March 14, 2023 • 21 mins
Be our Valentine! In this episode of 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's #1 (and only) cat-themed culture, history and science podcast - well - we’ve always known that cats are cuter than babies, wings or not. But! Did you know that cats are actually symbols of love for many ancient cultures? Well, some call it love. Listen on!
In this episode, host Amanda B. interviews Sterling “Trapking” Davis of Trapking Humane Cat Solutions, Amy No of Brooklyn's The 5 Kittens Rescues, and Danielle Mackay, a classics lecturer and writer at Rhodes University.
Join us as we explore the question of just how fertile cats are, and take a journey back in time to ancient Egypt and Greece to discover why cats have a stronger claim to being Valentine's Day mascots than the traditional figure of Cupid - and how felis catus deserves a bigger place in our hearts and minds.
Support the podcast, sign up for The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter and learn about way$ to help keep this ship afloat for our next season here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.
About the experts:
- Sterling "TrapKing" Davis is an Atlanta, GA-based trap hip hop musician, community organizer and educator on feline trap-neuter-rescue. Davis and his team consult across the continental U.S. to provide sustainable, humane solutions for feral cat population control from a positive, collaborative and community-centered approach (trapkinghumane.org).
- Danielle Mackay, M.A., of Rhodes University (South Africa) is a classics lecturer, researcher and writer.
- Amy No is the founder of The 5 Kittens Rescues, a trap-neuter-return activist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about her organization and their work at https://the5kittensrescues.com.
Producer, writer, editor, sound designer, host, basically everything*
- Captain Kitty (Amanda B.)
* with co-executive producers Binky & Snuggles
Animal voices include:
- Binky & Snuggles _^..^_
Opening and closing credits:
- Leathered: "Look Alive" (c) 2022
- Samples licensed via Loopcloud
- Additional sound effects from Pixabay.com
Logo design:
- Edward Anthony © 2024 (Instagram: @itsmyunzii)
Research cited:
- Felton, D. (2023, February 8). Don't underestimate Cupid – he's not the chubby cherub you associate with Valentine's day. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/dont-underestimate-cupid-hes-not-the-chubby-cherub-you-associate-with-valentines-day-197735
- Krznaric, R. (2023, February 13). Love like a greek: The six types of Love. GreekReporter.com. Retrieved from https://greekreporter.com/2022/10/10/six-types-love-ancient-greece/
- Mackay, D. (2022, September 2). Vengeful, virgin, huntress: The Greek goddess Artemis. TheCollector. Retrieved from http://www.thecollector.com/artemis-greek-goddess/
- Mackay, D. (2021, February 15). The ancient festivals of dionysus in athens: 'euhoi bacchoi'. TheCollector. Retrieved from https://www.thecollector.com/festival-of-dionysus/
- Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. or 18 A.D. (1914). Ovid's Metamorphoses. Translated by Evelyn-White, H G. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay, yeah.
(00:03):
So then you're gonna press here.
Okay, you're paw's a little wide, but oh, oops.
We're going on.
And we're back.
To Amandaland.
I mean, 6 degrees of cats.
A podcast about how cats have influenced
Our past, present, and future.
Right now, in my dimension, it happens to be...
(00:29):
Valentine's Day.
I love my baby.
I love my day.
About love.
I think it's time to talk about my very first love, Ribbons Bo.
My little bestie.
That guy would scratch out the door if he heard me crying.
(00:51):
Just to comfort me.
He'd also do that when he heard me playing guitar and singing.
I have no idea what that was about, but it was nice to have his audience.
He lives on in my heart.
Now, let me just clarify here.
The kind of love I'm talking about in that you all probably feel for your pets.
(01:13):
Is what the ancient Greeks distinguish as...
"Philia."
Friendship love.
A subtype of this kind of love is..."storge".
The love among parents and children.
That's how I'm using the word "love" right now.
When we're talking about Valentine's Day,
(01:35):
that kind of love isn't a different category.
Eros.
Sexual passion.
My kingdom for a kiss.
The love that undergirds all genres of music.
Except for... Christian rock.
If you call that music, just kidding...
(01:56):
I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum.
Even when the young is very bland.
Please don't come at me, Christian rockers.
