Aubrey Plaza as the Virgin Mary holding
Grumpy Cat as the Meowsiah (2014)
There are no cats in the Bible.
Neverthless, during the Middle Ages, they silently crept their way into Christian mythology and became associated with the Virgin Mary, as evidenced in the work of many great artists including Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt.
It's not really clear why the Madonna became associated with a feline companion, but one legend is that a cat had given birth to a kitten beneath the manger in Bethlehem and that Mary was deeply touched by the display of maternal tenderness that mirrored her own love for the newborn baby Jesus.
Further, it's sometimes claimed that when Jesus began to cry due to the coldness of the stable in which he lay, the she-cat instinctively jumped into his make-do crib and comforted the infant with the warmth of her body and gentle purring.
That's a nice story. However, I can't help imagining in my more diabolical moments what might have happened if the cat had sucked the breath away from Mary's bundle of joy and suffocated the Son of God ...
Would Joseph have strangled the creature in a rage?
Would Our Lady have adopted the kitten in order to compensate for the loss of her child and become its blessed surrogate mother?
Would the Three Wise Men have fallen down in worship before the kitten and recognised him as their Messiah?
Would we celebrate the birth of a feline saviour each December?
Would Nietzsche have written a work entitled Die Antikatze?
And would we now find the above photo of Aubrey Plaza an iconic and profoundly serious image, rather than an amusing and mildly blasphemous one?
Note: this post is for Gail Marie Naylor, whose picture of the Virgin Mary holding a cat inspired me to write it:
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