In pre-Christian Nordic society the cat was often used as a farm animal to protect itself from mice but was also considered to have magical powers and perceived in spiritual terms, it is a sacred animal to Freyja, goddess of love and magic, who possesses a chariot pulled by two cats, it was associated with fertility and used as magical protection and therefore has a particular relationship with witches and wizards.
In the Icelandic sagas, the clothing of a practitioner of witchcraft seidr is described, it is specified that she wore a dark goatskin hood decorated with white cat fur and cat fur gloves, also white, symbolically linked to the goddess Freyja.
It is with the beginning of the imaginary of witchcraft as a diabolical and heretical sect, that this animal acquired malevolent connotations for the Christian imagination.
In 1232 the pontifical decree Vox in Rama provided for the persecution of heretics.
In this document, Pope Gregory IX describes the devil's activities in northern Germany, including an initiation ceremony, in which participants perform an obscene kiss with a large black cat.
This marked the beginning of the prejudice that remains to this day against black cats and a persecution against these felines that led to their massacre, so much so as to contribute in part to the spread of the black plague in the fourteenth century, since the mice that spread the disease no longer had predators in many towns and villages.
In the Vápnfirðinga saga (the saga of the men of Vápnafjörðr) it is said that a certain Pórólfr Sleggja, a dangerous and evil man, possessed twenty enormous black and wild cats, all endowed with magical qualities that caused great fear in his neighbors and in which he placed his utmost confidence.
The saga ends with the death of Þórólfr, sunk in a swamp, and his house set on fire, but these animals helped him to defend himself from his attackers and even after his death people avoided the place where he had lived for fear of cats.
