In Serbia in the past people believed that burying a cat alive would stop summer rainstorms that were damaging the crops. And that burning a cat alive would stop summer droughts that were damaging the crops...
Source "Srpski mitološki rečnik - grupa autora"...
This one post cause an avalanche of replies from Serbs who accused me of Anti Serbian propaganda aimed at portraying Serbs as savages...And Anti Serbs who used this post as proof that Serbs are savages...
For people horrified by Barbaric Serbs killing cats in a desperate attempt to protect their crops from destruction and stop the famine, have a look at this: Apparently the Civilised Europeans were at that time burning cats for fun...
Some Serbian ethnographers believed that this was a remnant of Norse religion, because Freya, who "provided good summer weather for the grain crops" rode in a chariot pulled by cats, and that these were sacrifices to her...
People often do things long after they have forgotten the original reason for doing them cause "it's always been done"... Peasants are extremely conservative and don't easily change their ways...
The ethnographers were trying to make some sense of this "strange" ritual, and to them the fact that Freya was linked with cats, grain, weather was a possible root of this probably ancient ritual...
Personally I think the reason why people used cats in weather magic was because of their association with witches, and their ability to manipulate the weather. I wrote about this in my article "De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus"...
The main "Evil Magic" witches were accused of was weather magic used to cause cold, wet, stormy weather.
Two witches conjuring a hailstorm. Did you know that the sudden climate change which resulted in the medieval mini ice age was blamed on the weather controlling witches and was the excuse for the subsequent witch-hunt?
This happened to Freya too...I wrote about it in my post "Freya and her cats"...
As for sacrifices, this was human way of cheating gods...In this case a life of a cat for lives of people...
I talked about this in my post "Ishti"
Sanskrit इष्टि ("ishti") - 1. A wish, desire. 2. A sacrifice
This is the essence of "sacrifice": Hey God (insert name here), we want a lot of something, and in exchange, here is a bit of something...Fair enough?
And finally, The photo I used was made by some idiot in the United States who buried his cat to see what it's going to do. Has nothing to do with the ritual from Serbia, where the cat was actually completely buried...
The ritual was recorded in the 19th and 20th c. not because it originated in the 19th and 20th c, but because no one did any ethnographic studies among serbs before that...The ritual was probably ancient and no, it's not still being practiced...
