Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there's nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we'll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims. This episode contains the usual amount of cursing and brief mentions of torture and capital punishment. Please be advised.
If you were nervous to press play on this episode in case bad things happen to animals, please breathe easier. I swear to you here and now that I will never talk about animal abuse, violence against animals or animal death on this show. I'll chat about horrible things that happen to human beings, sure, but never to animals. It's probably something I need to talk about with my therapist, but that's my line in the sand.
Part of what we're talking about tonight on the podcast is familiars, little creatures who go out and do a witch's bidding. For example, if I was a witch and you were my familiar, I'd tell you to scurry into your favourite podcast app and give Paranormal Pajama Party a five-star rating and review.
I'm not a witch and you're probably a person, but I hope you'll consider doing it anyway to help other listeners find the show. Thanks!
The following is an excerpt from Mary Shelley's article, “On Ghosts”.
A gentleman journeying towards the house of a friend who lived on the outskirts of an extensive forest in the east of Germany lost his way.
He wandered for some time among the trees when he saw a light at a distance. On approaching it, he was surprised to observe that it proceeded from the interior of a ruined monastery.
Before he knocked at the gate, he thought it proper to look through the window. He saw a number of cats assembled ‘round a small grave, four of whom were at that moment letting down a coffin with a crown upon it. The gentleman startled at this unusual sight, and, imagining that he had arrived at the retreats of fiends or witches, mounted his horse and rode away with the utmost precipitation.
He arrived at his friend's house at a late hour, who sat up waiting for him. On his arrival, his friend questioned him as to the cause of the traces of agitation visible in his face. He began to recount his adventures after much hesitation, knowing that it was scarcely possible that his friend should give faith to his relation.
No sooner had he mentioned the coffin with the crown upon it than his friend's cat, who seemed to have been lying asleep before the fire, leapt up, crying, “Then I am king of the cats!” and scrambled up the chimney and was never seen more.
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Steph: Hi! I'm Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we'll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
So, as a charming little control freak who hates surprises of any kind, I had this season all planned out before I started recording anything. I knew exactly which subjects I was going to talk about and in what order I was going to talk about them, and everything was all set. It was perfect… and colour-coded.
But as I've been researching episodes for the podcast, certain themes keep cropping up again and again. And it turns out my inner nerd is stronger than my inner control freak because it's been sort of impossible not to follow the red yarn that connects the thumbtacks between the stories I've been telling you.
So tonight's episode deviates from my original strategy a little bit because there isn't a specific female monster or ghost or evil mythical creature we're talking about. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men…
Actually, this week's slumber party guest loves mice. This guest is the cat's pajamas. This guest is also literally a cat in pajamas! Please picture that, it is very cute.
Tonight I want to talk about cats and women, cats and magic, cats and Satan, and how all those things came to be wrapped up in one big spooky, ooky, whisker-wearing mess.
I started to think about this during the episode on “The Boarded Window”, which, as you'll remember, involves both a woman and a really, really big cat.
But cats popped up again when I was researching the old hag, too. There are folktales in the US and Europe that accuse cats of stealing babies’ breaths while they sleep, and sometimes the mare can take the form of a cat.
And then I rewatched the movie Alien, which has Ripley saving Jonesy the Cat, and I started to get all… twitchy.
I was thinking about three things. The first is that for some reason – in Western culture, anyway – there's this weird stereotype that dogs are boys, and cats are girls. Not literally, obviously, but they are coded that way in society. Cats are called “her” and dogs are called “him”. Even though I know that most orange cats are male. I've caught myself calling a neighbourhood ginger tabby a sweet girl before. What is that about?
The second thing I was thinking about is another stereotype, and this one seems to be global, which is that cats are somehow evil.
Please don't get me wrong. I have two cats and I love them dearly. I love them because they're a little bit evil. They're full of knives and they're always looking at invisible stuff right behind me. They're sometimes unhinged and sometimes straight-up rude.
But I also grew up in a culture where a black cat crossing your path was bad news, and in which every witch from the three in Macbeth to Sabrina has a cat. And they're always cuddling up to some nursing home resident who's about to die, like some kind of adorable harbinger of doom.
