The Cat of Judah

The Revelation of John 5:5 – ‘‘and one of the elders said unto me, Weep not; behold, the Lion that is of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath overcome to open the book and the seven seals thereof.’’

I was thumbing through that much-vaunted compendium of Semitic mythology based on the provenance, life, times and supposed sayings of the famed Nazarene, when the section of scripture quoted above skittered past my vision’s purview.

The particular segment I’ve bolded, which analogizes the likeness of said Nazarene to the king of beasts and monarch of the jungle; as well as most fictionalized, romanticized and indeed deified of all members of the cat-family – revealed to me how inordinately respected and loved the lion, taxonomically named Panthera Leo, has become in most theological and spiritual traditions.

This is especially true of the maned variety, which are almost always and exclusively male.

Does it tell you something about how pervasive and subliminally insidious ‘‘male-favoritism’’ and patriarchy can be in the ‘‘revealed texts’’? – But then, that’s a theme for another day and essay.

Returning to the subject at hand, pertaining cats and their place in organised religion:

At the other end of the concatenation, and in conspicuously sharp contrast to the favorable treatment accorded the regal and dignified lion – stands the contempt, resentment and even violent hostility reserved for the domestic cat.

Domestic cats, also the smallest and thus least physically imposing of the feline family, seem to have committed a crime akin to the original sin, occupying a place in the annals of Semitic scripture (the Quran & Hebrew/Christian writings) that threatens to fall even lower than the much-loathed serpent.

To be sure, in its treatment by devout believers – the cat is hissed at, barked after, gleefully set dogs upon and generally approached with an almost instinctive distaste – it’s fate suspended perhaps a bare inch above the serpent’s, whose very sighting holds a scripturally-sanctioned death-warrant; as immortally recorded at Genesis 3:15 – ‘‘and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’’

But while the serpent had its persecution coming to it, even earned it in a sense, since both its crimes and their associated penalty are scripturally codified – the almost comparable ill-treatment of the domestic cat is a near mystery; and a phenomenon as disturbing as it is bemusing.

Why do Christians and Jews (Judaists?) abhor the cat so much?

Samuel Langhorne Clemens – that quintessential American humorist, who wrote under the more famous nom-de-plume of Mark Twain, renders the phenomenon in a very telling and dramatic scene in his timeless tale, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Below is an excerpt from the book –

‘‘… and then there came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most melancholy caterwauling. The raising of a neighboring window disturbed him. A cry of – ‘Scat! You devil!’ and the crash of an empty bottle against the back of his aunt’s woodshed brought him wide awake, and a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the ‘ell’ on all fours. He ‘meow’d’ with caution once or twice, as he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and thence to the ground.’’

Caterwauling, just so you know, is the almost human cry domestic cats, especially the homeless and ‘wilder’ sort, make in the depth of night – very comparable to the innocent wail of a human infant or baby.

While I cannot speak on the behavior authoritatively, I am told the sound is an attempt by female cats on heat (in estrus) to notify males of their location, hence facilitating the reproductive process.

An alternative postulate holds that it’s an alarm raised ‘‘in yearning’’ for the pack, by the isolated and thus lonely individual.

One cannot say for sure. But what is certain is that many of us have been raised to superstitiously associate this caterwauling with a bad omen – much akin to the hoot of the distant owl believed to presage death himself, or the crossing of one’s morning path by a black cat.

Disturbed by the notion of black people conferring ill-omen on a black cat?

This peculiar African custom must of course be understood in the context of a pre-colonial African hinterland and society.

Because our people hadn’t encountered the amoral (immoral?) European yet, they had no politicized and classificatory system of race and color. 

To them, black and/or white were simply variants in the natural scheme, not categories of identity by which to objectify and denigrate human groups and persons.

The more justifiable concern would be why this African aversion to the black cat persists to the present day, well aware as we ought to be of our own ‘racial kinship’ to it?

To return to cats and religion: Interestingly, the howling at the full-moon characteristic of the dog-family isn’t held in equally bad taste – a habit simply tolerated with the mild irritation of an innocuous nuisance.

For long, I’d thought this recoiling from the caterwaul was a remnant of some native African spiritual-custom that’d survived the colonially-heralded advent of Christianity into the continent’s hinterland; since nowhere in Hebrew scripture is this atavistic paranoia toward the cat warranted.

