Whichever Way the Cat Turns

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — a Yorkshire coast parish, late October

I have been collecting cat-luck for longer than I would like to admit, and the collecting always sharpens around Halloween, when every black cat in the country seems briefly famous again, pinned to shop windows and greetings cards as if it had agreed to the arrangement. The omen itself is older and plainer than the decorations suggest. A black cat crosses your path. You stop. You read it.

What you read depends almost entirely on where you are standing. Across much of continental Europe, and in the version most Americans inherited, the crossing is a warning: turn back, or at least turn your collar, spit twice, or take a different road. In large parts of Britain the reading flips entirely. A black cat crossing in front of you is luck arriving, not leaving. Fishing communities along the Yorkshire and Cornish coasts kept black cats in the house specifically for this reason, less as pets than as a kind of standing charm, the belief being that a black cat kept well at home would keep the men safe at sea. A black cat that wandered in uninvited was, in some tellings, better still, since you had not even had to ask for the luck.

The versions disagree on finer points, as they always do with a superstition this well travelled. Some say it matters which direction the cat is going, left to right or the reverse. Some say only a strange cat counts, never your own. Victorian correspondence and the greetings cards of the period show the cat firmly rehabilitated as a wedding token, a black cat given to a bride or printed beside her on a card being thought to guarantee a contented marriage, which tells you how far the animal had come from its darker reputation only a century or two before.

That darker reputation is the part worth sitting with at Halloween, because it is the part the season actually remembers. Through the long period of the witch trials, in Scotland and Ireland as much as in England, the cat was not merely unlucky but suspect, a shape a witch was thought capable of taking, or a familiar she was thought to keep. A strange cat at the door was not read as fortune then. It was read as a visitor who might not be what she appeared to be. Some households, by report, were wary of letting the cat out on Samhain night at all, the old year's end when the dead and the otherwise-shaped were thought to be abroad and the boundary between a cat and something wearing a cat's shape felt thinner than usual. I cannot point to a single surviving rite built around this, a specific bowl left out or a particular word said over the animal, and I would rather say so plainly than invent one. What survives is the attitude, not the ceremony: caution dressed as affection.

It is a tidy enough history for one small animal to carry, bad luck and good luck, witch's familiar and bride's blessing, often in the same county within living memory of each other. The black cat crossing your path does not resolve the contradiction. It simply crosses, and leaves you to decide, which is perhaps the oldest function any omen has ever had. This Halloween, as on any other night, it will not much care which reading you choose.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.