And finally, I couldn't stop thinking about how weird it is that I hear cat-related phrases and idioms about women all the time, but I hardly ever hear them about men. Women are catty or sex kittens or cougars. We have pussies. We start catfights with other women, or we purr seductively.
Men can be called pussies, but that seems to be about gender roles and not literal cats. If you're about 90 years old, you might describe a male player as a tomcat, I guess. And men can be scaredy-cats, copycats, and walk down catwalks, but so can people of any gender.
When applied to women, these feline phrases are usually sexual. Pair a cat and a woman and you get… Well, you get Catwoman, a sexy cat burglar.
But then there are cat ladies, which is a term that's very unsexy and also almost always used as a derogative. I've seen “cat men” used, but it's usually in a positive context and it definitely seems to be a post-Internet 2.0 thing.
Women. Cats. Wickedness. Pardon the pun, but it was like catnip. I had no choice but to start digging into the litter box that is human history.
Sorry.
It turns out women and cats go way back. Way, way, way back. I can't prove this, of course, but I am starting to suspect that the first amoeba to crawl out of the primordial stew was like, “I'm a lady!”, and the next one out was like, “I'm a cat!”, and we've been together ever since.
It's easier to prove that we've been associated with each other since the Neolithic period. There are at least two prehistoric caves in Anatolia with art that prominently features women and cats in one cave. Lots of women are painted alongside leopards, even holding cubs like human babies.
In another cave, a woman wearing a crown and sitting on a throne is shown giving birth while a leopard rests beside her as her protector. This cave, incidentally, is covered in stalactites that look a lot like breasts. And the early people living there painted what would have been the nipples black and red. Make your own stalac-tit joke here because I am classier than that.
There's a pretty obvious connection in these paintings to motherhood and cats, and that only gets stronger as we fast forward a bit through time to Sumeria, the earliest known civilisation in Mesopotamia.
If the extent of your knowledge of Sumerian religion is that they worshipped Gozer the Gozerian, A) we can absolutely be friends and B) unfortunately, Ghostbusters has led you astray. There isn't a real-life Gozer, which is good news for the people of New York, but the Sumerians were into a goddess named Innana, who was sometimes known as Ishtar.
Innana was a goddess of both war and love. Although she was a fertility goddess, she was not a mother goddess. And even though one of her titles was Virgin Queen of Heaven and Earth, a lot of the hymns about her talk about her insatiable sexual appetite. She was definitely not a marriage goddess – she clearly had no interest in that monogamy business.
Virgin, in this case, seems to mean unmarried or autonomous from a man. In the stories about her, she's active and independent. She wants more power than she has, and she's not shy about going after it. Innana was sometimes called Labbatu, which means lioness, and as a warrior goddess, she was often portrayed with fierce lions by her side, or as a lion. That's a pretty common symbol for warrior goddesses throughout history. In fact, lions have a longer history of being associated with queens than with kings. Sorry, Mufasa.
Guess who was also hanging out in Mesopotamia at the time? Lilith, who we talked about briefly in our Night Hag episode!
As a little Lilith refresher, she was initially a spirit or demon who shows up in Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian cuneiform, associated with the underworld and death. Later she appears in Jewish mythology, in the Garden of Eden as Adam's first wife, who is opposed to the missionary position on principle. She left her husband after an argument about how she didn't want to lie beneath him during sex because she felt they were equals.
Adam and God apparently thought this was bananas, so God gave her the option of either going back to Adam or becoming a baby-killing witch-queen for all eternity. As we know, she went with witch-queen, had a bunch of daughters that became succubi, and long story short, now men are scared of bedtime.
You're never going to believe this, but Lilith was also regularly pictured alongside lions, as well as owls and other predatory creatures of the night. Lions were symbols of pride and imperiousness, so they were probably also emblematic of her refusal to bow to male authority.
So here we have our first fallen, sinful woman associated with cats, and a woman associated with the underworld.
