The Cats Who Bore the Cross

Every October, the warnings return: keep your black cats inside. Be careful about adopting them out too close to Halloween. Pagans, witches, or Satanists might be looking for animals to harm or sacrifice. There is remarkably little evidence behind these claims. Animal welfare organizations have challenged them for years, yet the warning survives because the black cat already occupies a particular place in our imagination. We have been taught for centuries that a black cat belongs beside a witch.

The historical irony is that the people now associated with harming black cats are not the people who created that reputation. Cats became deeply entangled with heresy, witchcraft, demons, dangerous femininity, and the supernatural within Christian European culture, and they were sometimes subjected to horrifying forms of public cruelty. That does not mean, as another popular story claims, that the medieval Church ordered a continent-wide extermination of cats. Medieval people also valued cats as mousers and kept them as domestic companions. The history is contradictory, but the cruelty and superstition were real.

When the Cat Became Sinister

One of the most famous documents in this history appeared in 1233, when Pope Gregory IX issued Vox in Rama in response to reports of heresy in Germany. The document describes an alleged initiation ceremony involving a black cat, including the lurid accusation that participants kissed the animal beneath its tail. It tells us more about Christian fears surrounding heresy than about the actual behavior of cats or even necessarily of the accused heretics. Medieval descriptions of religious outsiders frequently included allegations of sexual deviance, sacrilege, secret ceremonies, and devil worship. The important point is that a black cat could already be placed inside this imagined world of hidden spiritual danger.

Vox in Rama did not order Christians to kill cats, and there is no evidence that Gregory IX launched the continent-wide feline massacre sometimes attributed to him. Yet correcting that exaggeration should not erase the larger history. As European ideas about witchcraft developed, cats became increasingly entangled with magic, demons, transformation, and the night. They were not the only animals involved, and the association varied enormously across Europe, but it became remarkably durable. The familiar witch’s cat emerged from this world until centuries of demonology, folklore, accusation, and popular imagery eventually collapsed into the Halloween silhouette we recognize immediately today.

The relationship remained complicated because actual cats were still living ordinary lives alongside the people imagining these things. They protected food stores and manuscripts from rodents, inhabited homes and farms, and sometimes became beloved companions. A society could feed a cat beside the hearth and still imagine another one beside a witch. That contradiction is more historically useful than either extreme. Christianity did not simply turn Europeans against cats, but Christian ideas about heresy, demons, and witchcraft helped create some of the supernatural meanings that cats carried.

The Cruelty Was Real

Whatever caution we bring to claims about an organized war against cats, there is no reason to sanitize their treatment. Cats were tortured and killed as public entertainment in parts of Europe. They were thrown from heights, incorporated into fires, hanged, beaten, and used in festivities that combined cruelty with laughter. Some practices became entangled with religious calendars or supernatural beliefs, while others belonged more broadly to civic celebration, carnival, popular entertainment, or traditions whose origins are difficult to reconstruct. Calling every instance a Christian ritual would be inaccurate, but pretending these customs had nothing to do with the cultural meanings attached to cats would flatten the history in the opposite direction.

Ypres preserves one of the strangest memories of this past. Cats were historically thrown from the city’s belfry, although explanations for the practice vary. Today the Kattenstoet transforms the tradition into something harmless, with plush cats thrown to crowds below. Elsewhere, accounts describe cats being burned during public festivities. What is disturbing is not simply that people harmed animals in a more brutal age, but that their suffering could become communal spectacle. The people watching were not necessarily considered monsters by their neighbors. They were ordinary citizens participating in accepted forms of entertainment.

Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre offers perhaps the most revealing example. In eighteenth-century Paris, apprentices working in miserable conditions in a printing shop resented both their masters and the comfortable treatment afforded the household’s cats. They eventually captured cats, subjected them to a mock trial, condemned them, and hanged them while the workers laughed. Darnton’s question was not merely why they killed the animals, but why the entire performance was so extraordinarily funny to them. Understanding the joke required entering a symbolic world in which cats could evoke sexuality, witchcraft, domestic hierarchy, social conflict, and carnival inversion. The cats were not random victims, but neither were they being sacrificed according to Christian doctrine. Their cultural meanings made them useful targets through which the apprentices could attack the world of their masters.