So, I'm thinking Valentine's Day. Romantic, intimate forms of love.
And what comes to mind?
Aside from fancy expensive dinners.
Champagne.
(02:18):
Strawberry.
Chocolate.
Corn dogs.
There's also...
Cupid.
Chubby winged babies.
Wielding
A bow and arrow.
Weirder said aloud than it is when you just look at the Jallmark card.
It turns out that those naked babies are actually not Cupid.
They're actually his consorts of the Roman god Cupid or Eros, as he was known in Greece.
(02:44):
He was a really good-looking adult man.
God.
God-man.
Which, in my opinion, is a lot more age-appropriate for the topic of Valentine's Day, as well as anybody
who is holding a bow and arrow.
And yep.
"Eros"
The root of the word erotic.
Lust and sexual passion were in this god's wheelhouse.
(03:09):
Now, I'm all for historic accuracy.
But I have a feeling it would be a tad less of family-friendly for card companies to replace those winged babies with shirtless, handsome men.
Those cards exist, but we tend to give those out for different purposes.
You know what would be accurate to represent the fruits of intimate passion?
(03:34):
Of dare I call it...
Friskiess>
Cats.
Cats on love notes.
Cat Valentines.
Cats on a rose bouquet.
Cat shaped chocolate.
I need to license this.
Hear me out.
I didn't start talking about the Greeks and Romans were nothing.
(03:58):
In fact, I'll throw in a little about ancient Egypt in here too.
They seem to have dominated the whole cat worshiping thing.
Or did they?
In the last episode, anthro archeologist Melinda Zeder and Cat Behaviorist
Kristyn Vitale helped us understand both where, when and why cats were domesticated based on the best research we have now.
(04:27):
We discussed how cats were very, very important.
Not only as cute little friends that cheered you up after a long day of milking cows or raising pigs in harvesting grains,
but also, and especially, as fierce defenders of the harvest from rodents and other scavengers.
The ability then of cats and the role of cats in taking care of the pests that are feeding off of important stored resources like grains probably became of interest to humans.
(05:01):
Cats are very, very, very, very, very fecund.
It means fertile.
They're really, really efficient kitten makers.
I consulted with a couple experts on this point.
My name is Sterling, "TrapKing" Davis.
On Instagram, it's The Original TrapKing.
(05:24):
I go by "TrapKing" because of my nonprofit TrapKing Humane Cat Solutions, which focuses on TNR, trapping neuter return.
My name is Amy.
I run a cat rescue called The Five Kittens Rescue.
Our Instagram handle is t@TheFiveKittensRescues with an S at the end of "rescue".
(05:47):
Our goal is to stabilize and control the outdoor cat population.
TNR is the humane alternative for death or euthenasia for stray and feral cat populations.
I trap cats in humane traps, so they're not hurt.
Take them to the low-cost spay, neuter, vaccine clinics, where they're spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and returned.
(06:11):
Clearly, I'm talking the right folks here.
Just how fertile are cats?
I've trappeda cat that was pregnant at four months.
So you think about how fast that turnaround is and how fast they can reproduce.
They stop nursing at around five to six weeks, so they can get pregnant immediately after.
(06:38):
There are peak times in the year where cats tend to get more frisky.
We call it "cuffing season", they call it "kitten season".
So kitten season is the height of the mating.
And it's usually when it's warm, lots of cats are out and more active places where it's warm.
Kitten season is all year round.
The same way as humans, we like to get married and have our weddings when it's warm.
(07:02):
Cats mate when it's warm.
So you think about the warm climate if a cat is able to get pregnant at four months.
Eight, as a kitten.
And they're reproducing like that at that rate all year round.
Two cats can quickly become 200.
(07:25):
An average litter is five to six kittens.
So in a year...
Well, they have usually around three to four litters a year of three.
Four times six, let's say for example the higher end is 24 kitten.
(07:47):
It's a lot of cats.
I think I made my point there.
Cats are definitely having a ton of sex.
They're little CAT-sanovas.
So much so that the ancients found this to be divine.
I had the great opportunity to consult with a researcher and writer who may be able to shed some light on this.
(08:18):
My name's Daniel Mackay.
I have a master's degree in classical studies and ancient Greek.
