The European Cat Massacres

Cats, and black cats in particular, are often seen as omens of evil. In Medieval Europe, it was believed that a cat could be a witch or the devil in disguise — or at the very least, one of their proxies (like Behemoth, the black cat from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita). According to the historian Richard Darnton, ‘cats suggested witchcraft. To cross one at night in virtually any corner of France was to risk running into the devil or one of his agents or a witch abroad on an evil errand’.

This association is no doubt linked to the cat’s characteristic elusivity. In one of my favourite passages from Camille Paglia’s masterpiece, Sexual Personae, she describes cats as ‘occult’, which originally meant ‘hidden’:

The black cat of Halloween is the lingering shadow of archaic night. Sleeping up to twenty of every twenty-four hours, cats reconstruct and inhabit the primitive night-world. The cat is telepathic — or at least thinks that it is. Many people are unnerved by its cool stare. Compared to dogs, slavishly eager to please, cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their “evil” look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it (Paglia)