Feline Myth and Folklore

Along the centuries, cats have been part of the folklore and the superstition, and not only in relation with witches. For example, even nowadays, they recommend mothers not to let the cat sleep in the same room as babies, because the cat might asphyxiate or “suck their breath”, or the baby might chore with the animal’s hair.

Adam, Eve and Lilith
The origin of this superstition seems to go back to an ancient popular narrative of the Hebrews in which it says that Adam had another woman before Eve.

Lilith, which was her name, refused to submit herself to Adam, for which she was thrown from the Garden of Eden and turned into a demon that wandered around the earth.

The Spanish Jews thought that Lilith adopted the form of a giant black cat called El Broosha that sucked the blood of new born.

Buddhist Beliefs
Cats occupied a very different place in the belief of certain branch of Buddhism that was practiced in Southeast Asia.

There they believed that when a person had reached the highest levels of spiritually he would die, its soul would enter the body of a cat and would stay there until the cat died. Then the soul would go to paradise.

This belief is manifested with the presence of a cat at the feet of some statues of Buddha, in spite of the contradictory vision of the cat in other Buddhist branches.

It seems that the most benign vision is the one that has lasted until the XX Century. When the king Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand) was crowned in 1952, on the crowning procession a cat participated as a symbol of the preceding monarch, Ramah VI.

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