Any discussion of mummy cats would be remiss to leave out the OGs of mummification: ancient Egyptians. While we’re not sure if cats in ancient Egypt stared off inexplicably at nothing before sprinting into zoomies across the floor and instantly collapsing into a side-laying position … Okay, you know what? Of course cats were doing that. And so that special bond was formed, the one where humans are certain that cats are mystical, magical creatures capable of penetrating realms unseen and untraversable except to those of feline majesty. That must be why the cat is two inches away from the wall and facing it for no reason. It’s ghosts, you see.
Within such comedy lives truth, much like earlier in this article. Yes, as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History describes, cats were a sacred animal in Egypt – folks even used to mummify them to take them along to the afterlife (pictured above). We know that Egyptian religious practices influenced the ancient world a lot, particularly Greece, and then Greece influenced Rome, and then the Romans marched their armies off across Europe all the way to Briton.
Fast-forward 2,000 years and we find a walled-up, mummified cat dating to the 17th century in a place like Lancashire, England, per CNN. Pre-Christian, heathen practices lived on through 15th-to-18th-century witch hunts that also targeted cats believed to be “familiars,” as The Collector explains. But to the common person, cats weren’t sources of magical evil, but magical protection.
