Superstition is a phenomenon that I find odious. Misfortune is the pass of the vile, the alibi of the irresponsible. Always. Of course, when it is turned against the defenseless, it becomes an unbearable concentration of cheap cowardice.
This is the case with black cats. Do black cats really bring bad luck? Or do we really want to continue to say that if a black cat crosses your street it will bring you bad luck?
If you are convinced of yes, or if you know someone who still is, maybe a little bit as a joke and a bit really, then a fleeting look at the past could be useful.
In the pre-Christian and polytheistic world, the cat lived happy days, often venerated as a deity. In ancient Egypt, already from the second dynasty (2890 BC), the goddess Basket was represented with the appearance of a cat (black or dark). Goddess of cats but also of women, of fertility, of births and of the house.
Things changed drastically with the advent of Catholicism and in particular during the Middle Ages: with the Bull Vox in copper, in 1233, Pope Gregory IX officially condemned the black cat, the incarnation of Satan, and started the de facto extermination of cats. Women and cats were tortured for centuries: just think that for the feast of St. John, on 24 June each year, all the black cats captured were burned alive at the stake on a pole where they could climb only to suffer longer. The ways to torture “the incarnation of Satan” were unfortunately different and all atrocious: cats were beaten to death, skinned alive, thrown from the bell towers and, of course, crucified. To understand how profound was the superstitious madness, how blind and ruthless was the need to physically dismember the “evil”, just think that the last cat sentenced to death for witchcraft (?) was executed in London in 1712. It is no coincidence that today it is difficult to find completely black cats in Western Europe, while there are many more in the East, starting from the Balkan area.
It is also said that pirates carried on their ships black cats: black because of the same color of their banners and cats because the mice on the ships were more harmful than enemy cannons. For this reason, five centuries ago, the vision of a black cat on the roads near the coasts could indicate the arrival of dangerous filibusters and therefore be associated with danger and misfortune. Even older, perhaps even dating back to ancient Rome, it seems to be another story at the origin of our ill-starred superstition: crossing the road at night, a black cat could in fact make the horses run wild and cause the wagons to overturn, with disastrous consequences.
It took years and too many sacrifices to understand that times were now different, that irrational and foolish anger, the need to tear apart a fetish were absolutely useless. Not only useless, but even deleterious: it was during the nineteenth century that the progress of knowledge gradually led to exonerate the cats and to make clear their usefulness. More than pirates, more than the bizarre horses and above all more than Satan, for centuries it was diseases that had killed them. The famous Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), founder of modern microbiology, praised the hygienic habits of cats, always attentive to the cleanliness of their bodies. In fact, no disease was attributable to small cats, while their bitter enemies, the mice, were responsible for at least 35 diseases, including the infamous bubonic plague, which in Europe had caused more than 25 million deaths, or a third of the entire population. In other words, if cats had been worshiped during the Middle Ages, perhaps in place of the black plague and typhus, Europe would have been infested only by thunderous fuses and meows.
Is everything a little clearer now? Superstition is not only bad for those who should be “bad luck”, it is bad for everyone. To play with the concepts a little, one could sarcastically say that only superstition brings bad luck. And if for a Roman merchant a broken cart could be a problem, as well as for a Sardinia farmer the arrival of some drunken corsairs, for us there is no excuse.
So, next November 17, the day of the black cat, designed to dispel the vulgar beliefs of dark times, help us to tell this story. But don't do it just for cats. Do it for yourself too.