why the cat that accompanies the Daughters of Diana (or Cinderella) is of that hue, and the following paragraph from Jennings still further elucidates the matter:
"Black is the Saturnian colour-also that of the Egyptian Isis. Under the strange head of the embodiment of Deity under darkness, the following remarkable facts may be considered: the Virgin and Child are depicted black at the Cathedral at Moulins, at the famous Chapel of the Virgin in Loretto, in the Church of the Annunciation in Rome, at the Church of St. Lazaro and the Church of St. Stephen of Genoa, at that of St. Francisco at Pisa, at the Church of Brixen in the Tyrol, at a church in (and at the cathedral of) Augsburgh, where the black figures are as large as life, at the Borghese Chapel in Rome, at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the Pantheon, and in a small chapel at St. Peter's, on the right-hand side, on entering near the door."
The darkness of the Virgin, and the black cat representing her, is not the darkness of evil, but of the Uncreate, of the Great Deep, and the Unknown God. It is the Limitless, Formless and Inexpressible, that, by antithesis, is the One True Light.
♥ Indeed, the belief is still strongly prevalent in Celtic districts that May kittens ought never to be reared because they bring snakes into the house, whilst a generally distributed modification of this idea is that May kittens make troublesome, ill-behaved cats.
"May chets
bad luck begets
and sure to make dirty cats,"
is the dictum of an old Huntingdonshire proverb that even to-day makes its influence widely felt at least in country places, and is responsible for the slaughter of many wee innocents.
To trace the origin of so strange a belief we must turn to Celtic mythology: from it we learn that the first May was the day called Beltaine, sacred to Bile, the god of death.
♥ We may gain another viewpoint of the Corn Cat by turning to astronomical symbology. The brightest star in the Constellation of Virgo is called "an ear of corn" (Gk. Στάχυς (stachys); Lat. Spica). Stachys has an extended meaning, and is used also for "offspring" in a general sense. Here also the reference is to the Seed of the Woman, and we never find Virgo pictorially represented without the ear of con in her hand. Indeed, the importance assumed by it has sometimes been so great as to completely overshadow the bearer. Virgo has sunk into such insignificance as to become know as Ki*, or the Constellation of the Spike. This Heavenly Corn, the Spica Virginus, the offspring of the Virgin, has, like its early shadow, a Guardian Cat. The White Cat Moon, the Cleanser of the Night, or mârǵâras who disperses the shadows by her silvery beams, is the Protector of the Celestial Corn that the grey mice of night seek to devour and destroy.
*Ki was the Euphratean name for Virgo.
♥ Various derivations of the word Sabbath have been suggested, but perhaps none is quite convincing. In Hebrew the grammatical inflections show that it is a feminine form, properly shabbat-t for shabbāt-t. The root carries no implication of resting in the sense of enjoying repose, it in transitive forms means to "sever," to "terminate," and intransitively means to "desist," to "come to an end." It cannot be translated "the day of rest," but the grammatical for of shabbath suggests a transitive sense-"the divider," and would seem to denote that the Sabbath divides the month, or, in the case of the witches' quarterly festival, the year. The new moon and the Sabbath are almost invariably mentioned in connection with each other in the older portion of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so great was the joy occasioned by the reappearance of the crescent, that it became to the Jews the type of religious festivity in general. But the full moon also occupied a prominent position of religious significance, so that when the great agricultural festivals (which appear to have been originally sabbats) were fixed to take place on set days, the full moon was chosen for their celebration. For similar reasons the ancient Hindus appointed the times of the new and full moon to be days of sacrifice; and called the eve of the offering upavasatha.
♥ To them the moon was represented by her age-old Egyptian symbol of the Cat, so this animal was introduced into the Sabbat mysteries. The celebrants of these rites often costumed themselves in skins and masks that they might impersonate the Cat, or some other animal, effectively (as described in the chapter on Witches in Cat Form), the President being arrayed to represent the animal symbolising the deity whose benevolence it was specially desired to invoke.
In later years, when the Church had enthroned Satan as the god of this world, and identified witches as his servants, the President was formally entitled the "Devil," and the twelve officials attending him received the same complimentary designation; a nomenclature which had created much confusion. The group thus formed was known as a Coven (i.e. conventicle), and the rule which governed the number composing it had evident reference to the thirteen lunar months of the year, and was common to the organisation everywhere. But it apparently suggested to the Christians the fatal number formed by Christ and His chosen Twelve, one of whom was the traitor responsible for the Master's death. Thus it wads a cause of offence.
♥ It is probable that on those occasions when the masked dances of the Dianic cult were performed in caves rather than upon mountain tops the idea was to invoke the goddess in her aspect as Hecate; and that the use of an underground sanctuary had originally been suggested by the practice of cave burial. The ritual seems to have been, at least in part, for the purpose of enabling the living to commune wit the shadows. Therefore Hallow-e'en, when, according to Celtic belief, the souls of the departed hover over the earth, was a day of tremendous activity among the Daughters of Diana. On this annual day of festival, the dead, released from the dark temple sepulchres, joined their faithful priestesses, whose bodily bonds were also loosened for its meet celebration. Hecate herself would appear among them, and head a procession of witches and sorceresses, "good neighbours" and ghosts. The company, mounted on tabby-cats, which had been transformed for the occasion into coal-black steeds, would gallop along the roads, or, bestriding flying besoms, would sweep through the air.
