Cat

Why have cats mesmerized us for millennia? Few creatures have provoked such fascination, fear, devotion, and artistic inspiration as the cat. In Cat, cultural historian Katharine M. Rogers explores this enduring bond, tracing how the cat’s image—from divine symbol to witch’s familiar to beloved pet—reflects changing human values and anxieties. She argues that the way people interpret cats reveals more about ourselves than about the animal itself.

Cats, Rogers contends, embody a paradox that humans cannot resist: they are both intimate and alien, domestic yet wild, affectionate yet independent. This tension has made them perfect canvases for human imagination and desire. Throughout history, writes Rogers, “the cat has mirrored the cultures that kept her.” Where the ancient Egyptians saw divinity and grace, medieval Christians saw evil and heresy. Victorians adored their cats as emblems of home, while twentieth-century artists and writers reclaimed their mystery and rebellion.

From Predator to Companion

The book opens with the cat’s scientific and historical background—from Felis sylvestris libyca, the North African wildcat tamed in Egyptian granaries, to the revered pets that shared banquets and tombs with humans. This practical alliance—rodent control—evolved into a sacred and emotional connection. Unlike dogs, bred to serve human tasks, cats retained their independence; this autonomy fascinated and unsettled humans in equal measure. Rogers emphasizes that, while cats were domesticated late and never fully subordinated, they adapted only on their own terms, keeping their hunting instincts, territorial behavior, and nocturnal rhythm.

Myth, Fear, and Worship

Rogers shows how the Egyptians worshiped cats under the goddess Bastet, associating them with fertility, beauty, and domestic harmony. But by the Middle Ages, the same qualities of sleekness and independence became diabolical. Christian Europe, obsessed with obedience and hierarchy, saw in cats a refusal to submit—thus a rebellion against divine order. They became scapegoats in witch hunts, tortured as symbols of the devil’s cunning. Yet in Asia, cats mostly retained positive status: Japan’s maneki-neko beckoned fortune; Thailand’s Tamra Maeo Thai listed breeds that brought prosperity. This geographic divergence underlines Rogers’s central thesis: cats reflect cultural attitudes toward freedom, femininity, and mystery.

The Modern Transformation

By the Enlightenment, cruelty to cats symbolized moral corruption. Philosophers like Alexander Pope and poets like Christopher Smart championed compassion for them, challenging the Cartesian view of animals as soulless machines. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed the cat from familiar of witches to familiar of scholars and poets. Writers such as Gautier, Baudelaire, and Poe turned the cat into a muse—an emblem of artistry, independence, and sensual mystery. This literary elevation paralleled a domestic one: cats entered drawing rooms and later, middle-class parlors, becoming cherished “inmates of home and salon.”

Cats as Cultural Symbols

Rogers organizes her exploration around thematic shifts: cats as divine and demonic, as emblem of women’s sensuality, as model of home life, and finally, as individual beings with personality. In each period, human gender roles, religious beliefs, and social structures shaped the cat’s meaning. The nineteenth-century link between cats and women—often deployed by men like Buffon or Maupassant to express anxiety about female independence—gave way to feminist identification with cats as symbols of autonomy. In modern literature, cats become equal partners, ironic commentators, or independent souls mirroring artistic consciousness (as in Soseki’s I Am a Cat or Angela Carter’s revised Puss in Boots).

Why This History Matters

By following cats across centuries, Rogers illuminates changing intersections among nature, mythology, gender, and art. The book is not just about cats—it’s about what humans project onto them: our longing for beauty, our guilt over cruelty, our unease with independence. Understanding the cat’s image means confronting our own paradoxes: our need to dominate nature versus our admiration for its freedom. In this sense, Cat offers a sweeping reflection on civilization’s moral evolution—from killing and worshiping cats to loving them as family—and invites you to see your household feline as part of an ancient, ongoing story about humanity itself.

