Vampire Pussy

This is about cats and the undead, you perv

Toothpickings
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

As interesting as it is to look at settled mythology concerning vampires and question its finer points (How Much Blood Does A Vampire Need, for example, or why sunlight is no big D), another good way to waste time is to examine canon that isn’t quite settled; where fiction seems unsure of where it wants to land.

It’s also an excuse to share cat puns and dumb memes.

Cats and vampires have a long relationship, but good luck giving a quick summary on what the hell it is.

For starters, in some old traditions, vampires could take the form of common animals like cats (not so much bats). Sheridan Le Fanu was likely aware of this tradition when he had his title character in Carmilla morph into a black cat. The jury is still out on whether Puss In Boots is a ghoul.

But old traditions hold another link with fluff monsters, and that is the cat’s power to actually turn a dead body into a vampire. A feline crossing a corpse or leaping over its grave could, somehow, make a vampire where before there had just been a corpse. The physics of this transformation continue to elude me, but I now understand why my grandmother wanted to be buried with catnip.

There’s an even older tradition that links those godawful malkins with vampires, and it comes to us from Egypt. The god Sekhmet was a cat-faced deity that drank blood for fun and profit. Meow-beasts were also the guardians of the underworld in Egyptian lore, making the vampire a purrfect funnel for cats and immortals and blood drinkers.

Unrelated, my Egyptian mau has bitten me on several occasions; sometimes drawing blood

Turning to fiction — I mean litter-ature — I’m sure it’s not lost on you that Anne Rice set the origin of her vampires in Sekhmet’s ancient Egypt, all culminating in the story of her starring character, Lestat. Lestat, of course, gets introduced to readers initially as a guy who is cool with eating rats when humans aren’t available.

Rats. Hm, what else likes to chase and eat rodents?

And for the folks at the back of the room, Lestat’s full name is Lestat de Lioncourt.

I’m sure its a coincidence.

Who would have guessed? Anne Rice writes about vampires and is fond of cats. Closing the circle, people. Closing the circle.

But hang in there. If you think that there is an established, friendly alliance between cats and vampires, you’d be pawsitively wrong.

An entirely different relationship is found in the greatest vampire film ever made*, Let The Right One In. Here, cats attack a newly-turned vampire. We don’t get a clear explanation as to why, neither in the movie nor the book, but a small battalion of housecats obviously see something amiss in Virginia and do their best to shred her and probably also poop in her office. I’m basing that last guess on my own experiences.

Finally, breaking through fiction and folklore into the real world, there’s this interesting blog from microbial ecologist Holly Ganz about her experiences working with wild black footed cats in South Africa. Ganz notes that not only do these cats literally drink blood, but they are nocturnal and burrow underground during the day, waiting out the daylight in their native soil.

What more proof do you need??

What are we to do with all this? The meowthology of the cat/vampire relationship seems to be even more cloudy than the mythology of vampires themselves. Cats have both been a form of, a cause of, an enemy of, and an actual vampire. There’s yet to be a solidifying canon created, and so we have yet to settle on what the exact relationship between cats and vampires is.

But I for one am investing in a Dutch canine and naming it Abrawoof Dog Helsing.

WHO’S a good vampire hunter? Is it you? Is it you?

In clawsing, cat food will stink up the kitchen, cats poop will give you toxoplasmosis, and cat hair will be found almost exclusively on your dark clothing. They will never like the food you buy them and they will sleep on your face. They are chaotic evil and they hate everything that you love.

Vampires can be somewhat irritating too.

Just don’t invite either into your home.

*This is not open to debate

Toothpickings has just launched a Patreon page. If you find these diversions are worth your time and you’d like to indulge in extra content, please peruse https://www.patreon.com/toothpickings

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Image Sources: catsg.org, Shutterstock, Catster, EFTI, Universal Pictures, Cat Biome, the cesspool of memes that is the world wide web

Toothpickings

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Investigating the Western fascination with vampires, one dad joke at a time.

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