"Animals are often employed as a vehicle for carrying away or transferring the evil" (Golden Bough pg. 626)

Simon has ever-growing concern for the time he spends competing for my affection with none other than Lilith, my kitty. As much as I would love to put a photo up of her personally, I do not wish to take the time in transferring pictures from my camera to the computer. The above photograph looks quite a bit like her-simultaneously adorable and stunningly evil looking. Maybe not just evil looking; I might venture to say she is a bit evil in spirit.

A couple of nights ago, Simon set about convincing me that my cat was possessed by a demon. He sited several different instances in which he believed she was acting truly evil and even had me convinced she was speaking in some sort of tongue at one point. He didn't actually mean to do it (maybe he was just bored and decided to mess with my mind a bit), but he made me a bit paranoid. Later, while he was off making merry with a friend, I was left home alone with the kitty. A bit altered in state (the wine was going down rather easy that night), I decided that I needed to look up demonic animal possession. With young Lilith perched at the end of my bed looking on, I began googling the topic. I clicked on a link and suddenly a file called "Trojanware"(a bit mythological) began to infect my computer. I looked up at Lilith and she was staring at me, purring.

OF COURSE I was freaked out...did I not mention the altered state? In my mind, I had been thwarted by an evil demon while on the verge of discovering its existence. Yeah, freaked out might be an understatement. I locked her in the garage and ran upstairs to install Norton Antivirus on my computer. I didn't fully believe in the possession, but was most definitely freaked out.

The reason I am blogging about this now is because I decided to try and look up animal possession again tonight. I found a forum in which a girl posts a question about the topic. Someone told her she could find information about it in The Golden Bough...and then a light bulb.

Upon reading the passage quoted above, I realized that it is not exclusively about animal possession, but more about the transference of evil to animals from humans. For example, "When a Moor has a headache he will sometimes take a lamb or a goat and beat it till it falls down, believing that the headache will thus be transferred to the animal" (pg. 626). This seems a bit unnecessary, but if beating lambs and goats makes a guy with a headache feel better....he is an asshole. After reading the passage I found, I came up with an altogether new theory.

Maybe the cat isn't evil, Simon is. Huh? I don't know....he is a bit rough with her. Maybe his evil is transferring to her when he messes with her. He could have been trying to convince me of my cat's possession to throw me off of his trail. Well I don't think she is evil anyway, Simon is a whole other story.