I am also a writer. I wrote articles for The Collector, the online magazine.
Danielle's focus is on the Hellenistic period.
What's that again?
(08:39):
We have three main periods that we focus on in classics.
We have the archaic period, which is Homer, the writings of Homer, the start of pottery.
Still very Bronze Age.
I don't know how to say this, I'm being offensive to ancient Greeks.
(09:01):
Old fashioned.
(laughing) Yeah.
And then we have the classical period, which is, if you think of ancient Greece now, you think of the marble statues and the Parthenon.
And all the beauty that was created.
That was all done in the classical period.
That's where we had Socrates and the great leap forward when it came to philosophy and art and medicine.
(09:29):
And then after that, the Hellenistic period.
And that is marked by the birth of Alexander the Great.
Alexander, one of the most successful conquerors of history, came from Macedonia and he spread what we call Hellenism throughout Asia and North Africa into Egypt.
He became very fond of Egypt and he bolt his own little city called Alexandria.
(09:57):
In Hellenistic times, in Alexandria, everyone spoke Greek actually.
So that's what we refer to as the Hellenistic period.
So we'll not only be talking about Greece, but Egypt as well.
Let's dive into those myths.
Where did we first hear about all of these gods and goddesses?
(10:18):
We first look at the literature we have.
Luckily from Greece, we have so much literature, the Illiad and the Odyssey from Homer being sort of the staple of any classic library.
That's where you first learn about the gods and the heroes.
And how the gods can actually manipulate life on earth.
(10:41):
Whereas in Egypt, we didn't even understand heiroglyphs until the translation of the Resetta Stone.
So now we have all these resources from tombs that we can actually predate what we know from Greek mythology.
It's an amazing pantheon that the Egyptians had, and it's way bigger than the Greek one.
(11:06):
There is a lot of overlap in their functions and their forms and what they were praised for and revered for.
While the Greek Roman connection I'd heard before, how the Romans rebranded the Greek gods and goddesses and added their own stories into it,
this Greek Egyptian connection, while geographically obvious, I just didn't have a chance to really explore as much.
(11:31):
We don't know for certain exactly how much of the Greek pantheon was influenced by the Egyptians.
But definitely off the Greece had become imperial and they sort of moved into Alexandria with Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Period.
(11:52):
There is an insane amount of evidence that shows how the Greeks adopted Egyptian gods into their own pantheon.
And that's when you get the advent of the gods seraphas and amalgamation of two gods from two different pantheons.
Let's take a little pause.
(12:14):
Get it? "paws"?
Before the break, Danielle helped us understand the connection between the Greek and Egyptian pantheons.
So, cats?
(12:37):
Well, to start an Egypt being in Egypt, you need the Nile, you need the crops to survive if you don't have those then what else have you got during the desert?
And so when cats, after they were domesticated, they started laying that role of pest control.
And so it kind of became a symbiotic relationship where the people were looking after the cats because the cats were looking after them.
(13:07):
We see that in Ancient Egypt with how many kitty cats they're discovering in these tombs.
These cats were not buried alive.
I want to make that clear.
They were given their own burial, which is actually quite interesting because the common folk of Egypt were not treated to that sort of burial.
(13:28):
Tomb were only reserved for kings and royalties.
So, to see these cats getting little tombs and being buried next to sacred places, it actually shows you just the amount of reverence that the Egyptians had for cats.
The time has come to talk about the original cat goddess.
(13:53):
[Music]
Bast.
Yes, she's the first that comes to mind, isn't it?
She was previously a much earlier, a lion headed goddess.
She was the daughter of Attun, or A-mun, and she was associated with war.
(14:16):
She was a very ferocious goddess when she was lion-headed goddess.
But only later did she become associated with domestic cats when she became tamed per se, but domestic in her roles, where she became a goddess of fertility.
She was gentler, she was the cat for the people.
(14:43):
She was the cat for the kings.
Fertility was one of her symbols.
So that's how cats came to be connected to fertility.
Well, of course, fertility and cats go hand in hand.
They're ability to reproduce so much and on such a scale.
(15:06):
Having cats around agriculture, it's not a hard leap to make thinking that these cats are around and we're having a fruitful crop.
