THE WONDERFUL WONDERFUL CAT
For
millenniums men and cats lived one next to the other without one noticing the
existence of the other.Their paths never crossed.Some were hunters and predators.They,the
human beings,used to live from hand to mouth keeping themselves busy with sheep
and goats and the pasture was uninhabited. They would set out with their hunting
companions, the dogs,armed with javelins,bows and arrows in pursuit of new prey.Others
were small animal predators,for the most part noctural,always engaged in the discovery
of something new. It seemed really that men and cats had nothing in common as
long as men didn't begin to have a fixed abode. In Africa they occupied the shores
of the Nile: regularly, during the rainy season, the river would reach high tide
distributing like this it's own water to neighbouring fields. The season having
ended, the land would dry up, becoming arid, and to cover those long periods of
scarcity the ancient Egyptians constructed silos: the first big attractions of
the followers of the cultivation of man: rats and mice. In the meantime, in the
depths of South Africa lived still the little specialist. Of the few mice at this
point left, it somehow managed to find rare examples of them from the african
coasts.
Perhaps it found
the way to the Nile Delta by itself, or perhaps the hunters or the warriors drove
it way over there, we will never know; however, about 4000 years ago the dark
yellow African cat discovered the gigantic silos of the Egyptians and that is
the great Land of Plenty. It remained there, it found the means to be satisfied,
and there it bred. At the beginning it was tolerated by man, then having discovered
it's talents as a mouse hunter, it was this way utilized and in the end it was
elevated to goddess-protector of foods. With that it had begun the fabulous ascent
of the only living being that decided freely to become a domestic animal.
With the Egyptians the tranquil life was an easy thing: like a member of the family
it earned it's own place at the table, and that is a bowl always full of milk.
In the end Bastet, as god of the sun, divinity with a cat head of the god of the
sun, Ra, had his own temple in which a circle of priests took care of its well
being. The cat also symbolized the god of the moon: it was said that in the daytime,
it would imprison the rays of the sun in its eyes which would irradiate them during
the night. The outward appearance of an Egyptian family was tied fast by the number
of its striped or spotted companions: he who could say a considerable number of
male or female cats were his was called rich and powerful. To this end used to
correspond the sumptuousness of the funeral rites of a cat. The external sign
of mourning would consist of shaving one's eyebrows; one would say the deep mourning
was over only when one's eyebrows were regrown. The divinities were buried in
a fitting cemetery. Their bodies were embalmed and protected by special cloths
for mummies, and on the mask, as a sign of mourning, the moustache, the eyes,
and the nose were highlighted. The little mummy was then laid to rest in the coffin
and thus began the beginning of the ultimate ritual by means of the most prestigious
gifts: statuettes, gold or even mummified mice had to accompany them into the
kingdom of the night.
The poor families in the end used to take up collections
with the neighbors to assure the dead a "proper" ceremony. Burial in the cemetery
of Bubastis was quite a special honor. Bastet was deity bastis: all the towers,
the houses, and the bridges would serve as embellishment to the symbol from the
slender head, to the erect ears and to the almond eyes, Bastet. Hundreds of thousands
of men, year after year, used to fulfil their pilgramage to Bubastis, to render
homage to the animal, and as many men used to arrive there to bury their favorite
cat. In the golden age of the worship of the cat, around 800 B.C., the animal
had already changed it's appearance: the color of the fur looked gray and black,
the teeth were smaller and the frame had become more slender. From the timid and
dark yellow wild cat developed the first domestic cat: a breed traceable only
in the ancient Egyptian empire. The Pharaohs were to work things out in such a
way that the cat, acknowledged deity, remained in the borders of their own domain.