That episode exposes something darker than a story about one cruel pope ever could. Human beings can be victims within one hierarchy and perpetrators within another. The apprentices were themselves exploited, yet they expressed some of their anger through violence against creatures more vulnerable than they were. Cruelty did not require an official decree. It could be embedded deeply enough in ordinary culture to become entertainment.

Pagan Cats and Christian Witches

The opposite temptation is to imagine that if Christian Europe sometimes associated cats with evil, the pagan world must have universally revered them. There are genuine traditions behind pieces of that picture. Ancient Egyptian religion gave cats an extraordinary cultural and religious significance, particularly through their association with Bastet. Norse mythology gives Freyja a chariot drawn by cats. But “paganism” encompasses cultures separated by centuries, geography, language, and completely different religious systems. Egyptian reverence for cats and Freyja’s feline companions do not establish a universal pagan theology of the sacred cat.

Likewise, there is no historical basis for the modern claim that pre-Christian Samhain involved anything resembling an annual ritual sacrifice of black cats. Nor should we invent an idealized Samhain to rebut it. The ancient festival is difficult to reconstruct, and much of what circulates today combines historical evidence, later folklore, and modern Pagan reconstruction. Contemporary Pagan religions are themselves diverse traditions, not untouched survivals of a single ancient European faith.

The witch presents a similar problem. Most people prosecuted for witchcraft in Christian Europe were not practitioners of an underground pagan religion. They were people living within Christian societies who were accused according to ideas about harmful magic, demons, heresy, gender, community conflict, and supernatural power circulating around them. The black cat and the witch therefore share an unusual historical relationship: both became frightening partly through stories other people told about them.

The Myth We Added Later

One popular part of this history should be abandoned entirely. The story goes that medieval Christians, inspired by Gregory IX and other anti-cat superstitions, killed so many cats that Europe’s rat population exploded. Fleas carried by those rats then spread Yersinia pestis, helping create the Black Death. It is an irresistible piece of historical justice: destroy the animal that controls the rat, and nature punishes your superstition with plague.

There is no solid evidence for that chain of events. We do not have evidence of a European cat extermination following Vox in Rama on anything like the scale the theory requires, and modern plague research has complicated the familiar explanation of the Black Death as a simple rat-flea-human progression. Cats really were victims of superstition and cruelty. That does not mean their persecution caused the plague.

History does not need us to manufacture poetic justice for its cruelties to matter.

The persistence of that story is instructive because it resembles the Halloween warning in an unexpected way. Both take fragments of genuine history and arrange them into a satisfying moral narrative. Pagans become secret animal sacrificers in one; Christians become cat-exterminating architects of their own plague in the other. Neither survives careful examination intact.

Who Made the Black Cat a Monster?

What does survive is stranger and more revealing. There is little evidence that contemporary Pagans pose some special Halloween danger to black cats. There is abundant historical evidence that European societies attached frightening supernatural meanings to cats and sometimes subjected them to spectacular cruelty. Many of the associations that eventually produced our familiar black-cat-and-witch imagery developed within societies overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity, even though Christianity never maintained a simple or universal hostility toward cats.

The black cat was not made dangerous by the people modern Halloween warnings blame. It became dangerous in stories told about both the cat and the supposed witch beside it. Once those stories became familiar enough, they could survive long after the world that produced them had disappeared. The accusation changed, the imagery remained, and eventually an old symbol of supernatural suspicion became evidence for an imaginary modern threat.

Perhaps that is why the cat makes such an appropriate guardian of the hearth. For centuries, human beings have projected gods, demons, witches, sexuality, luck, death, magic, and danger onto an animal that was mostly trying to find somewhere warm to sleep and something small to catch. Cats lived beside us through all of it, stubbornly refusing to become any of the things we imagined them to be.

The cat survived all of our meanings. This Halloween, perhaps we can simply let it come home.

Sources and Further Reading

Bailey, Michael D. Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Gregory IX. Vox in Rama. 1233.

Monter, E. William. Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Rogers, Katharine M. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.