Perhaps these cats with their fertility are assisting the fertility of the earth.
And if you're an ancient Egyptian, you might think, well, then they must be a goddess who is helping, who is the cat goddess.
(15:34):
Cats, sex, fertility.
What do the Greeks have to say about that?
Danielle's really good authority here.
The mother goddess of Greek religion, Cybele, her name is directly translated to mother of the mountains.
(15:56):
She is very much associated with lions.
It's said that she has an untamed nature and she's the lover of all the wild things and she's the mistress of animal.
She's depicted in a chariot drawn by lions.
Dionysus is sort of the core god of my research.
(16:17):
He's actually out of the whole Greek pantheon associated most with cats.
Predator cats.
He's got this shape shifting aspect where you can turn into anything in the stories and the myths.
He's shifting into different animals, different plants.
(16:39):
He's got a very intense connection with the wild, the celebration.
He's got this untamed aspect to him.
He's also known as Bacchus in Roman mythology.
That's where the term "bacchanal" comes from.
He's associated with wine, pleasure and parties.
(17:04):
He was described as possessing what we might identify as a mix of both masculine and feminine traits.
He's considered the most feminine of the gods.
I have a quote here from Ovid's "Metamorphosis".
"Dionysus.
(17:25):
You Dionysus have youth unfailing, you're a boy forever.
You shine in the firmament.
When you lay your horns, your countenance is like a lovely girl."
Predatory cats.
They are mainly associated with female goddesses.
(17:48):
The panther is actually his most important animal.
So he's got that femininity about him.
He's also a god of fertility.
Think about wine and cultivation.
He's interesting.
I can't stop finding things about him.
that make him so unique.
(18:10):
Love it.
I'm getting a sense of why Danielle's so passionate about Dionysus.
Let's reflect.
From Egypt to Greece or Greece to Egypt to bust to kitties from Cybele to Dionysus to pleasure, romance and wine,
(18:36):
which leads to being frisky.
By now, we're all on the same page about just how much sex cats are out there having.
Cats.
The ultimate symbol of "getting it on:.
Cats are much more family friendly, and thematically aligned with romance sex and love
(19:01):
than those winged babies.
Or the actual Cupid, a.k.a. Eros -
a grown adult man, half naked, bearing a dangerous weapon.
So, if this is motivated you to go revise your Valentines,
I will leave you, dear listener, with a romantic poem I just composed:
(19:23):
"Roses are red.
Kitties are not.
Cats are cute of the winged babies.
I love them a lot."
Alright folks.
Next episode, we will be talking a bit more about cats and love.
(19:46):
That is how they want to be loved.
I want to thank the wonderful researcher and lecturer Daniel Mackay.
TNR activist and TrapKing Humane founder
Sterling "TrapKing" Davis.
And Brooklyn, New York's The Five Kittens Rescue Founder.
Amy--
(20:07):
Sorry, I forgot to thank you too.
Thanks, Binky and Snuggles.
You're a constant source of inspiration.
And distraction.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
Please be sure to check out their information and support them.
You can find that in the show notes as well as some research that is cited to support my case.
(20:28):
If you love this episode, please give us a top rating and review.
Thanks for coming on board.
Everything is connected.
6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly.
Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/6degreesofcats or find us on all those social media platforms.
(20:56):
And for my paid subscribers, you'll have access to the extra audio with more deep dives by our experts.
This and all episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient and the weird.
And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
I love cats.
(21:23):
I have one little boy, his name is Jagger.
And he's such a cool guy.
And he's a chunky little boy.
Okay, yeah.
(00:03):
So then you're gonna press here.
Okay, you're paw's a little wide, but oh, oops.
We're going on.
And we're back.
To Amandaland.
I mean, 6 degrees of cats.
A podcast about how cats have influenced
Our past, present, and future.
Right now, in my dimension, it happens to be...
(00:29):
Valentine's Day.
I love my baby.
I love my day.
About love.
I think it's time to talk about my very first love, Ribbons Bo.
My little bestie.
That guy would scratch out the door if he heard me crying.
(00:51):
Just to comfort me.
He'd also do that when he heard me playing guitar and singing.
I have no idea what that was about, but it was nice to have his audience.
