CAT, DOG AND MAN: THE LEGEND OF THE ORIGINS

Once upon a time, in another era, the elves were travelling through the world. They were said to be starfarers, refugees from a dying world who fled the dark evil lurking in the galaxies.

They had arrived during the age of the great dragons, those whom we nowadays call dinosaurs. The great dragons disappearance had reminded the elves that even though immortal they might be, they were not eternal, because even gods can accidentally die.

They were living their bucolic way of life, filled with joy and songs, in the heart of the great impenetrable Sahara forest when the danger from outer space reappeared. Their unspeakable enemies had finally found them.

They had the appearance of gigantic wolves on which faces one could read a purely malevolent cruelty, a cruelty which was not of this world! A magic cruelty ready to feast on the magic of the elves.

The confrontation was on a par with the magic powers which collided! The final battle was such that magic destroyed magic, leaving only chaos and destruction in its wake. The Earth even shook on its orbit. The immense, the magnificent Sahara forest of was destroyed forever, changed into a dry desert. Elven songs would not soar from its foliage anymore.

Finally came the time when the remaining handful of elves faced what was left of their enemies, the last remnants of the evil powers! Exhausted, worn out, the opponents had a break. Mutual extermination was close at hand. None of the two races could hope to prosper ever again. To grow and multiply had become a dream of the distant past, now forever unattainable. No stake could justify this fight anymore.

Unable to win, the last survivors cast what few of their magic powers remained in the final fight. Magic faced magic one tragic and final time and so were destroyed the last remnants of magic on our world. So were destroyed the absolute Evil and the absolute Good, leaving only Hope on our world!

And so were the last survivors of these two races deprived of their magic powers and they became mortal.

The elves became human! The noblest part in them was this longing for freedom which expressed itself in their communion with nature, in their supple and wave-like gait, in this strange glance within their green vertical pupils. Thus the essence of the elves became the cat! An essence of freedom definitely lost to the man and which would be the object of the aspirations most profoundly anchored in him!

Their enemies, for their part, lost much in size and power, savagery and cruelty, became wolves and dogs, lost thirst of conquest and freedom. They swore loyalty to what remained of their former opponents.

And thus were born Man, Cat and Dog, and so was the place of each registered in heaven. The man would always dominate and aspire to a freedom which would never satisfy him. The dog, in a staunch loyalty, couldn’t even envision its lost freedom anymore. The cat, infatuated with freedom, would still look around the man for its lost self but would never know rest. And cat and dog would forever keep within them a part of this antagonism which had almost annihilated everything!

It’s said that some were little affected by these transformations. Anubis told his story which was interpreted and passed on in the Book of the Dead. The last one of the race, so we are told, disappeared in France in the Gévaudan area.

Isis, Osiris, Seth and some others lived their last centuries in the heart of what used to be the impenetrable Sahara forest and soon going to become the deserts of High and Lower Egypt. Their narratives, badly understood by men, were going to make them the divinities of rising Egypt.

The last one of them, Bastet, had kept both her humanity and her thirst of absolute freedom. Everything in her was expressed in her gait and her feline look. She looked like a goddess with a cat’s head and at the same time conveyed the bucolic sweetness of her race and the extremes angers which had almost to overcome their enemies.

And so Bastet, last survivor of these fantastic epics, became a goddess to these new people who could never again reach the magnificence of these elves from whom they arose. Bastet allowed the alliance of her people, the cats, with the human beings, allowing them to finally live side by side in a rough approximation of the unique being they once used to be. So the man discovered that the cat was that part of absolute which was missing in him.

It’s said that a part of magic still lives in the most antique lineages of the cats of Egypt and that they can return fragments of this lost past to a few chosen human beings.

Nowadays, the Egyptian Mau still carries in him the ancient blessing of Bastet. Conscious of this wealth, he expresses it by his noble look, his strong independent personality, his merging tenderness for human being. According to the legend, the magic can be reborn when one litter will combine the four colors of the Mau: Silver, Bronze, Black Smoke and Black, provided, of course, that their favorite human being is found worthy.

Excerpt from the book “à ma fille” by Didier Hallépée - translation by Zoran Radovanovic