Nyx in the House of Night

jaguar in order to cross over into the spirit realm.
    In medieval China and Japan, cats were also accorded mystical powers. Cats are believed to have been smuggled into China from Egypt as early as the third century. It took another 600 years for them to show up in Japan, where they were imported from China and Korea. Cats got mixed reviews in these countries. It seems most of the folklore about them depicts them as demons—stealing from humans, shape-shifting from cat to woman and back again, wielding dancing balls of fire, and frightening people by walking two-legged across their roofs. There were also spectre-cats—the ghosts of cats—that delighted in haunting humans (though in Japan, tortoiseshell cats were believed to keep ghosts away. Go figure!). In China it was believed that after death humans turned into cats. Carl VanVechten tells of the Empress Wu, who decreed that no cats could enter her palace after she executed a court lady who had “threatened to turn the empress into a rat and tease her as a spectre-cat” (a story that can be found in Carl Van Vechten’s The Tiger in the House ).
    In Japan, some cats were believed to be goblins and others, protectors against goblins. The famous story “The Boy Who Drew Cats” tells of cats painted on temple screens who came to life to defeat a giant rat goblin. Japanese cats also had a reputation for turning into beautiful women, who sometimes helped their owners—one story tells of a cat who turned into a geisha to earn money for the impoverished old couple who owned her—and sometimes turned out to be demons. Long-tailed cats, in particular, were considered capable of turning into demons, and one Japanese demon, the nekomata, was said to be an enormous cat with a forked tail.
Long Before Dracula . . .
“T he Vampire Cat of Nabeshima,” which dates back the Sengoku Era (1568-1615), tells of the Prince of Hizen, who had a beautiful consort named O Toyo living in his household. One night an enormous cat (with a normal tail) appeared in O Toyo’s bedroom, sprang at her, and crushed her throat in its teeth until she died. The cat dug a grave beneath one of the verandas and buried O Toyo’s body. It then shape-shifted, taking on O Toyo’s form. The prince never realized that his lover was dead. Night after night, the false O Toyo came into his bedchamber and drained the blood from him. The prince soon became sickly and weak and suffered from terrifying nightmares. He had no idea that he was sleeping with a vampire instead of his beloved consort. The prince’s retainers guessed that something was attacking him at night, but whenever they kept watch over him, they fell asleep—bewitched by the vampire cat. Eventually, with the help of a priest, one of the prince’s young retainers managed to stay awake and fight the false O Toyo, who turned back into a cat and vanished into the mountains.
(A more complete version of this story can be found in Tales of Old Japan , by A.B. Mitford [1871]. It’s also posted online at www.sarudama.com/japanesefolklore_vampirecat.shtml.)
    Despite the apparent risks, oriental cats were kept for their hunting ability and their beauty. When cats were introduced to Japan sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries, they were first kept as exotic pets that only the wealthy could afford, but they soon began to earn their keep. Silk was one of Japan’s most important industries, and mice were eating the silk worms, as well as the grain stores. Cats were the solution to both problems.
    Oriental cats were also believed to bring luck. An old Buddhist superstition says that there will be silver in the house of a light cat, gold in the house of a dark one. The belief in cats as agents of luck and prosperity can still be seen in Japan in the Maneki Neko, or the Beckoning Cat, a white cat with a raised paw that’s displayed in many business establishments. There are at least three legends of how the Maneki Neko came into being, and all of them involve cats that brought luck or protection to their owners; one cat even killed a snake to save its geisha-mistress after the cat was beheaded. (You can find some of these legends at www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneki_Neko.)
    All of which brings us, finally, to the cats of the House of Night series.
    THE CATS OF THE HOUSE OF NIGHT
“Cats choose us; we don’t own them.”
— Marked
    The cats of the House of Night resonate with all of these traditions, but—though they are never referred to