Vampires & Cats


From _Curses, Hexes, and Spells_ by Daniel Cohen, a cute and surprising good little book. Exactly the type of book you pass by, but you can make of it what you will.

"Another side to the cat's reputation of being supernaturally evil is its long-standing connection with vampirism. While the witches freely offered blood to cat familiars for the power the familiars might give them, there is an ancient belief that cats also sucked the blood of unwilling victims, that, in fact, cats were vampires. This belief seems to even predate the idea of cats as witches' familiars, indeed to predate the concept of witchcraft itself. According to Hebrew folklore Adam had a wife before Eve. Her name was Lilith, and she left paradise because she refused to submit to Adam. Since that time, she has haunted the night as a demon and a vampire. The Sephardic Jews believed that Lilith, in the form of a huge black cat called El Broosha, sucked the blood of newborn victims.

"The ancient belief that cats represent some sort of mortal danger to infants persists in a somewhat altered form today. New mothers are often warned not to allow cats to sleep in an infant's room for fear that the cat might "suck" an infant's breath or smother the child. Few realise that the belief stretches back to Jewish legends of Lilith as a vampire cat.

"Another belief was that cats or demons in cat form were able to turn the recently dead into vampires. Great care was always taken to keep cats out of a room in which the corpse of a person was laid out. Behind this fear was the idea that the cat was a demon which could possess the fresh body. Any cat that wandered into a room where there was a body was immediately killed if it could be caught. If the cat wasn't disposed of the result might be terrible as this seventeenth-century account quoted by Howley illustates:

""Johannes Cuntius, a citizen and alderman of Pentach, in Silesia, when about sixty years of age, died somewhat suddenly, as the result of a kick from his horse. At the moment of his death a black cat rushed into the room, jumped on the bed and scratched violently at his face. Both at the time of his death and that of his funeral a great tempest rose - the wind and snow made men's bodies quake and their teeth chatter in their heads. The storm is said to have ceased with startling suddenness as the body was placed under the ground. Immediately after the burial, however, stories began to circulate of the appearance of a phantom which spoke to people in the voice of Cuntius. Remarkable tales were told of the consumation of milk from jugs and bowls, of milk being turned into blood, of old men soiled with blood, and poultry killed and eaten. Eventually, it was decided to disinter the body. It was found that all the bodies buried above that of Cuntius had become putrefied and rotten, but his skin was tender and florid, his joints by no means stiff, and when a staff was put between the fingers they closed around it and held it fast in their grasp. He could open and shut his eyes, and when a vein in his leg was punctured the blood sprang out as fresh as that of a living person. This happened after the body had been in the grave for about six months. Great difficulty was experienced when the body was cut up and dismembered by the order of authorities, by reason of the resistence offered; but when the task was completed and the remains consigned to the flames, the spectre ceased to molest the natives or interfere with their slumbers or health."

"Today we associate the bat with the vampire. But most people who really believed in vampire associated them with the cat or the wolf, another animal that has inspired a host of beliefs about its evil powers.

"The bat always had a bad reputation in Europe. It was a creature of the night, and it tended to inhabit remote and gloomy places like caves and deserted buildings. But there was no clear connection of the bat with vampirism until Hernan Cortez and other conquistadors brought back tales of blood-sucking (or, to be accurate, blood-drinking) bats that they had found living in the New World. Still, it wasn't until the publication of Bram Stoker's novel *Dracula* near the end of the nineteenth century that bats became an inevitable part of vampire lore. Now there is no seperating the two. Bow incongrous it seems to imagine Bela Lugosi turning into a cat!"

And now going into bats, I noticed Popular Science (November 1996) on the coffee table and turning to page 56, the middle of an article intitled "Batman!" and read:

"[[[note from claude: here they are stating popular myths and then disproving them. The first sentence is meant to be the myth and then the following ones are the explanations.]]] Some bats are vampires. That's true, too, and it's a significant problem. But not in the United States. The three species of vampire bat (out of more than 900 worldwide) live only in Mexico and southward. They don't suck blood but slit the skin with razor-sharp teeth and lap the drip. Vampire bats are damaging to livestock, but ranchers rarely bother to differentiate between species, and routinely destroy whole colonies of beneficial bats (including some that migrate between the United States and Mexico) by burning tires in the entrances to caves the harbor bats."

More from _Curses, Hexes, and Spells_ by Daniel Cohen:

"The bond between a witch and her cat familiar was sealed with the witch's own blood. W. Oldfield Howley cites several cases in *The Cat in the Mysteries of Magic and Religion*. A witch tried at Windsor, England in 1579 confessed to possessing a demon in the shape of a black cat "whereby she is aided in her witchcrafte, and she daiely feedeth it with Milke, mingled with her owne bloud." At another trial held in Essex a few years later evidence was given of a cat familiar who would come to the witch during the night "and suckle the bloud of her upon her arms and other places of her body." When a group of accused witches of Huntingdonshire were brought to trail in 1646, one of the women explained how she had been given a cat by a witch and told that if she would deny God, "and affirme the same by her bloud, then whomesoever she cursed and sent the Cat unto them, they should dye shortly after." This she had agreed to do and, pricking her finger with a thorn, had given it to the cat to lick."

One observation: Both this above quote and the other quote from _Hexes_ have quotes from Howley in them. Perhaps these are two different Howleys, because the language is so different. Or different adaptations of the work? However, both appear to be quoting directly from him.

This was adapted from an old post I made to the Vampyres mailing list.

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Claudia Lake - sherlock3@pipeline.com

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