The Cat Has Always Known Something We Don’t (International Cat Day)

There is a specific quality to the way a cat looks at something you cannot see. Not at nothing. At something. Their gaze fixes at a point in the room, or just above your shoulder, or at the edge of a doorway, with an attention that is too deliberate to dismiss. Most people who live with cats know this experience and have no particularly satisfying explanation for it.

Every culture that has spent significant time with cats has arrived at the same conclusion: they are not entirely of this world.

In ancient Egypt, the goddess Bastet was depicted with the head of a cat, revered as the protector of home and pharaoh, associated with the sun and with the power of the living ruler. Cats were mummified, buried with ceremony, given their own vast cemeteries. To harm a cat was punishable by death. This was not superstition. It was a society’s way of encoding something it understood clearly: that this creature carried a quality of awareness that deserved protection.

In Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja, associated with love, beauty, fertility and magic, rode a chariot pulled by two great cats. They were named Bygul and Trjegul, meaning golden bee and striped bee. They were considered magical, possessed of great strength, and associated with divinity. That Freyja of all the Norse deities chose cats as her companions is interesting. She was also the keeper of the slain, the one who chose which warriors came to her hall. A goddess of both love and death, served by cats. The Egyptians would have understood this entirely.

In Celtic tradition, cats were linked to the Otherworld, understood as threshold creatures who moved between mortal and spiritual realms. Japanese folklore describes the Bakeneko, a cat that gained magical powers with age, sometimes walking upright or speaking. The Nekomata, with its split tail, was said to command the dead. These are not separate mythologies arriving at similar conclusions by coincidence. They are independent observations of the same animal producing the same result: the cat sits at the edge of something. She sees more than one world at once.

I have a Ragdoll in the Animarii: Unzipped series. Her name is The One that Plays with Starlight. She is currently not listed in my store because she has just been accepted into a juried online gallery showcase at Metta Gallery, where she will be featured from August 8, International Cat Day: mettagallery.com/feline

I chose to paint a domestic cat in this series because domestication is its own kind of mystery. The cat is the only animal that domesticated itself. It chose proximity to humans on its own terms, and has continued to operate on its own terms ever since. Every other domestic animal was bred selectively, shaped to serve a purpose. The cat arrived, decided the arrangement was acceptable, and has been quietly running things ever since.

What the Ragdoll carries specifically is something I noticed the first time I spent time with one. They go limp when you hold them. Not out of submission but out of complete trust, a deliberate release of tension that is actually quite rare in any creature. It is the opposite of bracing for something. It is the physical expression of knowing you are held.