♥ This Celtic Hecate became known as Nicneven when a system blending the faiths of the Celts and the Goths on the subject was accepted, and her cult is said to have survived with considerable vigour in Scotland until the eighteenth century. But in England the Dianic cult was dying even before the commencement of the mediæval persecution which so cruelly destroyed its votaries, and left us only distorted fragments of its tenets.
Perhaps just because the Church had adopted so much of the ritual and creed of solar and lunar theogonies, it was furiously energetic against those customs it failed to absorb, and all through the Middle Ages, not only witches, but cats, were persecuted and tortured by the Christian organisations. The older religions had held these animals sacred, and the churches dreaded a revival of their faiths, and did not want the populace to see the connection between Virgin Mary and the Virgin Diana, and to realise that the new religion was the same in essentials as the old.
♥ In all ages, and among all peoples, the belief has prevailed with varying intensity that Nature was the custodian of secret forces, which might be seized and used by the initiate, either to benefit others, or to destroy them, or for such personal purposes as love, and the acquirement of riches and power. No nation is, or ever has been, without its soothsayers, sorcerers, and magicians; whilst above and beyond the half-hidden creed of which they are the representatives, each nation boasts a religious faith, with terrors and aspirations confirmed by signs and miracles; or tenets disclosed by supernatural messengers and means.
Whatever the stage of development a country may have attained, whether infancy, or decrepit age, or manhood's prime, barbarous or civilised, conqueror 0r enslaved, in all stages of knowledge or ignorance, a most remarkable similarity in both religious and magical phenomena is forced upon the observer's notice.
♥ But whenever the Deity is conceived of as an arbitrary Tyrant instead of as an All-loving Parent, religion becomes the potent and terrible instrument of evil.
♥ Between "the fierceness of the wrath of God" (Rev. xiv. 19) and the "great wrath" of the devil (Rev. xii. 12), Christians lived in a state of abject and continuous fear. No wonder they were cruel. Their deity was to the full as unmoral as their devil; but they believed that ultimately he was destined to prove the victor, and after his triumph would burn his foes alive in the lake of fire and brimstone, whence "the smoke of their torment" would ascend "for ever and ever" to his throne (Rev. xic. II).
So they sought to please him by anticipating the vengeance that he jealously claimed as his own prerogative (Rom. xii. 19), and even expected to fain a high place in Heaven for themselves by hastening the perdition of their brothers and sisters. Oh, God! what a culmination to man's painful search for Light!
During the reign of the famous British demonologist King James I, who, in the Act relating to the Gunpowder Plot, is described as "the most great, learned, and religious king" that ever reigned in England, the Christian Church made a determined onslaught on the fragmentary and regraded survivals of the once noble, profoundly occult religion of Diana Triformis.
Thus left to a popular revival of interest in the darker aspect of occultism, for it was as Hecate alone that the uninitiated, irreverent bigots glimpsed the threefold goddess when they sought to tear aside the veil that covered her. "Witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate's offerings," said Shakespeare, voicing the belief of his own times, and it soon became a fashionable study among courtiers and place-seekers. The angle from which the new students approached it, automatically negatived the possibility of any revelation of its higher esoteric significance, whilst the bitter persecution instigated by the Christian churches, brought forth further distortion and concealment of its true tenets.
♥ As Eliphas Levi pointed out, "superstition is derived from a Latin word which signified survival," and "is the dead body of Religious Rite." Witchcraft was a survival of the worship of the feminine Principle of God-of the Eternal Virgin-Motherhood of the Creator; and inseparably connected with it was the Cat, the symbol of this aspect of the Divine. Hence the feline form is represented on the apex of the Sistrum that Isis carried in her hand, and the Cat was the chosen transformation of the great Diana (or Hecate) herself in her hour of peril, when the terrible Typhon forced the gods to hide their divinity in animal shapes, and flee into Egypt. (This legend probably means that owing to the degeneration of humanity Religion had to be veiled in symbolism from profane eyes.) Having assumed feline form, Diana took refuge in the moon, and all lunar goddesses in different countries and ages were inseparately connected with the Cat. Witches, once their priestesses, adored the moon with undiminished reverence, so that the Cat was bound to retain its importance in the cult of Dianism, even after the terrible degradation of Mother-worship.
To explain the downfall of this ancient and beautiful faith, we must remember that the Cat, either by her own multiple nature, or more obviously, when coiled in a circle, like the changing moon she represented, showed forth the Mother of Nature as All. She was Venus the Beautiful, and Venus the Terrible, the Goddess of Life and Death, whose Eastern name Al-Husa, or Huza, stands for the Egyptian "Divine Woman," or Isis. Al-Husa means the hyacinth or lily, hence the Light, which, being the soul of Matter or Maya is the shadow of God, the very opposite of God's Actuality.
