Loving Cats

FOR MANY YEARS I taught Western Civilization, and early in the semester I delivered lectures about ancient Egypt. lectures don't do justice to ancient Egypt; you need visual aids, maybe a trip to a world class museum of ancient history. I always smiled when it came time to make my favorite comment: the ancient Egyptians worshiped cats. My own love of dogs and cats underlay my joy in considering an entire advanced civilization with reference for my beloved felines, but when I said it, I was never quite sure what I meant. I'm not still not. Not long ago I heard an interview with a renowned scholar of ancient Egypt, and she siad that the ancients did not so much worship cats, as they paid very close attention to them. That, I can relate to. In fact there are in the Egyptian pre Christian panoply of deities, among their many incarnations of the divine, several goddesses who could and often did transform themselves into cats. The beautiful engravings on monuments attest to reference for cats. Speculation is that cats were extremely beneficial in removing rodents from granaries, allowing the people to keep their staple crops to themselves. That would inspire gratitude and reverence in anyone, one would think. Of the roughly three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, cats only started becoming house pets during the second millennia; and their status remained quite high, although the process of "de-deification" had probably begun. The ancient Romans, always borrowing from other cultures, caught on to cats; to this very day stray cats are a welcome part of modern Rome, for the same reason; they drastically reduce the rodent population. I live in a small town in the middle of the United States, we seem to have a fairly large and healthy stray cat population, and I feed them, and "take them in", ten in all so far, but I think I have finally reached my maximum carrying capacity. (how many times have I said that before?). When you consider the absolutely primitive, cruel, and irrational nature of our modern religions, involving such nightmares as human sacrifice and eternal damnation in hell, the worship of cats, a symbol for the admiration of nature and life, doesn't seem at all hard to understand.