Black Cats
Black cats have a mixed reputation in the world of superstition, with some cultures regarding them as lucky while others see them as the epitome of doom. If a black cat crosses your path in Japan, it’s believed good luck is on its way. However, in western, Christian traditions, the black cat is firmly linked to doom. Associated with the concept of the witch’s familiar, the cat, as an associate of Satan is a demon in disguise. As such it is unlucky to have one cross your path. So how to explain this variance in opinion?
Once again, the black cat’s reputation in western civilization is rooted in the ancient past- and the changes in connotation that occurred with time. In ancient Egypt, the cat was sacred as the symbol of the goddess Bast. To the Romans, the cat was the symbol of liberty and sat at the foot of the statue of the goddess liberty herself. As such, it was a positive symbol, strong and independent. Black, however, was the color of death. Although this was not negative to the ancients, it was the Egyptian and later the Roman color of mourning. In its turn, it would color the reputation of the black cat.
By the Christian era, black cats, with their associations with goddesses and death acquired a darker connotation. The classical legend of Galenthias would not have helped this. In Greek mythology, Galenthias was a servant of Alcmene, the mother of Heracles’. When the Fates, at the behest of Hera tried to delay Heracles’s birth, Galenthias she broke the spell by shouting that Alcmene had given birth. Heracles was born safely, but as a punishment, Galenthias was turned into a black cat (although Ovid’s version of the Greek myth says a weasel)
It was as a cat that Galenthias came to serve Hecate, the goddess of the underworld. Hecate was a perfectly respectable underworld deity in the Greek world, for life and death were part of the same cycle. However, for the Christians, the underworld came to mean hell, the realm of the devil and a place of evil. So, as a goddess of the underworld, Hecate became the queen of the witches and the black cat, as her servant the prototype witch’s familiar.
However, even in Christian countries, the black cat’s reputation isn’t all bad. In Scotland, if a black cat appears on your doorstep, it is an omen of future prosperity while a black cat at a wedding is a portent of future children. For, despite the bad press, some traditions remember black cats as symbols of fertility. For in Scandinavian mythology, Black cats pulled the chariot of Freya, the goddess of fertility- a belief that spread about Viking occupied areas of Northern Europe.
There is no such ambiguity surrounding the unluckiness of damage to the next item of superstition.