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Cats are
an image of wholeness - a merging of the physical and spiritual,
the psychic and the sensual. For a cat, these are not separate
worlds, but one. They have been tagged with a variety of traits,
including curiosity, nine lives, independence, cleverness, unpredictability,
and healing.
Cats have
long been held sacred and linked to images of power.
Egyptians
named the Goddess Bast as the divine mother of cats. The Egyptian
term for the sacred cat was Mau, an imitation of a cats
cry and a mother-syllable. (For more information on Bast, click
here.) Cat worship began in Egypt, where the first domesticated
cats descended from a wild ancestor, felis libyca.
To the
Greeks, Bast's equivalent was Artemis, and to the Romans she
was Diana.
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Cats are
at home after dark, and because darkness is the home of fears
and those things humans do not want to see and cannot see, the
cat has come to be associated with magic and mystery.
By the
Middle Ages Diana was the name of the Queen of the Witches.
The cat was then becoming linked with witchcraft and goddess
worship. It was said any witch could assume a cat's shape nine
times in her life. (She could also assume the shape of a hare,
which were moon goddess totems. When cats were brought to England,
they were confused with hares as symbols of the moon goddess.)
To the Scots,
the Goddess of Witches was Mither o' the Mawkins. (Mawkin or
malkin was either a hare or a cat.) As the cat became the primary
lunar animal, the traditional witch's familiar was Greymalkin
or Grimalkin, a "gray cat".
The Goddess
Freya was pictured in a chariot drawn by cats - recalling earlier
images of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, with her chariot drawn
by two lions.
If a cat
is your totem animal, look for magic and mystery to come alive.
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