Okay, back into our space-time machine. We're going to the Indus Valley, where a buffalo demon named Mahishasura was going around torturing and killing people. See, he had asked Brahma, the Hindu creator god, for eternal life. When Brahma said no, Mahishasura made a different request: That only a woman be able to kill him.
Pfft. Women aren’t deadly. It's basically the same thing as living forever, right?
Eventually, he captured Svarga, the celestial realm of the deities. To fight back, the most powerful deities combined their power to create a goddess with many arms, Adi Shakti. I'm really simplifying some stuff here, but one of Adi Shakti's manifestations is Durga, the warrior goddess.
Durga hopped on a tiger and set out to kill Mahishasura. He took on many different forms, but Durga killed him each time until finally he was slain by a woman and her very big cat.
Meanwhile, in ancient Egypt, remember the snake-headed goddess Wadjet from the “Vanishing Hitchhikers” episode? Well, she's linked with another motherly protector type and the go-to goddess when people think about women and cats: Bastet.
Originally, Bastet was one of several lioness-headed goddesses. Eventually, however, her portrayal evolved into the cat-headed woman we're more familiar with today. She and a goddess named Sekhmet, who had a lion head, eventually came to represent two aspects of the same deity. Sekhmet was the fierce warrior, and Bastet was her gentler side.
That's not to say that Bastet wasn't a mighty protector in her own right. She was the defender of the sun god, Ra, and the goddess of protection against contagious diseases and evil spirits, which will turn out to be pretty ironic as this story goes along.
This protector symbolism makes a lot of sense because cats were valued for their ability to protect stores of food from vermin, and also because they fought cobras. Amazing! (Fun fact: I learned this week that unlike dogs and other species, humans didn't actually domesticate cats. Cats kind of domesticated themselves. So humans attracted vermin, which the cats liked, and the cats took care of the vermin, which humans liked. Pretty symbiotic and cool.)
Anyway, house cats were revered in Ancient Egypt. If your cat died, your whole family went into mourning. Everyone shaved their eyebrows off, you mummified the cat, and you brought it to a sacred place to be interred. Bastet’s temple was one of those sacred places.
Her temple was surrounded by water on three sides. Legend held that the wild lioness warrior Sekhmet quenched her thirst in one of these cooling lakes and transformed into the calmer Bastet before settling into the temple, which I have to assume was shaped like a large cardboard box. When archaeologists excavated her temple, they discovered more than 300,000 mummified cats.
Bastet was also a fertility goddess, and she's often shown with kittens surrounding her. It's theorised that she's depicted as a cat because they were fertile, good mothers and fierce protectors of their babies.
Eventually, the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty – you know, Cleopatra's people – replaced the Egyptians as rulers of Ancient Egypt for a time, and they kicked off a repeating pattern. Like any of us trying to understand a new concept, the ancient Greeks could best wrap their brains around the Egyptian deities by comparing them to something they already knew. In this case, Bastet sort of morphed, or syncretised, into the Greek goddess Artemis.
Artemis was the goddess of the hunt, mistress of the beasts and protector of untamed wilderness. She was one of three Greek virgin goddesses, along with Athena and Hestia.
In ancient Greece, hunters usually abstained from sex before the hunt because they believed it would change their scent and alert their prey. As with Innana in Sumeria, though, Artemis' virginity was less about whether or not she'd had penetrative sex, and more about her autonomy and power. She was worshipped as the protector of women, including in childbirth, despite never being a mother herself.
Her special animals were the lion and the bear, nature's greatest hunters. (Although I gotta say, I've been watching a lot of videos of bears on swingsets lately, and I'm not convinced they're not just big, dangerous goofballs.) Artemis was known as the goddess who moved silently by night, and she could transform into – you'll never guess – a cat.
There's another ancient Greek goddess that bears mentioning at this point, even though she's much more of a dog person, and that's Hecate.
Her origins are a little murky. Some scholars think she's simply another aspect of Artemis. Where Artemis stood for purity and female strength, Hecate embodied the goddess’ darker elements, magic nighttime dealings, and an association with the underworld. She may also have been another syncretised Ancient Egyptian goddess – this time, the frog-headed Heket. She had a large cult following in Asia Minor, not too far from those Neolithic Anatolian caves, full of paintings of powerful women.
