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My first cat, Simmy, loved lefse.

Lefse is one of the joys of Northern eating: a soft, floppy Norwegian flatbread made (these days) mostly from potatoes. Usually eaten rolled up with jam or butter-and-sugar, you can actually eat pretty much anything in it; Norwegians, I've heard, eat their hotdogs rolled up in a slice of lefse. Think Norwegian tortilla.

(The name, in fact, comes from the same old Germanic root as loaf: “little loaf,” it meant originally.)

Presumably, Simmy had acquired this unusual (in a cat) taste in the home of her first “owner,” a co-worker of mine of Danish extraction. I gather that they ate a lot of junk food there as well: at the rattle of a potato chip bag, Simmy would immediately apparate out of nowhere.

Now where is that lefse? I thought when I got to the bottom of the grocery bag that night. I'm sure I put it in the ba—SIMMY!

I rushed into the temple, which is where—being a temple cat of the first order—Simmy always took her spoils. Sure enough. She'd just managed to open the package, but had yet to have the first bite.

The expression of resignation on her face when I took the lefse away was probably the clearest example of interspecies communication that I've ever seen in my life. I could tell exactly what she was thinking.

Now isn't that just the Law of the Jungle? The little animal does all the work, and the big animal comes along and takes it off of them.

Feline Faun

Two centuries before witches were first accused of worshiping the Animal Man with an anal kiss, the same accusation was leveled against the Cathars of southern France: Cathars being thus, in effect, proto-witches.

According to medieval French cleric Alain de Lille, the Devil appeared to them in the form of a huge black cat or, interestingly, of a man with the fur-covered legs of a cat.

In witch-trial documents of later centuries, the Devil is said not infrequently to take the form of a black cat, usually with tail raised: all the better to kiss you with, my dear.

(In 1682, Devonshire witches Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards told the judges that he appeared to them as a lion.)

To the best of my knowledge, though, the man with cat legs—think feline faun—was unique to the Cathar vision.

Though the Animal God of the witches generally shows himself forth as one of the prey species by which we humans live, and have always lived—hence horned—neither is it unknown for him to take the form of a predator: each new form a revelation. Carved in mammoth ivory, the Lion Man is one of Europe's oldest images.

He is indeed a roaring lion, our god, our ancestors' god, stalking and roaring up and down the world.

As once again in our age and day he raises up a people to himself, let no one be surprised to behold him, once again, on feline paws.

Happy got to experience rain, sunshine, and moonlight on the weekend he died. I spent all day Sunday with him, carrying him around and petting his beautiful black fur with its thick, light gray undercoat, and white spots on the neck and belly. Coincidentally it was the day Catholics dedicate to their cat saint, so when I lay in bed petting my napping kitty and checked social media there were an unusually large number of cat related posts. I spent a lot of my time speaking softly to Happy. I also internally spoke with Freya. She told me I couldn’t save him, and that she would welcome him to her field and her home.

That evening, he was in my bed and meowed for me to do something. I was not sure what. I carried him to his water; he didn’t want water. I carried him to his food; he didn’t want food. I carried him onto the back porch. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the moon. The white spot on his belly nearly glowed in the moonlight. I let him sit in the moonlight and checked back on him later, and discovered he had made it back inside the cat door by himself, and camped just inside the flap. When I picked him up I noticed the tip of his tail was wet. He got to trail his tail in the pool one last time, which he loved to do. He had made it all the way out to the pool deck and back, but now he was ready to be carried again. I put him back in my bed and curled up around him. I petted him and we fell asleep. He died in the morning before I woke up.

I've written before about the dogs the Minoans kept as pets and hunting companions. But did you know the Minoans also had cats? They probably came to Crete on trading ships from Egypt, and it's clear from the art that they loved their kitties every bit as much as modern people do.

That's a Minoan cat up top in a fresco from Hagia Triada. In true cat fashion, it's hiding behind some ivy to sneak up on a bird.

About a week after my housemate wished for her own cat, this cat appeared. When I first saw him he was on the front walkway, and I snapped this photo thinking he would probably walk away after that. Nope. He walked right into the house and made himself at home. 

This is amazing because my cat Happy usually runs off any other cats that enter his territory. He usually hides from strange people and dogs, too. Anything rat-sized is dinner, of course. But Happy tolerated this new cat. He only got hissy when the new cat jumped up on the bed where Happy and I were sleeping. Otherwise he was remarkably laid-back about the whole other cat thing. It's like magic. It IS magic. Freya magic.

Simmy was a one-person cat, and I was it. She was also an adept of the astral.

When I won a scholarship to study in the Middle East, she disappeared for the entire time that I was gone. Oh, my housemates could tell that she was still around: the litter box was used, the food bowl emptied. But see her, they didn't.

Simmy, you see, was Busy.

She was my first cat, a petite brown tabby Manx with a stumpy little tail. (One of her nicknames was Bunny Butt.) Like most Manx, she was a powerful jumper. When bats would get into the house—a perennial problem wherever witches live—she would jump for them as they wheeled around the room, and never failed to catch them out of midair.

I'd been gone for about a month when one morning I dreamed that Simmy was sitting on the foot of my bed in my room in Jerusalem. I very much had the impression that while her body was laying inert in one of her secret hiding places, her soul had out been roaming the world in search of her Human. Found me she finally had, after a month of searching.

But that didn't mean that she wasn't pissed. She was sitting on the bed with her back to me.

Interspecies communication has always fascinated me. Miss Squeak was a past master of the art.

She learned early on how to get exactly what she wanted from human beings. When she was young and lived in the country, she led an indoor-outdoor life.

If it so happened that she arrived back home late at night after the doors were already closed, no matter. She'd climb the big old blue spruce next to the house and hop off onto the roof. Then she'd sit outside the bedroom window and cry until they opened the window to let her in.

What Miss Squeak wanted, Miss Squeak got.

Later in life, she came to live with me in the city.

One day I took a workman down into the basement to do some updates on the water meter. Unbeknownst to us, Miss Squeak followed us down.

I heard the story later. While working on the meter, he was puzzled by an incessant series of sharp, demanding cries from elsewhere in the basement.

Following the cries to their source, he found a little black-and-white kitty sitting on the laundry room floor in front of the closed door that led to the stairs. Miss Squeak never did like closed doors.

Mind you, if she'd just wanted to get back upstairs, she could have gone up by the same way that we came down; that door to the stairs still stood wide open.

But, of course, mere access was never the point. There must be a lot of satisfaction in getting the big, dumb animals around you to do precisely what you want.