Nyx in the House of Night

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 also quite a number of confessions from witches claiming they became cats, but it’s nearly certain that most of these were obtained under torture. One woman in England was hanged because a neighbor saw a cat jump up onto her windowsill, and was convinced it was the devil.
    Reading the history of cats in Europe can give you nightmares. As victims of the witch hysteria, cats were put on trial and convicted, whipped, burned, boiled, drowned, and walled-in alive. They had gone from being creatures who were worshipped as gods to creatures that, because they were linked with the Goddess, were feared and destroyed.
That Old Black Magic
D uring this period, there were people who were actually practicing black magic, and they, too, killed and tormented cats and used feline body parts in their spells, giving some truth to the church’s claims. These devotees of the black arts believed that the cat’s ability to see spirits was contained in some part of their body—usually the eyes or skin—and that ability could be transferred to a human if the human ate the body part or wore it as a talisman. Sometimes, in an effort to gain this “second sight,” the ashes of burnt cats were ground into an ointment and applied to the eyes, or the cats were simply offered as sacrifices to the gods of darkness. Even as recently as 1923, the British occultist Aleister Crowley, a sadist who hated cats, was believed to have transfixed a cat through magic and then sacrificed it in a ritual to cure his