Rogers begins by grounding our fascination with cats in biology and history. The domestic cat, she explains, is a relatively recent companion, descended from Felis sylvestris libyca, the North African wildcat tamed in Egyptian villages about 4,000 years ago. This relationship started not with affection but with mutual convenience—humans needed protection from rodents, and cats needed food. Yet even this simple alliance held emotional potential. While early dogs were exploited for labor or guard duties, cats joined human homes as partners against pests—a job that matched their instincts rather than suppressed them.

The Egyptian Bond

In ancient Egypt, cats evolved from pragmatic helpers to sacred companions. Artistic scenes show family cats sitting under banquet tables or helping hunters in the marshes. Their association with Bastet, goddess of fertility and home life, elevated them to divine symbols of beauty and maternal devotion. When a family cat died, the household went into mourning—a recognition not of mere utility but affection. Rogers highlights how this early civilization offers a rare example of unambiguous admiration for the cat, free from the ambivalence that other cultures would soon develop.

The Great Cultural Escape

As cats spread beyond Egypt into Greece and Rome, their symbolic role shifted. While Athens and Rome admired them as rodent-catchers, they never achieved the Egyptian level of reverence. Romans often confused cats with weasels and ferrets—proof that they remained marginal. Still, even this lukewarm adoption allowed cats to infiltrate Europe. In contrast, in China, Japan, and Thailand, they became prized as elegant pets and symbols of harmony. The Thai Tamra Maeo Thai even catalogued auspicious feline traits centuries before European breeders took note. The contrast between Western suspicion and Eastern appreciation foreshadows how differently cultures would read the same animal.

Medieval Fear and Cruelty

In Christian Europe’s rigid hierarchy, independence was a crime. Cats’ self-sufficiency and nocturnal behavior clashed with the belief that all creation existed under divine order. Their refusal to obey made them suspects of heresy. Rogers documents shocking rituals: cats sacrificed on St. John’s Eve to banish evil, or public burnings during witch trials. Even playful affection toward cats—especially by women—could invite charges of witchcraft. This cruelty, she notes, was less theological than psychological: cats embodied the fear of what humans could not control. Ironically, their only defense was the same trait that condemned them—the ability to survive without human approval.

Rediscovery and Redemption

By the eighteenth century, the tide turned. Enlightenment thinkers like Pope and Voltaire saw kindness to animals as a measure of civilization. Painters began to include household cats in domestic scenes; poets celebrated them as quiet companions. In France, Cardinal Richelieu kept six cats; in Britain, Samuel Johnson fed his Hodge with oysters. Rogers sees this shift as both moral and aesthetic: the cat was becoming beautiful again, not just useful. Yet its wild grace remained intact—a reminder that no matter how “tame,” the feline spirit still prowled at the edge of civilization’s tidy order.

Why did the medieval mind link cats to witchcraft and demons? Rogers devotes an entire chapter to this dance of fear and fascination. The same qualities that delighted Egyptians—cats’ keen senses, silent movement, and luminous eyes—terrified Christian Europe. To a society obsessed with visibility and obedience, a creature that prowled unseen at night and defied orders seemed unnatural. Their independence was recast as malevolence, and their beauty as dangerous allure.

Witches and Familiars

Stories abound: Elizabeth Francis in 1566 allegedly kept a spotted cat named Sathan, who spoke in a hollow voice and committed murders on her behalf. Scottish witches roasted cats to summon demons; peasants believed slain felines could avert storms. Even casual affection between women and cats was demonized—as when a farmer’s wife was accused of witchcraft simply for petting her cat. In this atmosphere, cats embodied both independence and female criminality. Their burning became a symbolic reaffirmation of male and divine authority. The cat’s gaze—a steady, unflinching stare—was reimagined as a challenge to human hierarchy itself.

East and West Contrasts

Far across the world, Japanese folklore told opposite stories. There, demon-cats (nekomata) were terrifying but balanced by tales of heroic feline spirits. In the legend of the Vampire Cat of Nabeshima, a cat transforms into a woman who drains her master’s life—an echo of Western fear of seductive evil—but she is ultimately defeated by Shippeitaro, the loyal dog. Yet Japan also birthed the benevolent maneki-neko, the beckoning cat who brings prosperity. Rogers uses this juxtaposition to show that perceptions of feline magic always reflected social order: where independence was tolerated, cats were lucky; where hierarchy reigned, they became evil.

