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11/21/2004 "The Royal House of Cat Book interview by the Best Friends Sanctuary"


From Best Friends magazine
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One of the great international correspondents of our time, Georgie Anne Geyer has traveled the world interviewing the kings, queens, and statesmen. She's noted for her books and columns about world leaders. But her latest book is about an altogether different royal line: cats.

Best Friends
editor Michael Mountain talked with her about When Cats Reigned Like Kings - On the Trail of the Sacred Cats.

Michael Mountain: You've interviewed some of the world's greatest leaders, from kings and presidents to prime ministers and dictators. Now you've written a book about cats. Why?

Georgie Anne Geyer: Well, the truth is I got awfully tired of human beings while covering wars in El Salvador and Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Iran. I had my two wonderful cats, Pasha, who was an Egyptian god cat lost on the streets of Chicago, and Neko, the little Japanese bobcat cat I have now. And as I roamed around the world doing these other stories, I saw that so many of these other countries had made cats, of all the animals in the world, into royal and sacred creatures. I love history, so I began to collect the histories of cats in various countries. Of course, all cats are royal and sacred, as we know.

M.M.: There is a definite spiritual essence that runs all the way through your book. For example, your description of how in Egypt cats were seen as actually being able to carry the souls of people after they'd died.

G.G.: So many ancient societies - Egypt, Siam, Japan, China - believed in the transmigration of souls. And they believed that the cat, again alone out of all the animals in the world, could carry the soul of his human friend into the next world. Herodotus, when he visited Egypt in 500 B.C., wrote about this.

And of course Egyptians made the cats into gods. I had a very joyful, precious day when I went north of Cairo, and I visited the ruins of the Temple of Bastet on the Nile, which is where the cat Goddess Bastet held court. That's [the famous statue] where she's poised beautifully with her little paws in front of her and wearing her necklace and her earrings. There were thousands of cats there, roaming around the altars, and they were not only revered but actually honored and prayed to by Egyptians who came there from all over the realm.

M.M.: You suggest at one point that cats answer our own deepest spiritual yearnings - how do they do that?

G.G.: Well, this is a curious thing, and I sort of play with this idea in the book: Did we make cats into gods throughout history because of our need to find a creature who could embody the spiritual? Or did they come to us with the spiritual message and tell us about it? You can see through the history of felines across the globe, across the centuries, that there was something in the cat alone that brought out the spirituality in mankind. Dogs, as wonderful as they are, were gatekeepers often at the palace, and they were honored as hunters, and so on. The Egyptians had many, many animals as gods - crocodiles, falcons - in various localities, but only the cat was a god across the whole realm. Only the cat was a god in all of these different cultures.

M.M.: Do you have a slight yearning yourself for mankind to return to a time when all the animals were recognized as spiritual beings? There is one sentence in your book where you write, "I believe that all cats are beautiful and that they share in that sacred and royal spirit that they exemplify in themselves and inspire in us humans." And that comes across as your own credo

G.G.: Yes, I do believe in that. I think we're missing so much when we don't try to understand animals on all kinds of levels. And anyone who has lived with a beloved dog or cat would feel and know this. Historically, every cat is royal and sacred because every cat came out of Egypt - they originated in the African wilds and were domesticated and then made into gods in Egypt. Then when the Romans came in 350 B.C., cats were taken all over the world - to Europe and to Asia - down the trade routes. So all cats share in the royalty and sacredness of ancient Egypt.

Later on, cats went through a very bad period of Judeo-Christianity in the Middle East and Europe, because when you have one god, you couldn't have animal gods. But then in the late 19th century, you had the breeds come in Britain. And this was almost a new kind of royalty - a royalty of the democracies, where cats could be recognized (and dogs, too) and cared for and shown as beautiful. At the first cat show in London at the Crystal Palace, people were just amazed suddenly to see these cats who had been out on the street, lounging on velvet pillows looking as beautiful as of course they do look. But they didn't have breeds then; they showed according to colors. So in the book, I traced how they went from being royalty in the ancient days to now being a new kind of royalty - the cat who's loved as a precious part of the family.

M.M.: You must be the only person anywhere who meets world leaders and talks with them about cats. Like when the governor of Bangkok tells you that "cats and politics are a little bit similar."

