Cats have a unique relationship with humans as domesticated animals; they’re either loved or loathed. Cats are criticized for being selfish (as much as a nonrational being can be said to be selfish), lazy, and mercurial—and, worst of all, fickle compared to “man’s best friend,” the dog. Black dogs notwithstanding, no other furry four-legged companion has been so associated with the folklore of witchcraft and demonology as the cat. These persistent stereotypes are a troubling reminder of a less rational time in history, when people were hanged for the imaginary crime of witchcraft and cats were eyed with both suspicion and contempt for being demonic witches’ familiars. Good thing that’s ancient history, right? Not so if you believe certain self-proclaimed “exorcists”! When I saw the headline of a recent New York Post article that read “Exorcist Insists Demon Is Using Terrifying Cat as a Puppet,” I needed to know what this exorcist considered compelling evidence of demonic possession.
Alyson Kalhagen of Green Bay, Wisconsin, runs both a Facebook page and an Instagram account for her two cats, Pixel (the Cornish Rex described in The New York Post article) and Sophie. Sometime in October 2020, Alyson received a message from someone (Alyson chose not to reveal the person’s identity) claiming to be an “exorcist” and warning her that “there’s a cloud behind your cat it’s a demon it’s using your cat as a puppet it doesn’t know how to use your cat’s body so its practicing by using its face.”
When I asked Alyson if the message she received was in direct response to a particular post she had made on Facebook (the Instagram account didn’t exist at the time), she told me, “They didn’t specify, but it [the timing] lined up with me posting this particular photo.” She was referring to a post she had made on Facebook on October 21, 2020. Originally, Alyson didn’t share her story about the message she had received beyond her circle of close friends, but then something happened that changed her mind:
I was in a group called Animals in Predicaments Posting that apparently had an admin go rogue and suddenly change the name of the group to Satanists in Predicaments Posting. There was a lot of chaos going on in the group as they worked to get the name changed back, but I thought the situation was funny and that some of them might get a kick out of the story of my “demonic” cat.
After sharing her story on Animals in Predicaments Posting, Alyson was contacted by someone from Kennedy News Media, who in turn sold the story to The Sun, New York Post, and other outlets. This matches with The Sun crediting the photos used in their article to Kennedy News Media in their February 18 article, “Hellcat: Cat with ‘Creepy’ Facial Expression is a DEMON According to Exorcist Who Says Owner Should ‘Cage Him & Pray.’”
My initial reaction was to scoff at the idea of a demon possessing a cat, but then I started thinking. It’s easy to dismiss this person as either a troll or someone who is genuine in their belief and sincere in their misguided concern. However, if there’s any truth to claims that cats have historically been mistreated because of witchcraft accusations, I think comments such as these ought to be taken seriously. Even though the self-proclaimed “exorcist” merely instructed Pixel be put “in a cage so she can’t get away” and for Kalhagen to “pray to archangel Michael over and over in front of your cat,” exorcisms, when performed by sincere believers in their power and efficacy, can become very physical and even dangerous. If this “exorcist” had told someone more prone to believe in demonic possession (or someone who was emotionally or psychologically vulnerable) that their cat was demonically possessed, the end result may have been very different and decidedly more tragic than a rather silly news article.