Science, Superstition, and Fear

Even science joined the persecution. Physicians like Ambroise Paré insisted that a cat’s brain, fur, or breath could poison humans. Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607) claimed that cats killed by mere glance and carried plague in their breath. Such pseudoscience cloaked superstition in authority, turning fear into dogma. By contrast, thinkers like Joseph Addison mocked these beliefs in the Spectator, marking the dawn of modern skepticism. As rationality spread, witchcraft was dismissed—but the symbolic connection between women and cats, mystery and morality, remained deeply rooted.

From Devil to Muse

By the nineteenth century, writers like Walter Scott and Baudelaire reclaimed the cat’s “demonic” reputation as a badge of artistic defiance. To them, cats’ elegant self-sufficiency mirrored the artist’s separation from bourgeois morality. Gautier admired their “phosphorescent eyes” as proof of nocturnal intelligence; H. P. Lovecraft later called cats “free souls” who reject “pointless sociability.” In art and literature, the once-cursed familiar became a symbol of insight, sensuality, and rebellion—a transformation that parallels the human journey from superstition to aesthetic self-awareness.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cats had finally gained a secure place by the hearth. Rogers traces how they evolved from necessary mousers to cherished companions. The shift began among European elites: Cardinal Richelieu famously kept a room full of cats; poets like Joachim du Bellay wrote elegies to their cats as if to lost lovers. Writers including Samuel Johnson, Christopher Smart, and Horace Walpole exalted their pets in verse and anecdote, describing them as mirrors of intellect or emotional partners. Through them, affection for cats became socially legitimate—an emblem of sensitivity rather than eccentricity.

The Birth of Pet Sentiment

The Enlightenment’s moral expansion played a role. As cruelty toward animals came to be seen as barbaric, sentimentality emerged as moral virtue. Alexander Pope’s essays scolded boys for torturing cats, and by Queen Victoria’s reign, cats were recognized as worthy of kindness. Rogers reminds us that this compassion was revolutionary: under Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy, animals were once viewed as unfeeling machines. The new ethic of care humanized not just pets but their owners. To love a cat signified a refined soul attuned to empathy and domestic harmony.

Cats as Domestic Icons

During the Victorian age, cats were absorbed into the cult of Home. Artworks and children’s rhymes—like “The Three Little Kittens” or Louis Wain’s famous illustrations—turned them into avatars of domestic virtue and charming mischief. While dogs symbolized loyalty and labor, cats now represented gentility, order, and maternal love. Rogers notes the irony: the same independence once punished as evil was now redressed as decorum. Even the early cat shows, organized by Harrison Weir at London’s Crystal Palace in 1871, reflected not pure affection but middle-class aspiration, breeding pedigree cats to demonstrate refinement.

Between Sentiment and Selfhood

Yet beneath all the prettiness, the cat’s deeper appeal endured: self-determination. Writers like Thomas Hardy, Théophile Gautier, and Matthew Arnold cherished cats not because they were obedient but because they weren’t. Their restraint and mysterious intelligence seemed antidotes to human vanity. As Rogers puts it, by loving what cannot be owned, Victorians were practicing a new, quieter form of respect for other creatures—a moral halfway point between domination and empathy. The cat’s rise from scapegoat to salon companion was, in essence, a small revolution in human consciousness.

This revolution also began to challenge social hierarchies within the home: cats blurred lines between servant and master, pet and person. They became part of family portraits, perched not at their owners’ feet but beside them. In this domestic elevation lay the seeds of our modern view—that animals possess individuality and emotional lives of their own.

One of Rogers’s most penetrating analyses connects cats to gender. Since Egypt’s Bastet, the feline has been entwined with womanhood, sensuality, and mystery. From Renaissance portraiture to fin-de-siècle literature, the cat often sat beside women, symbolizing both allure and danger. Rogers unpacks this long association to reveal how men used cats to express fascination—and unease—with female independence. Meanwhile, women writers and artists later reclaimed these very symbols as ones of empowerment.