Indoctrination does indeed elude death – because to this day, the innocent sound of a sad cat sorrowing outside my bedroom window after midnight is enough to send me into a trepidation of cold sweats and shivers; funereal visions forming in my mind while desperately muttered supplications and hastily fabricated Hail-Mary(s) rise unbidden from my tongue.   

Is the wretch announcing my impending death? – I oft can’t help but wonder.

After reading Twain’s book however, I realized this pathological fear of cats wasn’t just African or ‘‘indigenous’’, but actually was somewhat universal, multicultural and cross-geographical.

There could be some salt to the theory that our enslaved brethren ‘exported’ the belief to the Americas across the middle-passage, since even Twain’s books, corroborated by many other sources, are noticeably rife with allusions to ‘‘primitive’’ African superstitions like witchcraft, in the dialogue-attribution to his slave-characters.

But that would be believably true if Islam, which arguably had very little contact with African ‘primitivism’ in its formative years, didn’t have a similar strand running through its psychology.

In one anecdote contained in the Islamic Hadith, which relates the doings of the Prophet and his companions – Mohammad himself tells how he would rather ‘‘cut off the long-sleeve of my garment, instead of allowing it to touch and be defiled by a cat’’.

This anecdote certainly happens before Islam’s golden-age and its associated Jihads and attendant conquests of foreign lands and people, not excluding the African north.

Also, since this is just a recount of the Prophet’s own life, we aren’t too sure if his behavior in said anecdote was part of some implied, obscure instruction he’d received from the angel Gabriel as part of the revealed recitation.

One is therefore left befuddled as to the origins of this strange and peculiar ‘tradition’ – this ‘‘puss(y)-phobia’’.

Why does this otherwise alluring, purring and prepossessing creature inspire such visceral and rabid terror in grown men and women?

When does the fluffy tubby transition from a cozy and cuddly ‘‘kitty’’ with round, lustrous and irresistibly beguiling eyes (Puss-in-Boots style), to a furred fiend come from the pits of Hades herself to haunt living men?

At what point do the poor fellows cease to be woman’s best friend?

Could it have been made-up and foisted upon Christian (and Islamic) practice?

Is it a spill-over from, or the cultural offspring of Christianity’s well-documented consorting with ‘‘pagan’’ peoples and their heathen ways?

Is it the way of the world to not only withhold reverence from the unmuscled – but to also proceed, unabashed and unrepentant, in disdaining them?

Is it our wont to resent the smaller, feebler members of any given family? 

Do our cultures – and this not excepting Judeo-Christianity with its numerous protestations against being privy or kindred to this world – detest the cat for his stuntedness, while simultaneously extolling the lion for his sturdiness despite the two beasts sharing genetic-material in excess of 95 percent?

If one isn’t mentally lazy or spiritually cowardly, they may even be tempted, out of a healthy curiosity and suspicion, to extend this skepticism to many of the several other unscriptural elements of Christian tradition – such as Christmas, Easter and materially wealthy pastors/apostles.

Perhaps the very scriptures themselves fall victim to the same flaw? Namely – that of later and ‘‘uninspired’’ additions and incorporations?

But who could begin to question, let alone know the ways of the Most High?

We’ve been dismissively told, with a solid finality and in tones that certainly broach no argument – that said ways are unfathomably enigmatic (the adjective oft employed is mysterious, methinks).

This is why my next work of fiction will perhaps explore this impious character – The CAT OF JUDAH – and one hopes that titling it eponymously won’t summon a Papal Fatwa upon the inexpensive (and fairly vacant) head of the prospective author.



***

PS:
Perhaps the cat’s religious resentment is only superseded by the virulent hatred our ‘good and pious Christian folk’ harbor for the reptile – particularly the limbless variety.

Is it not interesting to note, however – with out understanding of evolutionary truth today, that reptiles are indeed an ancestral and parental lifeform as far as our species is concerned – and that without the existence of reptiles, birds wouldn’t exist, and therefore mammals wouldn’t exist, and therefore primates wouldn’t exist (at least not as we know them today)?

And in case it’d slipped, for some uncanny reason – we happen to be primates.