In the past few days I [wrote] a few stories portraying the Master Species of Cat to be not only our superiors (as we catslaves know) but our object of veneration. But I do swear that cats seem to know the sacred, and probably better than us two-legs.

There is a verse in one of the Sikh prayers which says in effect that the mightiest of kings with all his elephants and gold are "not equal even to an ant, who in its mind never forgets God." And so Louie and I have always believed in this rather literally: that when we two-legs attained reason over instinct, we also attained the ability to forget the higher and more noble things in life.

The cats in my life have an uncanny sense of the sacred. One of their favorite hiding places is behind a huge picture of all ten Sikh gurus, which sits in the small room we want to make into a meditation and study area. And when I read the scriptures of any faith (as a fiend for comparative religion, I collect them) the cats all rub and purr on the books far more than they do with my secular literature; none of them are Dostoyevsky fans! And many years ago when I studied Wicca for a time, I could not keep Fritzie out of my little solo circle. I just ended up saying heck with it, he must want to talk to the Goddess too; and then I learned about Bast.

Louie tells a story of his youth, that there was a mama cat and four kittens in the house. His father had a religious room like the one we want to make; there is a platform in there where the Holy Book is kept. The Adi Granth is a huge volume and there are specifics of how to keep it: It must be the highest object in the room, except for the canopy which is suspended over it like a chuppa in a Jewish wedding; the reader and any congregation must be seated on the floor except in cases of physical disability, for no person may be higher than the Book, and the Holy Book may never touch the floor. The kittens could not leave that book alone! Father-in-law used to gripe continually about finding kittens on, in, or under the platform where Granth Sahib rested. They would lie there for hours and purr away until the old man chased them off, and then they would come back while he read and sneak under the platform or pounce on the pages. After one of the kids pointed out the verse I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, he decided to leave them be, for even the kittens knew there was something special in a place that contains holy energy.

Copyright © Baha Singh
May 7, 2006