Not only was it prohibited to harm a cat, the punishment being death, or directly
kill it, but it was also forbidden to bring it out of the country. The ancestral
cat was not as fertile as our domestic cats of today, for it still followed the
natural reproductive rhythms of its wild ancestors. The heat cycles were less
frequent and the litters were smaller. In
fact, it seems that in the span of seven years one female would be able to give
birth to 28 kittens, probably 4 kittens per litter per year. All that increased
its value and consequently it enriched the impulse of the smugglers to export
some specimens of these clever hunters of mice and rats towards Greece or to Rome.
it is still uncertain if the secret and illicit trade had positive results, or
if it was the same cat to exceed mysteriously the boundaries of Egypt. For two
thousand years it was, however, the god of a people. Then the Egyptian Empire
failed and the god met its end. But not the cat and its successors: they knew
new honors and in the ancient Roman Empire and in Greece, they had new ranks.
In China, "Mao", the cat that is, is the protagonist of valued writings. In Arabia
the cat acquired the same value as a horse. Hinduism imposed and obliged one to
notice each stray cat and to feed it. Buddhism made it rise again on the throne
of divinity like the god Sastht. Of the pet of Mohammed, they say that prophet
may have cut the sleeve of his robe in order not to wake the cat when he got up
from the straw-filled mattress that he used to share with him. Also, the first
pre-Christian monks would show love and warmth for the cat.
The cat was actually
the first living being that had an animal protection law established for it. The
Prince Howel of Galles punished severely the killing of cats. It was again the
cat to be used as valuable merchandise of exchange of the Chinese and Japanese,
versus silk, valuing its skills as a predator of mice. In the space of about 1500
years the cat had conquered the ancient world. Of its own will, it followed man
in every city, adapting itself to each new environment, undergoing only little
outward transformations. In Japan they preferred the white and reds; in China
the flattened muzzle; in Scandanavia the smaller cats; in France long haired cats.
Inwardly it remained nevertheless always the same. A predatory animal that was
able to manage alone. An autonomous being, yet without denying a certain submissiveness.
Then came the decline. At the height of the age of superstitions, around 1200
A.D., the persecutor became the persecuted. The god became the devil. People wh
o, until that moment had venerated and consecrated it with devotion, put it quickly
to the stake.
In the following 450 dark years, our domestic cats payed for
human friendship on pain of death, and with them hundreds of thousands of cat
owners were burned, tortured and stoned to death like witches and sorcerers. The
pitiless fight had exchanged roles: the rats, that used to travel on the fleets,
rapidly multiplied and brought diseases and epidemics. The plague caused carnage:
entire cities were destroyed. Three quarters of the Europeans died, from the middle
of the XIII century until the middle of the XVI century, the epidemic struck without
pity, 25 million men suffered the consequences. Perhaps by chance, at the height
of the period of the plague, the cat regained its power; perhaps it was still
by chance that, a few years after, the "Black Death" began to make less frequent
its victims. It wasn't certainly by chance that men returned to utilize the predator
of rats and mice. The animal would hunt the rodents and would rouse them with
extreme ease also in the homes of man. The French were the first to re-evaluate
the precious predator, the farmers first, absolutely, the city dwellers then followed.
But in the end "Le Chat", "El gato" and "The Cat" won back its place also near
the Spanish and English nobility.
When the first European ships landed in
America the cats were also aboard: together with the pioneers they occupied the
"Wild West" and together with the Mormons they distributed themselves on the plains.
As long as they did not multiply rapidly, they were extremely good exchange commodities,
in the South a cat used to cost a piece of gold. The second fabulous rise of the
cat had begun in the early 18th century: the antique Egyptian features of the
orange-gray-black striped cat transformed themselves in numerous variations. The
muzzle became thus pointed and round, with the nose more or less flattend. From
god it was elevated to an artistic symbol in poetry and in painting. In the meantime,
its service as a predator of mice had almost run out. It had a touch of independence
left in a universe of rules and regulations as well as a touch of naturalness
in the artificiality in our world full of concrete. A delightful tale versus a
reality. A modern tale versus the oppressive concrete.
Thanks very much to my friend Vincenzo Gioia for translation from Italian to English.
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