A Sweet Fact That Will Make You Cry About Cats In Religions

The Amazing History Of Cats In Religions

Whether revered, reviled, or simply ignored, cats have in general not been served well by religious beliefs.

 Being regarded as sacred animals in pagan religions of the past may have placed cats among the gods, but for millions of them, it also guaranteed a sacrificial death. With the rise of Christianity, it became even more dangerous for cats. 

Linked with devil worship, cats in Europe were nearly eradicated in the Middle Ages by the Church’s campaign of persecution.

Egyptian Goddess

 Ancient Egypt is the first place of the oldest historical records linking cats to religion. From around 1500BCE, a cult associated with the cat-goddess Bastet (also known as Bast) began to gain ground.

Bastet originally glorifies as a lion goddess, used to have enormous popularity in her gentler form and had devoted followers, especially between women. In statues, she was usually represented as a cat-headed woman, sometimes surrounded by a group of small cats or kittens.

 It is likely that the extreme veneration with which ancient Egyptians came to regard cats had its origins in the Bastet cult. 

When a family cat died, the owners went into extravagant mourning and, if they were wealthy enough, buried their mummified and decorated pet in an elaborate sarcophagus.

 Anyone who killed a cat, even by accident, risked being put to death. Paradoxically, such reverence did not stop the mass slaughter of cats for religious reasons.

 Alongside numerous statuettes of symbolic cats, archeological excavations at ancient Egyptian sites turned up huge cat cemeteries containing mummified cats in their hundreds of thousands. X-ray examination of some of the bodies showed that the cats were young, hardly more than kittens, and had died from broken necks.

These were clearly not family pets but victims of deliberate slaughter.Various studies have come to the conclusion that the cats would have been kept by the temple priests specifically for sacrificial killing and mummification, then sold to pilgrims as offerings to the gods.

Sacred Icons

Outside Egypt, cats were considered a part of any religion, yet inside they were almost worshipped as gods.

 The goddess Freya in the Norse pantheon was a cat lover and drove a chariot pulled by two enormous gray cats that had been given to her as a gift by Thor, the god of thunder. 

The ancient Romans were said to be great respecters of cats, the only animals allowed to enter their temples, and sometimes gave them preferential treatment as household gods, symbols of home and safety.

 In the Americas, pre-Columbian civilizations knew nothing of domestic cats, which had yet to cross the Atlantic, but some of their deities were associated with big cats. 

Both the Mayans and the Incas worshiped gods who took the form of jaguars.  In today's most common religions, cats as sacred icons remain few and far between.

 One exception is the Hindu goddess Shashthi worshiped as a protector of children, who is often depicted riding a cat.

 In some branches of Buddhism, the soul of someone who has attained great spirituality is said on death to enter the body of a cat. There is also an old imitation of cats, specifically white ones, being kept by Buddhist monks as temple keepers

Christian persecution

Unlike many other animals, cats are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, either for good or evil. In a scarce positive connection between cats and Christianity, the 7th-century St.Gertrude, abbess of a Benedictine order near Brussels, is regarded as the patron saint of cats; she is sometimes portrayed holding a cat—or surrounded by mice.

 There is some evidence that Gertrude, presumably thanks to her cats, had a reputation for keeping her abbey miraculously free of mice in an age plagued with vermin.

 The Christian Church’s centuries-long, well documented prejudice against cats was probably at least partly driven by a determination to stamp out the remnants of earlier pagan beliefs. 

Church authorities viewed cats as agents of the Devil, especially when they were kept by people believed to be witches (see pp.26–27), and dealt with them mercilessly—maiming, torturing, hanging, and burning were among the cruelties sanctioned. Persecution of cats reached its height in the Middle Ages and continued, astonishingly, into early modern times.

Islamic blessing 

 Historically, out of all their connections with religions, cats have had the greatest acceptance in Muslim cultures, where treating animals with kindness is an important part of Islamic teaching. 

The Prophet Muhammad, whose revelations in the 7th century form the text of the Holy Koran set an example—there are many reports of the care and respect he gave to his own pets. In an Islamic version of the origins of the tabby forehead marking, the “M” is said to have been left by the Prophet’s touch.


This article '' A Sweet Fact That Will Make You Cry About Cats In Religions '' was published by Zakaria Hacib