The association of cats with the Devil and heresy has a long history, much of it as marked by fiction as by fact. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX established the Papal Inquisition to formalize the process of trying and sentencing those accused of heresy. In the same year, he authored the decretal Vox in Rama or Voice in Ramah, addressed to Henry VII, the King of Germany, condemning what was believed to be an epidemic of Luciferianism at the time in Germany. In Vox in Rama, Pope Gregory IX implicates cats as part of the Luciferian’s diabolical rites:
Then all sit down to a banquet and when they rise after it is finished, a black cat emerges from a kind of statue which normally stands in the place where these meetings are held. It is as large as a fair-sized dog, and enters backwards with its tail erect. First the novice kisses its hind parts, then the Master of Ceremonies proceeds to do the same and finally all the others in turn; or rather all those who deserve the honor.” (Kors and Peters 2001)
The most remarkable aspect of this story is the idea that anyone could command a cat to do anything, let alone walk backward! A popular online theory claims that cats were tortured and exterminated en masse as a result of this papal bull, ultimately contributing to the outbreak of bubonic plague. According to this theory, the outbreak of bubonic plague, the Black Death, was a direct result of the unchecked population of rats carrying plague-bearing fleas. Had the cats in Europe not been wiped out as a direct result of witchcraft superstition and the cat-killing Pope Gregory IX sanctioned, it’s argued that perhaps the plague may have been curtailed. I am neither a zoologist nor a historian, so I’m hardly qualified to give an opinion on whether there are good reasons to believe the claims of a link between Vox in Rama, the mass extermination of cats, and the Black Death. However, in his correspondence with me, Dr. Luebke, professor of history at the University of Oregon, stated “For what it’s worth, you’re right to be skeptical about the claim that Vox in Rama was responsible for a decline in the cat population, thereby exacerbating the spread of bubonic plague. Anyone who made that claim in my classes would get a D.” I believe there are several reasons for doubting this claim: first, a careful reading of the Vox in Rama reveals no such directive to harm cats. While it is true that Pope Gregory IX implicated cats in Satanic practices—and perhaps as a result people mistreated or killed cats—this would not be because the Pope explicitly told them to. Second, this letter was primarily intended as a condemnation of heretical practices that were believed to be taking place in Germany, not Europe at large. Third, Vox in Rama was authored in 1232. Most historians agree the Black Death didn’t reach European shores until 1347. For Pope Gregory IX’s decretal to be even partially responsible, we must assume that not only did it directly or indirectly result in European Catholics drastically reducing the cat population sufficiently but that this population reduction lasted at least 115 years. Considering that Europe would experience recurrent outbreaks of the Black Death until the late seventeenth century, it would have to have been as many as 430 years. Finally, this line of argument ignores the fact that the Black Death originated in China and inner Asia and that outbreaks occurred in Egypt and North Africa, places that were not subject to Papal authority.
Pope Gregory IX wasn’t the only Pope to allegedly have commented on cats. Another popular online theory states that Pope Innocent VIII “fanned the flames of anti-cat prejudice” in his 1484 papal bull, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, in which he allegedly called the cat “the devil’s favorite animal and idol of all witches.” I failed to find the aforementioned quote anywhere in the Summis or any specific mention of “cats” for that matter (Kors and Peters 2001). This claim may be inspired by the relationship the Summis has with perhaps the single most influential witch-hunter’s manual, Malleus Maleficarum or “The Witches’ Hammer,” in which it’s stated:
Nevertheless, devils at times, with God’s permission, in their own persons hurt even the innocent; and formerly they injured the Blessed Job, although they were not personally present, nor did the devils make use of any such illusory apparition as in the example we have quoted, when they used the phantasm of a cat, an animal which is, in the Scriptures, an appropriate symbol of the perfidious, just as a dog is the symbol of preachers; for cats are always setting snares for each other.
The Summis was a papal bull written in response to Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, who had complained to Pope Innocent VIII about being refused assistance by local authorities in Germany. The Summis granted Kramer jurisdiction over the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen. I note that, despite being one of the most reprehensible books ever printed and being directly responsible for the torture and death of countless accused witches, I could not find any passage in the Malleus Maleficarum in which witch-hunters were directed to torture or kill cats. That’s not to say overzealous witch-hunters, judges, or superstitious townsfolk may not have engaged in such barbaric acts; it just seems to be the case that secular and ecclesiastical authorities were more interested in interrogating and punishing witches than waging war against their demonic familiars.
Despite the Catholic Church never officially sanctioning violence against cats, felines were persistently treated with suspicion by English witch-hunters. Indeed, Helen Parish of the Department of History at the University of Reading, tells us that “The presence of the familiar in the witch trials is an almost uniquely English phenomenon,” and even then we find regional differences; as Owen Davies points out, there are almost no mentions of familiars in Wales and few mentions in northern England (Davies, 1999). In his 1584 Discovery of Witchcraft, Reginald Scott writes of witches: “Some say they can keepe divels and spirits in the likenesse of todes and cats” (Robbins 1960), which, according to Rossell Robbins in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, is the first example of familiar being used to refer to a faithful, hence “familiar,” spirit. Familiars were low-ranking demons given to a witch in exchange for having made a pact with the Devil. Familiars would take the shape of small, often domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, toads, or birds, and were sent to do the witch’s bidding or work magical harm against her enemies, a practice known as “malefice” or “maleficia.”