Like Lilith, Hecate deserves a full episode eventually. The quick version is that she was a protector and mother goddess with rulership over earth, sea, and sky. She's giving me flashbacks to our Rusalka episode because she was a goddess of liminal spaces: temple entrances, city gates, crossroads.... You know, the kind where you sell your soul to the devil so you can play guitar. Or maybe the kind where you transform into a cursed headless mule in Brazil.
That liminal space or between-worlds thing makes sense because she was also a chthonic goddess, meaning a goddess of the underworld. Virgil called Hell's entrance “Hecate’s Grove”, and she could unlock the gates of death with the key she was often depicted holding. Beyond the underworld and the spirits of the dead, Hecate also became connected with potions, magic spells and witchcraft.
As I mentioned, she was a known dog lover, often shown with a big black dog by her side. She was regularly portrayed with polecats, a ferrety-looking weasel; red mullet fish, which are known to eat corpses; frogs because they could cross between two elements, as she could; horses; and – you guessed it – cats. Although they don't appear as frequently as dogs, she was sometimes depicted on coins and in artwork with lions at her side.
So as you can see, we've got this long history of powerful female deities being portrayed either with cats or as cats. And I haven't even mentioned the Norse goddess Freyja, whose chariot was pulled by two cats.
These ladies aren't quiet, demure types. These are autonomous women whose power rivalled or exceeded that of their male peers. They were warriors and guardians. They were mothers who could be gentle and caring, but always fiercely protective, and they were champions of women.
But these cat goddesses and demons also had dark connections to some of the scarier elements of the universe: nighttime, death, poison, ghosts, and Hell itself. They were, if I say so myself, pretty fucking metal.
So how did we go from metal cat goddesses of creation and destruction to witches with cat-shaped familiars who were actually Satan's minions? Well, it's a long story. We don't have time to get into all of it. There's a bestselling book about it, if you want to check out the details.
The gist of it, though, is that this carpenter from a super-small town said and did some stuff that made a few officials from the occupying government pretty mad. It turned into a whole thing, and now the world's largest religion is based on that guy's teachings. The main thing he wanted was for all of us to remember to treat others the way we'd want to be treated so naturally, a lot of killing, colonising and oppressing has been done in his name. The bestseller that I mentioned leaves out that last part.
Things started well for cats, women, and Christianity. The same syncretisation that connected Bastet to Artemis and Artemis to Hecate happened again, this time with Mary, mother of Jesus. The Roman equivalent of Artemis was Diana, and when Constantine I decriminalised Christianity in the Roman Empire, it was only natural that the Virgin Mary might have some of the same qualities that previously belonged to another famous virgin and protective mother-type figure.
Art from the Middle Ages that depicts the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel told Mary that she would bear God's child, often includes a cat. So do many paintings of the Holy Family. There's even Italian folklore about a cat in Bethlehem that gave birth to a kitten on the same night that Mary had Jesus. Very, very cute.
But things started to go downhill fast. There are no cats in the New Testament, and that might be an indication that the species was on the brink of a PR crisis. In the Middle Ages, one of my sources said, “the general run of Christians were firmly persuaded that Satan had marked cats for his own.”
Christianity could only grow by converting people away from their original religions, and the clergy told people that their old pantheistic gods were actually devils leading them away from the one true God. But as anyone who's sat through family holidays knows, people don't let go of traditions easily. Some were still participating in their old pagan ceremonies and practices on the down-low.
The medieval Christian church put as much emphasis on demons as it did on saints, and that made sense to people. Belief in witchcraft was fairly universal at the time, and it seemed much more likely that you'd have a run-in with the neighbourhood witch than come across an angel on your way to work in the morning. That same source said, “The devil was ever watchful over his own and saw to it that at least one competent witch was provided for every parish.”
Now we've got a culture of people who are terrified of witches, aware that some of their neighbours are still sneaking around doing secret pagan rituals, and being told by authority figures that the old ways are straight from Satan himself. With such a strong association with the old religions, it's little wonder that cats started to be viewed with suspicion.
