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About a week after my housemate wished for her own cat, this cat appeared. When I first saw him he was on the front walkway, and I snapped this photo thinking he would probably walk away after that. Nope. He walked right into the house and made himself at home. 

This is amazing because my cat Happy usually runs off any other cats that enter his territory. He usually hides from strange people and dogs, too. Anything rat-sized is dinner, of course. But Happy tolerated this new cat. He only got hissy when the new cat jumped up on the bed where Happy and I were sleeping. Otherwise he was remarkably laid-back about the whole other cat thing. It's like magic. It IS magic. Freya magic.

A friend's friend has been having trouble with her cat. She'll be petting him, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, he lunges and bites her viciously.

“She's been trying pheromone therapy,” my friend tells me, rolling her eyes. “I keep telling her that some cats just don't want to be petted, that some cats can only put up with handling for so long; but she just doesn't want to hear it.”

“People,” I commiserate. “An animal is a partnership. It isn't a thing, subject to your wants and whims: it's a living being, with a life and a mind of its own.”

She sighs and shakes her head. What I've just said is so obvious that it shouldn't even need to be put into words. There's a pause as we both consider the implications of this.

Simmy was a one-person cat, and I was it. She was also an adept of the astral.

When I won a scholarship to study in the Middle East, she disappeared for the entire time that I was gone. Oh, my housemates could tell that she was still around: the litter box was used, the food bowl emptied. But see her, they didn't.

Simmy, you see, was Busy.

She was my first cat, a petite brown tabby Manx with a stumpy little tail. (One of her nicknames was Bunny Butt.) Like most Manx, she was a powerful jumper. When bats would get into the house—a perennial problem wherever witches live—she would jump for them as they wheeled around the room, and never failed to catch them out of midair.

I'd been gone for about a month when one morning I dreamed that Simmy was sitting on the foot of my bed in my room in Jerusalem. I very much had the impression that while her body was laying inert in one of her secret hiding places, her soul had out been roaming the world in search of her Human. Found me she finally had, after a month of searching.

But that didn't mean that she wasn't pissed. She was sitting on the bed with her back to me.

Interspecies communication has always fascinated me. Miss Squeak was a past master of the art.

She learned early on how to get exactly what she wanted from human beings. When she was young and lived in the country, she led an indoor-outdoor life.

If it so happened that she arrived back home late at night after the doors were already closed, no matter. She'd climb the big old blue spruce next to the house and hop off onto the roof. Then she'd sit outside the bedroom window and cry until they opened the window to let her in.

What Miss Squeak wanted, Miss Squeak got.

Later in life, she came to live with me in the city.

One day I took a workman down into the basement to do some updates on the water meter. Unbeknownst to us, Miss Squeak followed us down.

I heard the story later. While working on the meter, he was puzzled by an incessant series of sharp, demanding cries from elsewhere in the basement.

Following the cries to their source, he found a little black-and-white kitty sitting on the laundry room floor in front of the closed door that led to the stairs. Miss Squeak never did like closed doors.

Mind you, if she'd just wanted to get back upstairs, she could have gone up by the same way that we came down; that door to the stairs still stood wide open.

But, of course, mere access was never the point. There must be a lot of satisfaction in getting the big, dumb animals around you to do precisely what you want.

Miss Squeak grew up in a house of many cats, and all of them picked on her. When she first came to live with me, you could see the incredulity on her face: You mean I can just lay down anywhere, and nobody will try to jump me?

With such a background, Squeak didn't like to be held. That was OK with me; she was plenty affectionate in other ways.

Then, about a year and a half ago, as I was laying on my bed one day, reading—the sleep hygienists all say you shouldn't, I know—she hopped up on the bed and stretched out on my chest.

Here I am, she said, looking me in the eye.

And that was that. Since then, she's even taken to climbing up on my lap, the ultimate act of feline trust: Squeak, the cat that didn't like to be held.

On her last night, when I got home from work I found that she'd curled up on the pillow on my bed. Well, everyone has the right to die where they want to.

Although by that point moving was difficult for her, when I woke in the middle of the night I found that she had crawled under the covers and snugged up to me: the primal mammalian comfort of skin-to-skin contact that, in the end, is maybe the best giving that we have to offer one another.

So the cat that everyone picked on managed to find a territory of her own, and someone to snug up to. There are worse lives to be had.

A friend of mine insists that her dog is pagan.

Well, if one defines “pagan” as “following the thews (customs, life-ways, religion) of one's thede (= tribe, people),” I guess I could buy it. Witches (insofar as we follow anything) follow the Witch religion, dogs follow the Dog religion. I would imagine that the Dog religion is a pretty basic biological religion, with an ethical code strongly based on loyalty.

Rather like human paganism at its best, actually.

Then, of course, there's the Kitty-Cat religion. I'm certainly not privy to the inner mysteries here, but so far as I can tell, Cat religion is monotheistic.

There's one god, and it's Me.

Maybe that's where the Abrahamics got it from. This would fit with my theory that monotheism is essentially narcissism writ large.

I'm playing here, of course, but the question is a serious one: can animals—let me be specific and say non-human animals here—be said to have religion? The answer, of course, would depend on how one defines “religion.”

Just why John decided to name his cat Koomi, I don't know.

But when he and I started dating one summer, we soon had her figured out.

Imagine Theosophy's Helena Blavatsky as a brown tabby. That would be Koomi. Obese, indolent, with an endemic frown and piercing eyes that put you in your place. No one ever saw Koomi move. Judging from the food dish and the litter box she must have; then it occurred to us that this must actually have been evidence of teleportation instead.

For Koomi-cat was no mere kitty. Clearly, this was none other than Hoot Koomi, the feline mahatma. After centuries spent guiding the evolution of souls—Koot Hoomi, anyone?—she had clearly decided to take an incarnation off. This time around, Hoot Koomi was not going to do anything she didn't want to do.

In fact, she wasn't going to do anything.