G.G.: Yes, I found myself seated next to him at a luncheon one day, and I'd been told that he had had 11 cats, and he did say they were like politics - something about how both involve you intensely.

M.M.: Does anybody particularly stand out in terms of kings, queens, prime ministers, whatever, who have a particular thing with cats?

G.G.: Probably the late King Hussein [of Jordan], whom I interviewed a number of times when I covered the Middle East. He had several - always several - little cats which his wife bought him in London. And I foolishly did not ask him what kind. But he said that they would wait for him at the bottom of the staircase in his palace every night and would walk up to bed with him.

And Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher El Sayed of Egypt, whom I talked to three years ago, was a very charming man. He was just in the middle of one of the endless Palestinian problems and quarrels, and I told him I'd been up to the temple of Bastet in the north and he said, "That's so wonderful, oh, that's so wonderful. I can't wait to tell my wife and my mother!" It's been funny being in these conversations with these world leaders and then talking about cats.

M.M.: Now you've talked about cat gods and goddesses and the cat kings and queens, but there's the other side, too - the naughty cats or the bad cats. What did you find out about them? Because there's a whole duality there.

G.G.: The duality is really striking. In Egypt, for instance, I had always heard about Bastet, sitting primly with her little paws and her beautiful necklace and always the earrings. And then one day I suddenly heard an Egyptian friend of mine say, "Well, there's always the bad cat, Sekhmet, the roaring lion cat." I was just starting my research then, so I hadn't run across Sekhmet. But yes, indeed, there is Sekhmet, who is called "the mangler" and "enforcer," and she was the other side of the good Bastet.

Bastet brought good things and was also seen as the mother with the basket in the very famous sculpture in the Egyptian Museum. But Sekhmet was the bad god of thunder and lightning and the mangler - the bad side of humankind. And there's the same duality in Japan and in Siam in those wonderful cat treatises, which strangely enough are not known to many people. There are good cats and bad cats. They had exact descriptions of the good cats in your life and what they would bring you. And the same with the bad cats. So man's duality of nature and spirituality is also ... do we say imposed on the cats or reflected in the cats? That's where I left off and let everyone's imagination take over.

M.M.: So there is a possibility that we're simply reflections of cats?

G.G.: I'm not going to say that's wrong! It's too much fun to think about.

M.M.: You actually found cats who are both sacred and royal in all parts of the world?

G.G.: Yes, and I made a genealogical chart of all the cultures and when the cat became sacred in those cultures. And there's also the part of the book called "The Family of Cat," in which I did profiles of all of the popular breeds today. Anyone can look and see what mixture their cat is. All cats, of course, are mixtures now, but you can tell the different breeds by the beautiful pictures and the little profiles I did.

M.M.: And you can't help but go and look up your favorite cat, so I immediately went to look for the heritage and line of Squeaky Pop, who is one of my cats, and he's a sort of Maine coon, big and fluffy, and you have a whole story about Maine coons and how they may have come over from France after Marie Antoinette was executed there.

G.G.: You know, I think that story has a very good chance of being true, because there was an attempt to spring Marie Antoinette before she was killed in the French Revolution. And she had sent her beloved cats ahead, the story goes, and it seems to ring true to me. There was this British ship captain and [the French queen] was going to join them and come to the New World, but she was taken and killed. According to the story, Captain Coon, the ship's captain, did bring them over. And of course cats were on all the ships in those years - they were on the Mayflower.

The Maine coon were beautiful cats. They were the first American cats. The first cat shows, in the 1800s in New England, were only for Maine coons because those were the only cats. And another interesting thing is you look at the Maine coons in New England, the Siberians in Russia, and the Norwegian Forest cats in Norway, and they are all very similar - big beautiful cats with long hair, beautiful faces, sort of gentle giants, and they all adapted to the winters in all these northern climes and developed these heavy coats. So you look at the pictures in the book or anywhere else, and you'll see how similar the northern cats are.

And [it's the same] with the southern cats. The Siamese and their offspring are very silky and beautiful. And bobtails started in Singapore and worked their way up through China and Japan. I find the history to be fascinating because cats have their own maps and their own heritage. They have their own royal palaces in Siam, and their own temples in Egypt.

When Cats Reigned Like Kings - On the Trail of the Sacred Cats is published by Andrews McMeel.

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