It should be noted that as a species, they weren't really doing themselves any favours. Cats are... cats are weird.
In Edo period Japan, cats weren't thought to be witches, but they were a type of yokai – supernatural entities. Japanese folklore is full of kaibyō, which translates to “strange cat”. For example, nekomata are domestic cats who grew old and transformed into giant two-tailed monsters. They ran away to live in the mountains, but they'd emerge disguised as old women, of course, to trick people so they could kidnap and eat them.
Another kind, the bakeneko, can also shapeshift, as well as speak in the human tongue, curse or possess people, raise the dead, or dance around with napkins on their heads. …What the hell, Japan?
Anyway, you can see why, even without the associations with the Greek underworld or demonic feminists, cats can be a bit spooky. Their irises changed shape in the dark. They walk silently. They hunt at night. They're not shy with their teeth and their claws. And they'll even lick blood, given the opportunity. Sometimes when you pet them, static electricity makes sparks fly off their fur.
But cats' biggest issue is the thing that endears them the most to cat lovers: They're kind of jerks. They can be super loving and cuddly, of course, but they can also be aloof, mysterious, and fickle. For some of us, that just adds to their charm. The same source I mentioned before, which was one of my favourites from this week, says, and I quote, “In nearly all lovers of cats, one finds a certain contempt for the stupidity of mankind.”
I would like to throw in a little disclaimer here, but it's not about my feelings towards mankind, which can be summed up with that.
The article I keep quoting from, “Cats Holy and Profane” by N.A. Crawford is really interesting, and it was helpful for some of the historical parts of this episode. But it was also published in a journal called The Psychoanalytical Review in 1934, and it takes a very abrupt turn to discuss how a phobia of cats may make you a lesbian. So while I enjoyed the beginning, I do have to say that it hasn't aged well.
It was especially startling because I’d just read this more recent article by a lesbian author who began by joking that you can't be a lesbian without owning a cat. So lesbians, please tell me how you feel.
Okay, back to cats, cat owners, and their collective attitude problems.
You may have noticed that the same attributes people don't like about cats are things that misogynists often say about women.
In our episode on “The Boarded Window”, Ambrose Bierce defined women as a type of cat in his satirical and pretty sexist Devil's Dictionary. And as we saw in the Headless Mule episode, equating women and animals is pretty old hat in patriarchal cultures.
In a lot of ways, I think that's an honour. Animals are the best! Have you ever seen a video of a cow getting the zoomies? Incredible. I aspire to zoomy cow levels of happiness and purity of spirit. Some of us would argue that maybe instead of denigrating animals as less-than, we could be trying a little harder to be more like them.
Since we don't have time to unpack that, too, I'll just point out the obvious: Equating a person to an animal is the literal definition of dehumanisation. It's a mental shortcut for women-hating assholes to avoid acknowledging a person's complexity and individualism, which in turn makes it easier for them to engage in horrific discriminatory acts without considering the consequences for the actual human beings involved.
Back into our time machine to medieval Europe, where the patriarchy was alive and well, and witch-hunting, another dehumanising activity, was having its heyday.
Women who were deemed threatening or who deviated from social norms were accused of witchcraft and subjected to extremely harsh interrogations and trials. And as a result of these interrogations, which we can pretty much equate to torture, accused witches would often admit to having a familiar.
The idea of a familiar wasn't new. After all, all the cat goddesses we just ran through had them. Witches had them, too. They acted as protectors for witches as they gained new powers, or assistants to help with spells and evil deeds.
They were pretty handy little guys. They'd help diagnose illnesses, root out the source of a curse, find lost objects and hunt treasure. Some enterprising magicians would summon them and then lock them into bottles, rings, or stones to sell them as charms for luck in gambling, love, or business. This was technically not witchcraft because they weren't wicked spirits, you see. Capitalism is fine. Being a weird lady is not.
By the way, it's important to point out that some of the accused witches during this time were women of colour practising their indigenous traditions, many of which also include familiar animals or spirits. And, boy howdy, was practising an indigenous tradition at this time a good way to get accused of witchcraft in an extremely xenophobic environment.