So long as Religion honoured the Real through its manifestation or shadow, and accepted, or even propitiated, the evil and finite, because they were the necessary instruments of the Creator, all was well. But when homage became directed from the Unknown Darkness that was Spiritual Light, to the visible material Light of Nature, which in Reality is Darkness and Delusion, the falsified conception speedily resulted in Black Magic and Devil Worship, with all its accompanying horrors.
That which is Real is Immutable. The unreal is distinguishable by its lack of stability. The moon is always changing form, and shape-shifting is one of the powers attributed to the daughters of Diana. Hargrave Jennings claims "the calderon of the witches as, in the original, the vase or urn of the fiery transmigration, in which all the things of the world change."
When we come down to practical affairs the belief in shape-shifting involves the corollary that wounds received by a person when masquerading in the form of an animal, will remain on the body after it has returned to human shape, and this alleged phenomenon is known as repercussion. There are an almost endless number of stories illustrating this particular form of zoanthropy, which are even now current in Scotland, France, Italy, and Germany, but in England such tales are rare, the witches' cat being considered rather as an attendant familiar spirit than as the witch herself in this country.
♥ "..Is it a remnant of the doctrine of transmigration? However, the notion fully accounts for the horror the people feel at the idea of killing a cat."
The Copts are followers of the Eutychian "heresy," or Jacobite sect of Christianity, but are supposed by some writers to be descended from the ancient Egyptians, as certain of their ceremonies resemble the customs of those people. It is noteworthy that chivalrous feelings of protection are aroused in their breasts by the thought that a fellow-human may be abroad as a helpless cat, and stands forth in striking contrast from the murderous instinct of European Christians in like circumstances. I leave the former cases to speak for themselves of the achievement of centuries of Christianity in conjunction with the then highest known for of civilisation. Was the Master quite forgotten? It wold seem so. The Churches had slain Him, and the animal that was the age-old symbol of the Christ was persecuted and slain, too.
♥ Although modern investigation confirms the idea that the monstrous accusations brought against the Templars were untrue, and the confessions that were extracted by torture valueless as evidence, yet it seems fairly clear that the Templars were members of a secret religion which combined the heretical doctrines of the Bogomilians, and the closely connected Luciferans or Satanists. The name of the former signifies in Slavonic tongue "The Friends of God," and the sect believed in a Supreme Deity whose eldest son, Satanael, worshipped by the Jews as Jehovah, created the world after revolting against his father; and whose younger son, Jesus, because man to counteract the wicked work of his brother. The Bogomilians did not venerate the Cross, because they saw it as the instrument of Christ's sufferings. But the Luciferans worshipped God's eldest son, who had power over wealth and worldly happiness. They are said to have adored a black cat as the symbol of Satan, when celebrating their mysteries...
♥ Like the Templars, the Gnostic sect of the Manicheans were accused by their persecutors of many terrible and incredible crimes, and were said to worship the devil in the form of a black cat. They were the disciples of Mani, or Manes, a Persian who was born in Babulonia about A.D. 216, and who is said to have been learned in all the wisdom of the Magians, and to have been physician, astronomer, artist, philosopher, and poet. His teachings, however, are supposed to have been partly derived from books he inherited, written by a Saracen disciple of Empedocles named Scythianus, and treating of the wisdom of Egypt. His gospel, which he first proclaimed about 242, combined its doctrine with ideas borrowed from Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Christianity, and certain of his own originating. His fundamental tenet wads Dualism. He believed Jehovah to be a subordinate Demiurgic minister of Ahriman, the eternal principle of evil. The human race was therefore of Satanic origin, and the powers of darkness, being co-equal with the powers of light, must be placated. Christ or Mithras, the Spirit of Life, resided in the sun by his power, and in the moon by his wisdom, and those who confessed him must renounce Jehovah. The heavenly orbs were the visible symbols of the deity Ormuzd, or the good Principle, and, allowing for the fact that Manichean doctrines have only reached us in the distorted form their enemies bestowed on them, it seems probable that the Cat was honoured by this sect because of its association with the sun and moon, and was representative of Mithras or Christ.
♥ Mr. Churchward has pointed out that the study of the mysteries of the past reveals the fact that "the Druids, the Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Chaldeans of Assyria had all the same religious rites and ceremonies as practised by their priests who were initiated to their Order, and that these were solemnly sworn to keep the doctrines a profound secret from the rest of mankind. All these flowed from one source-Egypt." "It is admitted that the secret system of free Masonry was originally founded on the mysteries of the Egyptian Isis," says Hislop.
♥ The strange religious rituals, at some of which we have been glancing because of the importance given by them to the symbol of the Cat, have for us a more than passing interest, for we are told by modern writers (as e.g. Nesta Webster and Montagu Summers), who have made a study of secret sects and societies, that "these amazing cults, these strange perverted rites which we associate with the Dark Ages, are going on around us to-day. Illuminism, Cabalism, and even Satanism are still realities," says the first-named writer, and the evidence she presents to us seems incontrovertible.