Winged Cats in Popular Culture
- A Kircher engraving from 1667 depicted a demonic creature with a cat's head, bat's wings and human torso. Cats and bats were both associated with the devil (in Christianity), and demons were sometimes depicted as bat-winged cats.
- In Thoreau's Walden, the narrator briefly describes a winged cat.
- In the 1980s and 1990s, the Forgotten Realms role-play game and related fantasy novels depicted shy winged cat-owl hybrids as the pets of wizards. The Forgotten Realms winged cats are called tressym.
- In Marvel Comics, a subspecies of the Light Elves called the Cat Elves have winged cats that serve as their steeds.
- In video games, some creatures may resemble winged cats.
- In Final Fantasy V, many random enemy encounters have such creatures.
- In the Lunar series, two supporting characters, Nall and Ruby, resemble flying cats for most of the game and even have stereotypical feline tendencies, like fish being a favorite dish.
- Myau of the first Phantasy Star game eats a nut that gives him wings.
- In Beyblade, the Bit-Beast Venus is a winged cat.
- Winged cat angel figurines are popular among cat owners in the USA.
- Winged kittens, called flittens, were created by Laura H. Von Stetina. A book about flittens, Mewingham Manor, Observations on a Curious New Species, was published by the Greenwich Workshop Press, and a line of flitten figurines are also produced in the USA by the Greenwich Workshop. These show cute kittens with butterflies' wings. Bradford Editions produces "Almost Purr-fect Angels" winged cat figurines.
- Catwings, a series of children's picture books by Ursula K. Le Guin, features several winged cats.
- A winged cat also appears in the chapter "Brute Neighbors" in Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
- Aq Bars, Tatarstan's coat of arms depicts a winged snow leopard, is related to winged cat.
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Famous quotes containing the words winged, cats, popular and/or culture:
“A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farmhouses.... This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even cats grow lonely and anxious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)