Familiars could take on any number of forms, sometimes even that of a human, but they were most commonly small animals, including dogs, rats, ferrets, birds, frogs and toads, rabbits, and – say it with me – cats.
Courts heard a lot of evidence associating cats with witches and Satan. In fact, Agnes Waterhouse, one of the first women executed for witchcraft in England, confessed to having a familiar in the form of a cat named Satan. Satan-the-cat was later transformed into Satan-the-toad, by the way, and I think that's a great name for a toad.
Cats were blamed for turning beer sour, wrecking ships, producing disease, desecrating crucifixes and even leading armies. Crawford says one theologian said all cats served seven masters for seven years each and then carried the last one to Hell with them. Protestants even told their congregations that the Pope travelled around in the form of a cat, which beats the pants off the Popemobile.
Women were being executed by the state and their satanic emissaries, cats, were not faring much better. I'm not going to get into it. If you want the details, some of the sources in the show notes talk about it. Suffice it to say that medieval and even Renaissance Europe were not good times to be a cat.
When the Puritans came to the New World, they brought with them those same attitudes towards both cats and women. The Pilgrims were especially disturbed by the qualities that made cat goddesses so powerful millennia before. They saw cats as an erotic symbol – an evil mother who had sold her soul to Satan. “In other words,” writes Crawford, “the cat typifies the specifically sexual character in woman, which, to any Puritan civilisation, is evil.”
Cue the witch trials of the 17th century.
To this day, there are superstitions in the United States that can be traced directly back to witch hysteria. Some people still get nervous when a black cat crosses their path, which the Puritans would have told you is because it's just marked your way with the sign of Satan. Of course, you can try to stay safe by touching wood – that is, touching the cross to defeat the devil.
But don't worry! Things have changed. We have grown as a species. Why, the last time a woman was executed for witchcraft was way back in… 2021, according to Wikipedia.
At least we’re cooler about women's relationships with cats now, though. Oh. Oh, wait. That's… that's not right, either.
My other favourite source this week was a chapter from the book Animaladies. In it, Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey points out that we are still haunted by the relationship between felines and females. But these days, we fear something else.
She wrote, “I've long been fascinated by the crazy cat lady as a cultural trope, a sort of folk devil whose appearance plays on broader anxieties attached to femininity and animality.”
Little Edie and Big Edie in Grey Gardens and Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons are just a few of modern pop culture's examples of women whose lifestyles deviate from the social norm. They live in squalor, as we assume animals do, and their relationships with their critters are treated with derision.
The unsaid part is that these are women who failed, right? They never fulfilled society's expectation that they have husbands, children, and well-kept appearances and homes. They're boogeymen, or rather, boogeywomen, I guess, meant to scare us into living our lives between the lines.
Interestingly, Probyn-Rapsey points out that women with a lot of animals are more likely to be reported and prosecuted for animal hoarding than men with a lot of animals because men don't fit the stereotype for many judges.
The cat-lady folk-devil’s claws aren't quite as sharp as they used to be. Women no longer need to get married to ensure their survival, and pet culture, spurred on by the Internet, encourages big displays of affection for our pets, says Probyn-Rapsey. Thanks to the Internet, there's also much more visibility for cat lovers of all genders. So cat ladies are now young, career-focused, and not even necessarily ladies.
I'm not sure we're out of the woods yet. When Time magazine named Taylor Swift its 2023 Person of the Year, she asked to pose on the cover with her cat. And even though Taylor's, you know, successful enough to be named Person of the Year, some people still wanted to talk about how sad it was that she's posing with her cat.
But now that I'm looking at the cover again, it's a picture of a beautiful woman and her cat. And all I can see is power.
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Steph: All right, all you cool cats and kittens. It's time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Thanks for joining me!
To learn more about the cat goddesses, witches and their familiars, Japan's strange cats and the fascinating history of cat ladies, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today's episodes. I've been collecting cat memes to share for weeks. Weeks!
I'll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don't forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