He lives on in my heart.
Now, let me just clarify here.
The kind of love I'm talking about in that you all probably feel for your pets.
(01:13):
Is what the ancient Greeks distinguish as...
"Philia."
Friendship love.
A subtype of this kind of love is..."storge".
The love among parents and children.
That's how I'm using the word "love" right now.
When we're talking about Valentine's Day,
(01:35):
that kind of love isn't a different category.
Eros.
Sexual passion.
My kingdom for a kiss.
The love that undergirds all genres of music.
Except for... Christian rock.
If you call that music, just kidding...
(01:56):
I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum.
Even when the young is very bland.
Please don't come at me, Christian rockers.
So, I'm thinking Valentine's Day. Romantic, intimate forms of love.
And what comes to mind?
Aside from fancy expensive dinners.
Champagne.
(02:18):
Strawberry.
Chocolate.
Corn dogs.
There's also...
Cupid.
Chubby winged babies.
Wielding
A bow and arrow.
Weirder said aloud than it is when you just look at the Jallmark card.
It turns out that those naked babies are actually not Cupid.
They're actually his consorts of the Roman god Cupid or Eros, as he was known in Greece.
(02:44):
He was a really good-looking adult man.
God.
God-man.
Which, in my opinion, is a lot more age-appropriate for the topic of Valentine's Day, as well as anybody
who is holding a bow and arrow.
And yep.
"Eros"
The root of the word erotic.
Lust and sexual passion were in this god's wheelhouse.
(03:09):
Now, I'm all for historic accuracy.
But I have a feeling it would be a tad less of family-friendly for card companies to replace those winged babies with shirtless, handsome men.
Those cards exist, but we tend to give those out for different purposes.
You know what would be accurate to represent the fruits of intimate passion?
(03:34):
Of dare I call it...
Friskiess>
Cats.
Cats on love notes.
Cat Valentines.
Cats on a rose bouquet.
Cat shaped chocolate.
I need to license this.
Hear me out.
I didn't start talking about the Greeks and Romans were nothing.
(03:58):
In fact, I'll throw in a little about ancient Egypt in here too.
They seem to have dominated the whole cat worshiping thing.
Or did they?
In the last episode, anthro archeologist Melinda Zeder and Cat Behaviorist
Kristyn Vitale helped us understand both where, when and why cats were domesticated based on the best research we have now.
(04:27):
We discussed how cats were very, very important.
Not only as cute little friends that cheered you up after a long day of milking cows or raising pigs in harvesting grains,
but also, and especially, as fierce defenders of the harvest from rodents and other scavengers.
The ability then of cats and the role of cats in taking care of the pests that are feeding off of important stored resources like grains probably became of interest to humans.
(05:01):
Cats are very, very, very, very, very fecund.
It means fertile.
They're really, really efficient kitten makers.
I consulted with a couple experts on this point.
My name is Sterling, "TrapKing" Davis.
On Instagram, it's The Original TrapKing.
(05:24):
I go by "TrapKing" because of my nonprofit TrapKing Humane Cat Solutions, which focuses on TNR, trapping neuter return.
My name is Amy.
I run a cat rescue called The Five Kittens Rescue.
Our Instagram handle is t@TheFiveKittensRescues with an S at the end of "rescue".
(05:47):
Our goal is to stabilize and control the outdoor cat population.
TNR is the humane alternative for death or euthenasia for stray and feral cat populations.
I trap cats in humane traps, so they're not hurt.
Take them to the low-cost spay, neuter, vaccine clinics, where they're spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and returned.
(06:11):
Clearly, I'm talking the right folks here.
Just how fertile are cats?
I've trappeda cat that was pregnant at four months.
So you think about how fast that turnaround is and how fast they can reproduce.
They stop nursing at around five to six weeks, so they can get pregnant immediately after.
(06:38):
There are peak times in the year where cats tend to get more frisky.
We call it "cuffing season", they call it "kitten season".
So kitten season is the height of the mating.
And it's usually when it's warm, lots of cats are out and more active places where it's warm.
Kitten season is all year round.
The same way as humans, we like to get married and have our weddings when it's warm.
(07:02):
Cats mate when it's warm.