One example comes from the St. Osyth Witch trials in 1582, in which it’s recorded that the accused, Ursula Kempe, confessed that:
She had four spirits whereof two of them were hes, and the other two were shes; the two he spirits were to punish and kill unto death, and the two shes were to punish with lameness and other diseases of bodily harm … One he, like a gray cat, is called Tittey; the second, like a blak cat, is called Jack; one she, like a black toad is called Pigin; and the other like a black lamb, is called Tyffin. (Quoted in Robbins 1960)
It wasn’t until 1604, with the passing of the Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits, that “any persons or persons shall … use, practice, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or worked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose…” became criminally liable under Jacobean law.
So, is there any evidence that cats were tortured or killed in connection with witchcraft accusations? Actually, yes. In Belgium, every three years on the second Sunday of May, the town of Ypres holds a festival known as Kattenstoet, “the festival of cats,” in which the town jester throws cats (in modern times plush toy cats are used) from the Belfry tower of the Cloth Hall to the crowd below. George McDonald explains, “The custom originated centuries ago, at a time when cats were considered a ‘familiar’ of witches, and evolved into the tradition of today’s lively carnival and procession” (McDonald 2011). Belgium was hardly unique with respect to their zoosadism. Accounts of torturing and killing cats in activities such as cat-burning, or “brûler les chats” in France, “beat the cat out of the barrel” in Denmark, or the Italian sport of nailing a cat to a tree while young men, hands bound behind their backs, take turns kneeling and headbutting the cat, indicate that across Europe many people had little reluctance to abuse and kill animals in the name of good old-fashioned entertainment.
In his book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, historian Robert Darnton gives an explanation for why cats in particular were often the targets of such abuse:
First and foremost, cats suggested witchcraft. To protect yourself from sorcery by cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and you would break its malevolent power. A maimed cat could not attend a sabbath or wander abroad to cast spells. Peasants frequently cudgeled cats who crossed their paths at night and discovered the next day that bruises had appeared on women believed to be witches—or so it was said in the lore of their village. (Darnton 2009)
Clearly, even if the Catholic Church never decreed the mistreatment of cats, the associations that the Church did make between cats and witchcraft led many people to assume it was preferable to take the precautions against malefice rather than suffer a cat to live. While things have indisputably improved since the time of the Inquisition and the witch trials, animal abuse and in particular abuse of cats is still a widespread problem today. Nationwide statistics in the United States are difficult to come by, but according to the Humane Society, 71 percent of domestic abuse survivors reported that their abuser had also targeted their pets in order to threaten compliance. In another study of families under investigation for suspected child abuse, an estimated 88 percent of the households under investigation also had a pet who was the victim of abuse. There is also the popular Netflix true crime docuseries, Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, documenting the apprehension of murderer Luka Magnotta, who came to the attention of internet sleuths after posting videos of himself torturing and killing kittens. Most people today may not believe in witchcraft or think it good-fun torturing, mutilating, and killing animals, but enough do and clearly more work is to be done on behalf of our evolutionary brethren.
As far as Pixel is concerned, there’s a perfectly reasonable, non-demonological explanation for his unusual appearance: the magic of genetics. In 2013, scientists were even able to identify the mutation that produces the Cornish Rex’s distinctive appearance, the lysophosphatidic acid receptor 6 (LPAR6) on chromosome A1. As for the “cloud” behind Pixel that is supposedly actually a demon, I guess I’m just not sensitive enough to see it. What I do see is a sweet cat and a wondrous example of the beauty and diversity of nature. I was glad to know that Alyson didn’t take the “exorcist’s” advice seriously, and I sincerely hope that person, if they truly believe and mean what they said, gets some serious medical help. Seeing things that aren’t really there and believing that evil spirits are controlling animals sounds delusional and paranoid to me, and I believe it would be prudent for this person to seek the advice of a medical professional before they harm themselves or others—especially a cat.
References
- Darnton, Robert. 2009. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, NY: Basic Books.
- Kors, Alan, and Edward Peters. 2001. Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 114–116; 177–180.
- McDonald, George. 2011. Frommer’s Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Frommer’s (April 26).
- Owen, Davies. 1999. Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture 1736–1951. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
- Robbins, Rossell. 1960. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.