Feline Familiars

Last class, we briefly read about and discussed familiars–companions of witches, typically cats, that aided the witch with supernatural abilities, such as transforming into the body of their familiar or seeing through their eyes. I have seen familiars depicted before in popular media, the most well-known being Salem in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Before reading about them, I had assumed they were a sort of ‘sidekick’ for the witch and didn’t know about their specific origins or purpose. As a writer, I always seek to understand diction and how words come to be. Since there has always been this popularized connection between a woman and her cat and an implication that cats are devilish, I was intrigued to learn more about why specifically cats are associated with women and witchcraft and why there is a negative overtone of this companionship.

According to this article, the earliest depictions of cats being associated with femininity trace back to Ancient Egypt, where they worshiped cats as demi-deities; this can be accredited to various goddesses, but primarily Bastet, the goddess of cats who encapsulated fertility, protection, and the home. It is here that I believe that the first link between cats and femininity was created as these are traditional feminine traits–homemaking and bearing children. In the 16th century, the tide started to turn on public opinion about cats and what they represented. This article states that the idea that cats had nine lives first appeared in a 1584 text, Beware of the Cat, and thus precipitated the idea that the nine lives correlated to how many times the witch could assume her familiar’s form. Cats were deeply connected to witches and were considered to be a form of the Devil or some sort of evil. One of the most notable entanglements with a witch and her familiar was Elizabeth Francis in 1566, in which she admitted to having a cat familiar, Sathan (supposedly resembling Satan), and ultimately aided her conviction and execution (A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and The Occult, 187). Cats continued to be a prominent part of witchcraft trials and were holistically associated with an evil presence for many years to come. 

When examining how those perceptions of witches and familiars are present in the 21st century, there is one apparent way that we can still see this bias. This ‘evil’ connection between a witch and her familiar–or a woman and her cat–has carried through in the form of the term, ‘crazy cat lady.’ This term and the outlook it represents can be traced back to the history mentioned earlier. Cats are associated with femininity; therefore, an excess amount of feminine energy, without any masculine figures, rules that the woman must be ‘crazy.’ Both derogatory terms–witch and crazy cat lady–ostracize typically single, older women from society. This almost makes me wonder if part of this term’s birth is from the old fear of a witch’s companionship with her familiar and if that fear still lingers today in some form or other. By researching the connection between witches and their feline familiars, I can now conclude that this negative connotation of a connection between women and cats is from the hysteria of the witchcraft trials.