broomsticks, of course. This cult of the goddess—along with its cats—was persecuted and wiped out.
The church was exceptionally clever and thorough in stirring up the terror of witches. They convinced people that these women (and occasionally men) had the powers of the moon and could control the tides and planting cycles, and even drive people to lunacy. Cats were said to share these powers, which made them equally evil and dangerous. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX formally decreed domestic cats diabolical.
The Casts touch on this in Untamed , when Aphrodite notes angrily to Sister Mary Angela that the church used to kill off cats for being witches and demons, and the nun replies, “Don’t you think that’s because cats have always been so closely associated with women? Especially those considered wise women by the general public. So naturally, in a predominantly male-dominated society, a certain type of people would see sinister things in them.”
What exactly was the church’s problem with women? It all goes back to Eve. It was Eve, the church literally believed, who tempted Adam to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. Women’s sexuality was considered a tool of the Devil, designed to lead men away from God and into sin. (The church has never been comfortable with sex unless it was sex for reproduction within the bounds of marriage.) You can see why goddesses—especially beautiful, sexual, pleasure-loving goddesses like Freya—were considered threats by the church. She was the embodiment of so many things that the male-dominated clergy hated and feared.
A Superstition with Nine Lives?
W hen I was growing up in the 1960s, a girl told me that our family had to get rid of our cat because it would suck the breath from my infant sister. The superstition is ridiculous, of course: the structure of a cat’s jaws makes it anatomically impossible for a cat to suck anything. But it’s an old and widely held belief that may go as far back as the stories of Lilith. According to a Jewish legend that became popular during the Middle Ages, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, who refused to obey him and so was cast out of the Garden of Eden and became a demon. Lilith, who was said to suck the life from infants as they slept, often appeared as an owl or a cat.
Despite the church’s longstanding antipathy for women and cats, things didn’t really come to a head for a few centuries. In 1489, Pope Innocent VIII wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer for Witches”), which declared that children of Satan tended to turn themselves into animals, just as Satan had turned himself into a serpent in order to tempt Eve. The ecclesiastical courts soon began charging women with having turned themselves into cats. In 1596, in Aberdeen, Scotland, a group of women were accused of being witches who had turned themselves into cats, allegedly to celebrate an orgy at a place called Fish Cross, named for a cross that stood in the middle of a fish market. Somehow, it never occurred to the church authorities that the orgy-seeking “witches” might have been actual cats drawn to the area by the smell of fish.
It was between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, however, that the Christian world became positively obsessed with the fear of witches. Nearly every unfortunate occurrence was blamed on them—lightning, disease, fire, hail, even shipwrecks. In 1607, Isobel Grierson was burned for witchcraft after a man claimed that she entered his house disguised as his own cat, but accompanied by other cats that were all caterwauling, nearly scaring him and his wife to death. (Was it possible his cat was in heat and followed by toms?) Poor Isobel was then accused of visiting another man’s house in cat form and spraying his wife. This woman later died, obviously because she had been sprayed by Isobel. There are, in fact, a remarkable number of accounts of men who saw women change themselves into cats and men who claimed to be wounded by cats. And there are
The church was exceptionally clever and thorough in stirring up the terror of witches. They convinced people that these women (and occasionally men) had the powers of the moon and could control the tides and planting cycles, and even drive people to lunacy. Cats were said to share these powers, which made them equally evil and dangerous. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX formally decreed domestic cats diabolical.
The Casts touch on this in Untamed , when Aphrodite notes angrily to Sister Mary Angela that the church used to kill off cats for being witches and demons, and the nun replies, “Don’t you think that’s because cats have always been so closely associated with women? Especially those considered wise women by the general public. So naturally, in a predominantly male-dominated society, a certain type of people would see sinister things in them.”
What exactly was the church’s problem with women? It all goes back to Eve. It was Eve, the church literally believed, who tempted Adam to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. Women’s sexuality was considered a tool of the Devil, designed to lead men away from God and into sin. (The church has never been comfortable with sex unless it was sex for reproduction within the bounds of marriage.) You can see why goddesses—especially beautiful, sexual, pleasure-loving goddesses like Freya—were considered threats by the church. She was the embodiment of so many things that the male-dominated clergy hated and feared.
A Superstition with Nine Lives?
W hen I was growing up in the 1960s, a girl told me that our family had to get rid of our cat because it would suck the breath from my infant sister. The superstition is ridiculous, of course: the structure of a cat’s jaws makes it anatomically impossible for a cat to suck anything. But it’s an old and widely held belief that may go as far back as the stories of Lilith. According to a Jewish legend that became popular during the Middle Ages, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, who refused to obey him and so was cast out of the Garden of Eden and became a demon. Lilith, who was said to suck the life from infants as they slept, often appeared as an owl or a cat.
Despite the church’s longstanding antipathy for women and cats, things didn’t really come to a head for a few centuries. In 1489, Pope Innocent VIII wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer for Witches”), which declared that children of Satan tended to turn themselves into animals, just as Satan had turned himself into a serpent in order to tempt Eve. The ecclesiastical courts soon began charging women with having turned themselves into cats. In 1596, in Aberdeen, Scotland, a group of women were accused of being witches who had turned themselves into cats, allegedly to celebrate an orgy at a place called Fish Cross, named for a cross that stood in the middle of a fish market. Somehow, it never occurred to the church authorities that the orgy-seeking “witches” might have been actual cats drawn to the area by the smell of fish.
It was between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, however, that the Christian world became positively obsessed with the fear of witches. Nearly every unfortunate occurrence was blamed on them—lightning, disease, fire, hail, even shipwrecks. In 1607, Isobel Grierson was burned for witchcraft after a man claimed that she entered his house disguised as his own cat, but accompanied by other cats that were all caterwauling, nearly scaring him and his wife to death. (Was it possible his cat was in heat and followed by toms?) Poor Isobel was then accused of visiting another man’s house in cat form and spraying his wife. This woman later died, obviously because she had been sprayed by Isobel. There are, in fact, a remarkable number of accounts of men who saw women change themselves into cats and men who claimed to be wounded by cats. And there are
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