Columnist Susan Snyder: History of Halloween is unmasked

Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2002 | 8:25 a.m.

Halloween is more than a week away.

But since the decorations, pumpkin patches and haunted houses have been out since about Labor Day, it's probably all right to talk about it now. (Pity the poor children who will be eating candy that people bought Sept. 15.)

We could discuss how kids who didn't get their costumes when they bought school supplies probably can't find one now. I overheard the clerk in one valley "Hello Kitty" store tell a customer they had run out of costumes a week earlier. It was the second-to-last weekend of September.

But let's go back a bit further than this season -- about 8,000 years -- and look at the origins of the Halloween witch and her cat. The image comes from an age-old connection between women and cats, according to Clea Simon, a Boston-based author whose new book "The Feline Mystique" explores this relationship.

In ancient cultures women were thought to control the mystery of life because they could give birth, Simon says. It was a goddess-type power that commanded awe and respect (the same could be said today of managing a 3-year-old's tantrum in the grocery store, but I digress).

Cats gave birth to whole litters of young with seeming ease. One day the cat's pregnant. The next day it has kittens. So the link seemed natural. Statues of goddesses and cats as gods abound from ancient cultures, including one from about 6,000 B.C. of a woman in labor being aided by a pair of leopards.

"Women and cats have always had the symbolic relationship of power," Simon said in a recent telephone interview. "But it began as a really positive relationship."

Well, yeah. Babies and kittens. Who doesn't love babies and kittens? But how did we turn babies and kittens into ugly witches and yowling cats? Simon said it has a lot to do with religion and fear.

Cats with goddesses gave way to cat goddesses, who oversaw not only the giving of life but also of death. Trade routes among ancient civilizations brought cat goddesses from one to another, with each community fashioning these images to fit their own needs.

Isis, Simon writes, was worshiped as the queen of heaven, Earth and the underworld from about 3000 B.C. to Roman times. She oversaw everything. And she had the ability to change into a cat. As societies progressed, so did people's fears.

"The awe turned to fear -- fear of the unknown," Simon said during our phone conversation.

Soon, we had male gods wearing the hides of lions, leopards and cats. Cats and women were to be conquered, to keep death and evil at bay. Women and cats still held the keys to the mysteries of the universe, but they were feared. Goddesses gave way to witches -- women so ugly no one would want to bear children with them.

A decree from the year 829 called for the capture and punishment of witches, and the first recorded witch execution was in 1022, Simon said. Women and cats died in some 50,000 executions over the next 600 years.

Today "several-thousand-year-old history is still showing up on our greeting cards," Simon said. "Even though it's kid stuff, that original mythology lives on."

Maybe that's why the witch costumes seem to rarely sell out.