So you think about the warm climate if a cat is able to get pregnant at four months.
Eight, as a kitten.
And they're reproducing like that at that rate all year round.
Two cats can quickly become 200.
(07:25):
An average litter is five to six kittens.
So in a year...
Well, they have usually around three to four litters a year of three.
Four times six, let's say for example the higher end is 24 kitten.
(07:47):
It's a lot of cats.
I think I made my point there.
Cats are definitely having a ton of sex.
They're little CAT-sanovas.
So much so that the ancients found this to be divine.
I had the great opportunity to consult with a researcher and writer who may be able to shed some light on this.
(08:18):
My name's Daniel Mackay.
I have a master's degree in classical studies and ancient Greek.
I am also a writer. I wrote articles for The Collector, the online magazine.
Danielle's focus is on the Hellenistic period.
What's that again?
(08:39):
We have three main periods that we focus on in classics.
We have the archaic period, which is Homer, the writings of Homer, the start of pottery.
Still very Bronze Age.
I don't know how to say this, I'm being offensive to ancient Greeks.
(09:01):
Old fashioned.
(laughing) Yeah.
And then we have the classical period, which is, if you think of ancient Greece now, you think of the marble statues and the Parthenon.
And all the beauty that was created.
That was all done in the classical period.
That's where we had Socrates and the great leap forward when it came to philosophy and art and medicine.
(09:29):
And then after that, the Hellenistic period.
And that is marked by the birth of Alexander the Great.
Alexander, one of the most successful conquerors of history, came from Macedonia and he spread what we call Hellenism throughout Asia and North Africa into Egypt.
He became very fond of Egypt and he bolt his own little city called Alexandria.
(09:57):
In Hellenistic times, in Alexandria, everyone spoke Greek actually.
So that's what we refer to as the Hellenistic period.
So we'll not only be talking about Greece, but Egypt as well.
Let's dive into those myths.
Where did we first hear about all of these gods and goddesses?
(10:18):
We first look at the literature we have.
Luckily from Greece, we have so much literature, the Illiad and the Odyssey from Homer being sort of the staple of any classic library.
That's where you first learn about the gods and the heroes.
And how the gods can actually manipulate life on earth.
(10:41):
Whereas in Egypt, we didn't even understand heiroglyphs until the translation of the Resetta Stone.
So now we have all these resources from tombs that we can actually predate what we know from Greek mythology.
It's an amazing pantheon that the Egyptians had, and it's way bigger than the Greek one.
(11:06):
There is a lot of overlap in their functions and their forms and what they were praised for and revered for.
While the Greek Roman connection I'd heard before, how the Romans rebranded the Greek gods and goddesses and added their own stories into it,
this Greek Egyptian connection, while geographically obvious, I just didn't have a chance to really explore as much.
(11:31):
We don't know for certain exactly how much of the Greek pantheon was influenced by the Egyptians.
But definitely off the Greece had become imperial and they sort of moved into Alexandria with Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Period.
(11:52):
There is an insane amount of evidence that shows how the Greeks adopted Egyptian gods into their own pantheon.
And that's when you get the advent of the gods seraphas and amalgamation of two gods from two different pantheons.
Let's take a little pause.
(12:14):
Get it? "paws"?
Before the break, Danielle helped us understand the connection between the Greek and Egyptian pantheons.
So, cats?
(12:37):
Well, to start an Egypt being in Egypt, you need the Nile, you need the crops to survive if you don't have those then what else have you got during the desert?
And so when cats, after they were domesticated, they started laying that role of pest control.
And so it kind of became a symbiotic relationship where the people were looking after the cats because the cats were looking after them.
(13:07):
We see that in Ancient Egypt with how many kitty cats they're discovering in these tombs.
These cats were not buried alive.
I want to make that clear.
They were given their own burial, which is actually quite interesting because the common folk of Egypt were not treated to that sort of burial.
(13:28):
Tomb were only reserved for kings and royalties.
So, to see these cats getting little tombs and being buried next to sacred places, it actually shows you just the amount of reverence that the Egyptians had for cats.
The time has come to talk about the original cat goddess.
(13:53):
[Music]
Bast.
Yes, she's the first that comes to mind, isn't it?
