Of Black Cats and Bad Luck
- A Crazy Little Bird Told Me
- Aug 5, 2023
- 4 min read
Did you ever wonder why black cats are a sign of bad luck?
I guess I should start with a disclaimer, as black cats are not a universal bad omen. It tends to be something widespread in the Western world, with some exceptions such as Scotland, where black cats are said to bring prosperity, or southern France where they are said to bring good luck. It also appears that if you hear a black cat sneeze in Italy, it is a sign of good fortune. Now, I can’t tell you whether an Italian hearing a cat sneeze in England, would also give it the same meaning.
So, have black cats always been a bad omen for westerners? The answer is not quite.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … no wait, wrong story!
It all seemed to start in Ancient Egypt, where most people would own black cats that were believed to contain the spirit of the goddess Bast (or Bastet) and therefore bring good luck.
Quick side note about this deity, who first appeared in the third millennium BCE, depicted as either a fierce lioness or a woman with the head of a lioness (either way, a scary lady!). Two thousand years later, Bastet began to be represented as a domestic cat or a cat-headed woman and became known as the defender of the king, and therefore of the sun god, as well as the goddess of pregnancy and childbirth.
How did we go from the good luck of Ancient Egypt to the mostly bad luck it is today, will you ask?
Well, it all started with a man called Theodosius I, who was the last emperor to rule over a united Roman Empire (after his death, the empire was divided into the Western and Eastern Roman Empires). After a life-threatening disease in 380, he requested to be baptised. Do you see where I am going with this?
Theodosius was the emperor who outlawed paganism (393) and made Christianity the Empire's official religion. He was quite dedicated to his mission, and as you can imagine all of this took place with the systematic destruction of temples, a fair amount of persecution and it seems quite few murders of priestesses, amongst others. This was the end of the roman Vestal Virgins or the famous Oracle of Delphi and the same man also banned the Pan-Hellenic games, or what we know today as the Olympics.
Owning a black cat marked a household as pagans and more often than not meant death. And so, the bad omen reputation started.
What does the Bible say about witches, will you ask? The following passages are taken from the King James Bible, and you will surely notice the common deadly theme:
o Exodus 22:18 – Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
o Leviticus 19:26 – Ye shall not ... use enchantment, nor observe times.
o Leviticus 20:27 – A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.
o Deuteronomy 18:10-11 – There shall not be found among you any ... that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
The story, however, did not stop with Theodosius, quite the contrary. The hunt for paganism, heretics and witches kept going for over a millennium.
The 13th century was a time of great superstition, where a heretic was considered as being associated with or influenced by the Devil (what other reason could possible explain why an individual did not believe in the Holy Trinity, right?). The famous phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade, the papal legate and Cistercian abbot Arnaud Almaric, prior to the massacre at Béziers on 22 July 1209, summarises the whole situation rather perfectly: "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”, which can be translated roughly as “Kill them all. The Lord will recognise its own”. Simple and foolproof method; kind of.
In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued the Vox in Rama, a decretal which condemned few things such as Luciferianism, but also tied black cats to satanic worship through practices and ceremonies led by witches (he gave great many details of such rituals in the decretal). To give you some context, that same Pope also established the Papal Inquisition in 1233 to regularize the persecution of heresy.
Being suspected of heresy, or worse being a witch, did not bode well for men, women and/or black cats in the 13th century, or 14th century for that matter. To be fair it spelled trouble up to the middle of the 18th century and resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people. Christians were nothing if not determined!
So here you have it, first the Roman Emperor and then the Pope are the reason why black cats are said to bring bad luck in most western countries, and why they are now associated with witches and Halloween!
So now, it is up to you to decide whether you want to keep living with the Christian superstition or rather believe in the pagan good luck symbolism.
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