Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Read Online Free Page A

love and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil—a gathering of thirteen—and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week. For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as “Witches’ Sabbath.”
    Black Cat: Middle Ages, England
    As superstitions go, fear of a black cat crossing one’s path is of relatively recent origin. It is also entirely antithetical to the revered place held by the cat when it was first domesticated in Egypt, around 3000 B.C .

    All cats, including black ones, were held in high esteem among the ancient Egyptians and protected by law from injury and death. So strong was cat idolatry that a pet’s death was mourned by the entire family; and both rich and poor embalmed the bodies of their cats in exquisite fashion, wrapping them in fine linen and placing them in mummy cases made of precious materials such as bronze and even wood—a scarcity in timber-poor Egypt. Entire cat cemeteries have been unearthed by archaeologists, with mummified black cats commonplace.
    Impressed by the way a cat could survive numerous high falls unscathed, the Egyptians originated the belief that the cat has nine lives.
    The cat’s popularity spread quickly through civilization. Sanskrit writings more than two thousand years old speak of cats’ roles in Indian society; and in China about 500 B.C ., Confucius kept a favorite pet cat. About A.D . 600, the prophet Muhammad preached with a cat in his arms, and at approximately the same time, the Japanese began to keep cats in their pagodas to protect sacred manuscripts. In those centuries, a cat crossing a person’s path was a sign of good luck.
    Dread of cats, especially black cats, first arose in Europe in the Middle Ages, particularly in England. The cat’s characteristic independence, willfulness, and stealth, coupled with its sudden overpopulation in major cities, contributed to its fall from grace. Alley cats were often fed by poor, lonely old ladies, and when witch hysteria struck Europe, and many of these homeless women were accused of practicing black magic, their cat companions (especially black ones) were deemed guilty of witchery by association.
    One popular tale from British feline lore illustrates the thinking of the day. In Lincolnshire in the 1560s, a father and his son were frightened one moonless night when a small creature darted across their path into a crawl space. Hurling stones into the opening, they saw an injured black cat scurry out and limp into the adjacent home of a woman suspected by the town of being a witch. Next day, the father and son encountered the woman on the street. Her face was bruised, her arm bandaged. And she now walked with a limp. From that day on in Lincolnshire, all black cats were suspected of being witches in night disguise. The lore persisted. The notion of witches transforming themselves into black cats in order to prowl streets unobserved became a central belief in America during the Salem witch hunts.
    Thus, an animal once looked on with approbation became a creature dreaded and despised.
    Many societies in the late Middle Ages attempted to drive cats into extinction. As the witch scare mounted to paranoia, many innocent women and their harmless pets were burned at the stake. A baby born with eyes too bright, a face too canny, a personality too precocious, was sacrificed for fear that it was host to a spirit that would in time become a witch by day, a black cat by night. In France, thousands of cats were burned monthly until King Louis XIII, in the 1630s, halted the shameful practice. Given the number of centuries in which black cats were slaughtered throughoutEurope, it is surprising that the gene for the color black was not deleted from the species…unless the cat does possess nine lives.
    Flip of a