She was previously a much earlier, a lion headed goddess.
She was the daughter of Attun, or A-mun, and she was associated with war.
(14:16):
She was a very ferocious goddess when she was lion-headed goddess.
But only later did she become associated with domestic cats when she became tamed per se, but domestic in her roles, where she became a goddess of fertility.
She was gentler, she was the cat for the people.
(14:43):
She was the cat for the kings.
Fertility was one of her symbols.
So that's how cats came to be connected to fertility.
Well, of course, fertility and cats go hand in hand.
They're ability to reproduce so much and on such a scale.
(15:06):
Having cats around agriculture, it's not a hard leap to make thinking that these cats are around and we're having a fruitful crop.
Perhaps these cats with their fertility are assisting the fertility of the earth.
And if you're an ancient Egyptian, you might think, well, then they must be a goddess who is helping, who is the cat goddess.
(15:34):
Cats, sex, fertility.
What do the Greeks have to say about that?
Danielle's really good authority here.
The mother goddess of Greek religion, Cybele, her name is directly translated to mother of the mountains.
(15:56):
She is very much associated with lions.
It's said that she has an untamed nature and she's the lover of all the wild things and she's the mistress of animal.
She's depicted in a chariot drawn by lions.
Dionysus is sort of the core god of my research.
(16:17):
He's actually out of the whole Greek pantheon associated most with cats.
Predator cats.
He's got this shape shifting aspect where you can turn into anything in the stories and the myths.
He's shifting into different animals, different plants.
(16:39):
He's got a very intense connection with the wild, the celebration.
He's got this untamed aspect to him.
He's also known as Bacchus in Roman mythology.
That's where the term "bacchanal" comes from.
He's associated with wine, pleasure and parties.
(17:04):
He was described as possessing what we might identify as a mix of both masculine and feminine traits.
He's considered the most feminine of the gods.
I have a quote here from Ovid's "Metamorphosis".
"Dionysus.
(17:25):
You Dionysus have youth unfailing, you're a boy forever.
You shine in the firmament.
When you lay your horns, your countenance is like a lovely girl."
Predatory cats.
They are mainly associated with female goddesses.
(17:48):
The panther is actually his most important animal.
So he's got that femininity about him.
He's also a god of fertility.
Think about wine and cultivation.
He's interesting.
I can't stop finding things about him.
that make him so unique.
(18:10):
Love it.
I'm getting a sense of why Danielle's so passionate about Dionysus.
Let's reflect.
From Egypt to Greece or Greece to Egypt to bust to kitties from Cybele to Dionysus to pleasure, romance and wine,
(18:36):
which leads to being frisky.
By now, we're all on the same page about just how much sex cats are out there having.
Cats.
The ultimate symbol of "getting it on:.
Cats are much more family friendly, and thematically aligned with romance sex and love
(19:01):
than those winged babies.
Or the actual Cupid, a.k.a. Eros -
a grown adult man, half naked, bearing a dangerous weapon.
So, if this is motivated you to go revise your Valentines,
I will leave you, dear listener, with a romantic poem I just composed:
(19:23):
"Roses are red.
Kitties are not.
Cats are cute of the winged babies.
I love them a lot."
Alright folks.
Next episode, we will be talking a bit more about cats and love.
(19:46):
That is how they want to be loved.
I want to thank the wonderful researcher and lecturer Daniel Mackay.
TNR activist and TrapKing Humane founder
Sterling "TrapKing" Davis.
And Brooklyn, New York's The Five Kittens Rescue Founder.
Amy--
(20:07):
Sorry, I forgot to thank you too.
Thanks, Binky and Snuggles.
You're a constant source of inspiration.
And distraction.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
Please be sure to check out their information and support them.
You can find that in the show notes as well as some research that is cited to support my case.
(20:28):
If you love this episode, please give us a top rating and review.
Thanks for coming on board.
Everything is connected.
6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly.
Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/6degreesofcats or find us on all those social media platforms.
(20:56):
And for my paid subscribers, you'll have access to the extra audio with more deep dives by our experts.
This and all episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient and the weird.
And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
I love cats.
(21:23):
I have one little boy, his name is Jagger.
And he's such a cool guy.
And he's a chunky little boy.
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