Cat symbolism

The witch's cat in British folklore

Brand's collection shows how firmly English and Scottish lore tied cats to witches. A Scottish account he quotes explains a thin, badly fed cat by “the witches riding on them in the night”, and John Gay's fable The Old Woman and her Cats has a cat complain that “Cats are thought imps, her broom a nag”. Brand thought the long English hatred of cats came from their being counted a partner in the witch's crimes. The Guardian (No. 61), in a passage Brand quotes, blamed the same prejudice for the persecution of owls, “who are a sort of feathered cats”.

Why do they say cats have nine lives?

The saying is old. Brand found it in a black-letter book of 1584, Beware the Cat, where a witch may “take on her a catte's body nine times”, and in John Marston's play The Dutch Courtezan: “Why then thou hast nine lives like a cat.” In Gay's fable a cat tells the witch that boys hunt cats “Because, 'tis said, your cats have nine.” Brand also quotes John Trusler's remark that the conceit of nine lives “hath cost at least nine lives in ten of the whole race of them.”

The black cat as a sign

Seeing a black cat means different things in different places. History.com calls the belief that a black cat crossing your path brings bad luck one of the oldest superstitions; the folklorist Phoebe Millerwhite explains it by the medieval belief that the Devil and witches took black cats' form, so the cat in your path “might very well be on a mission from a witch”. Ginny Roth of the US National Library of Medicine records that the Normans and Germanic peoples took a black cat, like the black raven, as a sign of a coming death, and that in sixteenth-century Italy a sick person was believed to die if a black cat lay on their bed.

The same cat is lucky elsewhere. Daniel Compora of the University of Toledo tells History.com that in Scotland and Japan black cats “have been known to represent prosperity”. Roth adds that in Japan black cats are believed to bless a marriage and ensure good harvests, and that an English ship's cat was lucky only while it stayed aboard: a black cat that walked on and then off again meant the ship would sink. Websites that give a “spiritual meaning” for seeing a cat cite no older source that we could find.

The harvest cat of France and Germany

James Frazer recorded farming customs in which the spirit of the corn took the form of a cat. At Grünberg in Silesia the reaper who cut the last corn was called the Tom-cat, and near Amiens finishing the harvest was “They are going to kill the Cat”. In the Vosges, Frazer writes, the cat, the dog or the hare of the last sheaf “is said to be fat or lean according as the crop is good or bad.”

The cat in Cherokee homes

The cat came to the Cherokee from white settlers. James Mooney, who collected Cherokee myths between 1887 and 1890, recorded its name, wesa, from the English “pussy”, and a children's joke: when a cat purrs by the fire it is counting in Cherokee, “sixteen, four, sixteen, four.”

Related animals

The Dog symbolism and the cat share the Egyptian mourning customs Herodotus describes, and the hare and dog share the cat's place in European harvest custom. The owl, Brand's “feathered cat”, has its own page as owl symbolism.