It\u2019s a foreboding warning of the peril about to ensue for him and his companions. Black cats even show up in a nefarious manner in Disney films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Cinderella<\/em>, the Tremaine\u2019s black cat is a pernicious figure that terrorizes the other animals and is called Lucifer. But when and how did black cats get their bad reputation? And why are there so many superstitions surrounding them? <\/p>\n\n\n\n It may surprise us today, but black cats were looked at quite favorably for much of recorded history. The Ancient Egyptians, in particular, revered cats, and the black cat was especially. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Representations of Bastet, the Egyptian goddess of health, were often in the shape of a black cat. Domesticated black cats for the residents of the Nile were seen as guardians against evil spirits and death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some cats were even mummified and buried with their owners. And this positive reputation continued for thousands of years. Moreover, the Romans continued to view black cats as a good luck symbol; down to the early first millennium AD, they were often carried on board ships to ensure the safety of the voyage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This, though, may have been as much owing to a desire to root out rodents on board the ship as any belief in the intrinsic luck that black cats conveyed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what happened to the reputation of black cats, and why did so many superstitions emerge surrounding them? The answer lies in the Middle Ages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As Western Europe was reconquered from its Roman occupiers between the third and sixth centuries AD, Celtic and Germanic belief systems proliferated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of these held that black cats were an evil force. For instance, in Celtic and Welsh mythology, monstrous creatures such as Cath Palug grew from black kittens and terrorized the people of Britain and Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As these beliefs permeated the Roman culture of Western Europe, black cats developed a reputation for bringing both good and bad luck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, this shifted again during the Late Middle Ages when the bad began to outweigh the good. In particular, the advent of the Black Death or bubonic plague<\/a> across Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, which killed over one-third of the continent\u2019s people in a decade, saw superstitions about black cats abound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many believed that the cats were delivering the plague to households and towns. There may have been some slight science to this. The plague was borne on a flea that arrived in Europe from Crimea on the back of rats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Since cats are known to attack and kill rats, it follows that medieval observers would have seen a pattern between the presence of cats and the spread of the plague. As a result, concerns about the malevolence of black cats grew from the fourteenth century onwards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This was further compounded by the growing concerns over witchcraft throughout Europe and the increasing associations between witches and black cats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the typical depiction of it as a medieval phenomenon, the obsession with witchcraft only really emerged from the thirteenth century onwards as the Middle Ages drew to a close. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed previously, the medieval Roman Catholic Church had condemned belief in witches as a Pagan superstition, but attitudes changed from the thirteenth century onwards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.historydefined.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/istockphoto-157655025-170667a.jpeg\")
The Revered Black Cat of Antiquity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Middle Ages: A Declining Reputation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Black Cats and the Witch Craze<\/h2>\n\n\n\n