An elderly, itinerant Hindu priest was deathly allergic to cats. Each year, at the high feast days, the people of the temple of Shantadurga would catch the cat that hung out around the temple and tie it up while the priest was in town to officiate. With time, of course, the old priest died and his 'chela' - his disciple - took over the duties. The people had been catching the cat and tying it up during the feast days for so long that they no longer remembered why.

Nevertheless, even after the old priest died, they continued to tie the cat up. When the young priest took over the duties of the temple, the high feast days still commenced with the ting-up-of-the-cat.

Finally, the cat died. So the people bought another cat to tie up, to usher in the high feast days...
 

Over the years, the tying-up-of-the-cat became a more and more important part of the high feast days. It became a great honor to be chosen as the Sacred Cat Roper, and village dignitaries vied for the honor. Each contender for the title had his own group of supporters, and so the village split into many quarreling factions. There arose among these factions many disputes as to the qualifications necessary to be Sacred Cat Roper, the proper methods of tying, the type and length of rope, the proper prayers to offer during the cat tying ceremony, the criteria for selecting successors to the Sacred Cat, and so forth. Sadly, the high feast days became, more and more, mere opportunities for the renewal of these village controversies. Finally, the disputes became so intractable that certain of the factions refused to abide by the village's choice of Sacred Cat Roper, and they acquired their own sacred cats and began to hold separate cat binding ceremonies after their own fashion.

Visitors to the village were surprised by all this emphasis on cat binding and naturally asked the reason for it. Since no one in the village knew the real origins of the tradition, various speculative explanations were offered, and over time, these too hardened into incompatible Sacred Cat
dogma. <pun intended>

Some asserted that the gods themselves had decreed the binding of cats on holy days. An early proponent of this view wrote a tract in defense of it, and after several generations had passed, those who held the view were often heard to argue that the view was true simply *because* it was found in the earliest extant manuscripts describing Sacred Cat Ritual practices of the ancestors. Others said that the Sacred Cat was a symbol for the human soul, and that the binding of the cat represented the binding of the human passions in an act of purification and contrition in preparation for the holy day. Still others believed that the cries of the cat as it was being bound were the only way to summon the gods to the feast. And there were many other such beliefs, some even more exotic and all deeply held.

And so it went, until, after much time had passed, the people forgot completely the reasons for the high feasts themselves and gradually ceased to be Hindus. Instead, they could only be described as devotees of the Cult of the Sacred Cat, in all its multifarious forms.

Optional questions for the reader (questions I struggle with all the time):

(1) How many Liturgical Cats, if any, can you identify in your next worship service?
(2) How do these Liturgical Cats divide you from other worshippers of the same God?
(3) If all the Liturgical Cats were removed, what would be left of your religious faith?