Cats, witches and the historical slander

The story goes that a thirteenth century pope declared cats diabolical, that Europe killed them by the thousand, and that the rats this freed up brought the Black Death. It is a tidy chain and almost none of it survives contact with the documents. What is true is narrower and stranger: an English and Scottish obsession with animal familiars, a law that made feeding one a felony, and a long record of casual cruelty to cats that had nothing to do with witchcraft at all.

What the famous letter actually said

Vox in Rama was issued by Gregory IX in 1233 and sent to German churchmen. It describes an initiation ritual attributed to a heretical sect, in which a black cat appears and is kissed. That is the whole of the cat content: a line in a description of an alleged heresy, written up from reports by an inquisitor working in the Rhineland.

It is not an order about cats. It does not instruct anyone to kill them, and no surviving record shows a cull following it. The gap between 1233 and the plague's arrival in 1347 is over a century, and nothing fills the middle of the argument.

The plague part fails on its own terms as well. Rats and their fleas are part of the story, but human fleas and lice are implicated too, and the speed of some outbreaks is hard to explain by rats alone. A town with more cats would not have been spared.

Medieval Europe did not need witchcraft to mistreat cats

Cats in medieval Europe were working animals. Monastic and household accounts treat them as mousers, which is also how the law treated them: valued for a function, not for company. Cat fur lined cheap clothing, which means cats were skinned in numbers for ordinary commercial reasons.

There were also customs that are genuinely hard to read now. Cats were burned in midsummer bonfires in several French towns, a practice recorded into the early modern period, and cats were walled into new buildings as foundation deposits, which is why builders still occasionally find a dried one in a cavity.

So the honest position is not that Europe loved cats and then turned on them. It is that cats were treated as livestock and as material, and that the witch trials are a later and separate chapter.

The familiar is an English and Scottish speciality

Continental witch trials are mostly about the pact, the sabbath and flight. The animal familiar, a small creature kept and fed by the accused and sent out to do harm, is overwhelmingly a feature of English records, with some Scottish parallels. If you picture a witch with an animal, you are picturing an English pamphlet.

The trial at Chelmsford in 1566 is the case that fixed the image. The pamphlet published afterwards describes a white spotted cat called Satan, passed between women, fed with drops of blood. The Witchcraft Act of 1604 then made it a felony to consult, employ, feed or reward an evil spirit, which turned keeping and feeding an animal into evidence in itself.

The familiars in the records are not mostly cats. Toads, dogs, mice, ferrets, hares, and in one well known Essex case a set of imps with household names, all appear at least as often. The cat won the iconography later, not the trials.

Black cats are not universally unlucky

In Britain a black cat crossing your path is traditionally good fortune, and sailors' households kept black cats for the same reason. In Japan the black cat is also read as fortunate. In much of continental Europe and in the United States the sign is reversed. There is no single folk tradition here, which is itself the useful fact.

The modern claim that black cats wait longer for adoption is often repeated and the evidence is mixed. Several shelter studies find a real effect, others find it disappears once you control for how many black cats are in the population to begin with.

Where the American version of the superstition hardened is easier to date. Mass produced Halloween postcards and decorations from the 1900s onward standardised the black cat, the pointed hat and the broom into a fixed set, and the picture most people now have of a witch comes from printed ephemera rather than from any trial record.

Egypt is not the counterexample people reach for

Egypt is usually produced as the proof that cats were once revered. Cats were certainly central to the cult of Bastet, and they were mummified in vast quantities at sites like Bubastis and Saqqara. But the quantity is the problem with the story.

Imaging studies of mummified cats have found many were young animals with broken necks. They were bred to be killed, wrapped and sold as votive offerings to pilgrims. Reverence and industrial slaughter were running at the same time, in the same temples.

That is worth holding onto, because it cuts both ways. The ancient world was not kinder to cats than the medieval one. It was differently organised.

Why the cat ended up in the picture anyway

The traits that got cats into the imagery are observable ones. They are active at night, their eyes return light because of a reflective layer behind the retina, they move silently, they come and go without permission, and they live in the part of the house that was women's work. An accusation that needed a domestic animal had one to hand.

The image then got fixed by illustration rather than by law. Nineteenth century printmakers, book illustrators and later postcard designers repeated the pairing until it became the shorthand, and once an image is shorthand it stops needing a source.

If you like the motif, the interesting version is the ordinary one. A cat asleep is the subject of almost every good drawing of a cat, which is why a cat asleep in a ring of branches reads as warm rather than sinister, and why a cat hanging off the edge of a shelf is funny instead of ominous. A cat sitting still inside an oval frame borrows the shape Victorian portraits used, which is the joke: the slandered animal, finally sitting for its picture.

Questions people actually ask

Did the Pope order cats to be killed?

No. Vox in Rama, issued in 1233, described a black cat in an alleged heretical ritual, but it contains no instruction about cats and no record shows a cull following it. The claim that this caused the Black Death has no documented middle.

Why are cats associated with witches?

Mainly through English and Scottish trial records, where the animal familiar was a standard accusation. The 1604 Witchcraft Act made feeding or rewarding an evil spirit a felony, which turned keeping an animal into evidence. Toads, dogs and mice appear as often as cats.

Are black cats unlucky or lucky?

It depends entirely on where you are. In Britain and Japan a black cat is traditionally fortunate. In much of continental Europe and the United States the same sign is read as bad luck.

Were cats really worshipped in ancient Egypt?

Cats were central to the cult of Bastet, but millions were also bred, killed young and mummified as votive offerings for pilgrims. Imaging of mummified cats frequently shows broken necks, so reverence and mass killing ran together.