Ancient Egypt comes back as new Britain

As a conservative – some will say reactionary – I’m pleased to report that Her Majesty’s realm is nowhere near as atheist as I feared.

Just because people venerate a different God from mine, it doesn’t mean they don’t venerate any. In fact, judging by the public reaction to the Zouma incident, Britain has revived the ancient Egyptian cult of cat-worship.

Starting from the First Dynasty, felines were treated as deities for at least 3,000 years. They were seen as representations of Ra, the sun god. Hence any affront against cats was treated as blasphemy, though I’m not sure what kind of punishment was meted out to the infidels.

However, I do know how such transgressions are punished in Britain and France, now the ancient cult has made a comeback. And so does Kurt Zouma, the French defender playing at West Ham.

The other day Kurt and his brother, also a defender, came home after a kicking session. Both felt it would be fun to extend that activity to a domestic environment. This time, however, Kurt branched out into rugby technique, dropkicking one of his cats.

Both he and his brother laughed as the latter was filming the cat flying across the room. Either Kurt’s rugby technique needs work or else a cat doesn’t have the ballistic characteristics of a ball, but he failed to reach a decent elevation and distance.

Unaware that they had committed a blasphemous act, the Zoumas happily put the video on social networks. That offended the religious sensibilities of cat-worshippers, and these days no offence is taken in stride.

The plagues of Egypt were visited upon Kurt (yes, I know I’m mixing religious metaphors, but at least the geography is spot on). To begin with, the RSPCA stepped in to confiscate Zouma’s cats, including the victim that apparently had suffered no lasting damage.

The same can’t be said for Zouma’s career. His commercial cash cows instantly did to his endorsements what he had done to that poor cat. Then 280,000 cat-worshippers signed an online petition demanding that the blasphemer be prosecuted and sacked from his club. So far David Moyes, West Ham manager, has ignored this demand.

Instead he merely fined Zouma two-week’s wages, which amounted to £250,000. That created an unforeseen problem. Other players, whose mathematical nous proved just adequate to the task of dividing that sum by two, realised that Zouma is on £125,000 a week, more than anyone else at the club.

Hence they demanded immediate pay rises, thereby committing at least two of the deadly sins, avarice and envy. However, since these sins have a different religious provenance, they don’t count.

One player came to Zouma’s defence without in any way condoning the sacrilege. Pointing out that no one is sacking players guilty of racism, central striker Antonio asked a question he thought was rhetorical: “Is kicking a cat worse than racism?”

Rhetorical? Not on your nelly, replied The Mail’s sports writer Martin Samuel: “The answer? It doesn’t matter. They’re both bad. Racism, cat-kicking. There doesn’t have to be a sliding scale of monstrousness.”

One has to see irrefutable logic there. Some 80 years ago, millions of people with surnames similar to Mr Samuel’s were being gassed in ovens. In the 25 years before and some 15 years after that, 60 million people with all sorts of surnames were murdered in another country.

Yet those crimes, monstrous as they are, are no different from cat-kicking. Morality, of which Mr Samuel is an infallible judge, is absolute. If you have that sliding relativist scale, kick it into touch.

The outburst of religious fervour is thunderous in Britain, but it’s even louder in Zouma’s native France. Brigitte Bardot, who has in the recent decades focused on animals the same passion she used to reserve for her co-stars, demanded that Zouma be dropped from the national team and prosecuted.

If the country’s prosecutors comply with that demand, Kurt is looking at up to four years in the clink, what with French laws being stricter than ours in this area of jurisprudence. Still, he should count himself lucky. In the old days, apostates were immolated.

It’s up for discussion whether any religiosity is better than none, provided that alternative cults don’t involve human sacrifice. Without joining the debate, I’ll merely point out that, in the occidental context, animal worship is a relatively recent faith.

It goes back to the time when reason – finally! – arrived in Europe and people started worshipping nature instead of God. Until then, they had treated nature in a purely functional manner. No sentimentality towards animals was in evidence.

In those backward times it was still assumed that nature, both flora and fauna, was there for the sole purpose of serving man, made in the image and likeness of God. But with the arrival of the Enlightenment and its artistic expression, Romanticism, people replaced God with their own reason.

And it told them that they didn’t need the supernatural to pursue the superpersonal. All they had to do was come up with new cults – or else take the old ones off the mothballs.

Hence the rampant anthropomorphism in treating animals (hence also, by the way, the alacrity with which modern secular zealots jump on the climate bandwagon).

Cruelty to animals isn’t nice. But the on-going mass hysteria about Zouma’s unfortunate choice of football is grotesquely out of proportion. After all, in his professional capacity Zouma must have kicked hundreds of human beings, some of them deliberately.

On the other hand, those creatures are unlikely to purr when tickled behind the ear. And nor do they possess any religious significance. Not any longer.

P.S. Mentioning France reminded me that I must apologise to President Macron. In an earlier article I inadvertently stated that he planned to replace the French national anthem La Marseillaise with the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (O viens, ô viens, Emmanuel).