From Muse to Menace

Renaissance artists paired women with cats to hint at sexuality (as in Bacchiacca’s Portrait of a Young Woman Holding a Cat) or domestic virtue. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted feline grace as parallel to youthful beauty. But moralists like Buffon turned the cat into a warning: sly, treacherous, greedy for pleasure—a mirror of what they feared in women. In the writings of Zola or Maupassant, cats and courtesans shared traits of predation and deceit; their beauty hid claws. Rogers shows that this double standard legislated emotions—men praised obedience in dogs and condemned autonomy in women and cats alike.

Women Reclaim the Cat

By the twentieth century, female authors began rewriting this script. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes features a woman whose life transforms after adopting a cat and becoming a witch—not as evil, but as liberated. Colette’s story “The Cat” exposes a husband’s infantile jealousy of his wife’s feline companionship; Joyce Carol Oates’s “The White Cat” turns this into psychological horror. Both authors invert the patriarchal fear of cats, using them as mediators of female self-realization. Rogers argues that the witch’s cat became a feminist icon—an emblem of women’s right to pleasure, intuition, and freedom from control.

Stereotypes and Modern Resistance

Even so, negative clichés linger. Popular humor books like How to Kill Your Girlfriend’s Cat or “cat lady” stereotypes show that male discomfort with female autonomy persists. Yet, as Rogers notes, contemporary women flip the insult: identifying with cats signals elegance, intelligence, and resilience. Artists like Cecilia Beaux painted women and cats as equals, sharing the same calm dignity. The once-damned feline has thus evolved into a totem of self-possession—a journey mirroring feminism’s struggle for respect in a world that long preferred obedience over independence.

Rogers ends her history by examining how, in the twentieth century, cats stopped being symbols and started being themselves. Modern culture, she notes, increasingly regards cats not as metaphors for vice, mystery, or feminism—but as individuals with unique temperaments. The shift reflects broader social changes: the decline of rigid hierarchy, the rise of empathy toward animals, and a growing appreciation for autonomy in all living beings.

From Pet to Partner

Writers like Mark Twain, Kipling, and Angela Carter replaced divine or demonic archetypes with character-driven portrayals. Twain’s wry comment that “if man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat” encapsulates this admiration. In fiction, cats became narrators and protagonists: Soseki’s I Am a Cat, with its sardonic feline observer, and May Sarton’s The Fur Person, which gives a cat’s-eye autobiography, both grant agency to nonhuman voices. They remind you how easily cats mirror human reason, humor, and contradiction without ever losing their essential otherness.

Equality at Home

In homes, too, cats have achieved something revolutionary: equality. Whereas dogs remain the emblem of loyalty, cats represent coexistence without domination. Guardianship—a term now replacing “ownership” in humane circles—acknowledges this shift. The cat doesn’t serve; it shares space. This redefinition has ethical significance: it mirrors a broader awareness that empathy, not mastery, defines moral progress. Rogers argues that our love for cats trains us to accept difference—an insight with implications for how we treat each other as well as animals.

Art, Humor, and Everyday Reverence

From Garfield’s sarcasm to Haruki Murakami’s philosophical tabbies, the modern cat occupies every corner of imagination. Rogers treats pop culture with the same respect as fine art, noting that comics, films, and advertisements all reveal our desire for beings who live by their own rules. In contrast to past centuries’ obsession with control, today’s feline fascination celebrates paradox itself: a creature that invites love yet resists domestication. In that resistance lies its enduring grace.

By the time Rogers closes her study, the cat has traversed every realm—divine temple, witch’s coven, bourgeois salon, feminist manifesto, and internet meme—emerging not diminished but more itself than ever. To understand cats, she concludes, is to confront the mystery of freedom within relationship: how to love without possessing, to live together without submission. In that delicate balance, the cat remains our most enigmatic teacher.