My kittens Artemis and Melchizedek named themselves: Artemis the first time I looked into his brilliant green cat eyes, and Melchizedek, a few weeks later when I picked up the 2-month-old brothers to bring them home.  Jokingly, I asked the little ball of black fur in my arms what he wanted to be called since his brother had been so clear.  The ludicrous name “Melchizedek” resounded in my psyche, spelled in black and deep red letters in my mind’s eye.  

I scoffed.  What grandiose names for a pair of kittens!  Artemis, the Greek name of Diana, is Goddess of the hunt, wild animals, nature and vegetation, a virgin goddess who protects the young and pure.  The little boy seemed too sweet to be so valiant.  The name Melchizedek I had encountered for the first time in new age circles when I moved to Sedona eight years before.  A renowned biblical high priest, his name in Aramaic means “King of Righteousness.”   In my new Doreen Virtue Ascended Masters’ deck, he signifies “Law of Attraction” – a reckoning and accountability.  I had arrived in Sedona a year out from a third bout of cancer, with my brain on fire from chronic Lyme, black mold, chemical biotoxicity, and lead and mercury poisoning, and acutely reactive to human-made electromagnetic fields.  I was psychologically and physiologically wrecked.  I had had enough of reckonings and accountability and disliked pulling the card.

But I obliged, sensing already these two kittens were not ordinary kittens.  They had in fact announced themselves in a flash vision months before.  Walking through my living room I had been startled by two ghost kittens running past me, one grey, the other black, chasing each other at full speed into the kitchen.  I recognized the pair immediately on Facebook with a full body shiver.  In the picture, they lay entwined, like lovers.

Our first three months together were fun.  The boys were immediately renamed the Beastie Boys – inseparable little terrors who saw my home as their parkour, one moment dangling from a swaying floor lamp to get from chair to sofa, the next jumping after each other from floor to kitchen counter to cabinet tops as if racing along the rooftops of Paris in a Mission Impossible movie.  They tore up my cloth furniture and broke fragile things I foolishly left out, drove me crazy angry, then into fits of crazy laughter, impossible to discipline or contain.

When Melchizedek first showed signs of the FIP illness[1]that would kill them both over the next 4 months – an out of the blue 24-hour flu and lethargy – Artemis cuddled his brother in his arms through the night, like a child.  I found them in the middle of the night exactly as I’d left them before going to bed.  The next morning, the day of our vet appointment, Melchi was his normal self again and off they went being the Beastie Boys.  I thought, wow, sweet Artemis just lived up to his Goddess name. 

PICTURE 1. Artemis with his arms around Melchizedek

Artemis, unlike Melchizedek, went down hard and did not rebound.  In the ensuing months, it would become clear that my Beastie Boys were here to work through a miasma of human-made illness inflicted on their cat kin with rhizomatic roots reaching far and wide into histories of human violence against innocent young life.  Each in their own way would live up to their self-chosen names.

During the agonizing 6 weeks and 3 vets it took to diagnose the lethal FIP illness, Artemis’s fevers rose and crashed like monster ocean swells with more wreckage shoring up on his little body each time:  lessening appetite and thirst, random wobbliness, fits of sneezing, watery eyes, crusty nostrils, a new intermittent limp in a hind leg, bouts of fatigue and the terrifying high fevers.  His aura grew darker and darker.  Vets subjected him to a battery of blood tests – so many needle pokes – and traumatizing back room stays for observation and imaging studies.  Nothing.  A mystery illness.  Artemis would crash in the wakes of these visits and impersonal human handlings and come out of treatments worse than before.  I grew to hate the exam rooms with their token happy cat paintings, jars of obligatory treats, and canned music, the distress of other animals seeping into the room each time doors were opened. 

I was also loathe to separate Artemis from Melchizedek as the brothers would retreat to the top of the kitchen cabinets as soon as we returned, letting me know their separation was not welcome. During these weeks of growing anguish for me, Melchizedek faithfully stood guard at the mouth of the cat cave or at edge of the last kitchen cabinet.  I improvised a step-up system so Artemis could make it up and down as his body weakened, placing food, water and even litter up there.  Melchizedek accompanied his brother on wobbly walks outside and used his body to prop him up wherever Artemis stopped to rest.  I envied their powerful bond.

PICTURE 2 Melchi supporting his brother

Swells of feverish wordless energies also rose and crashed within me.  I was confused, conflicted, bewildered.  I knew I was losing my Little Goddess.  I was stubborn, too, separating the brothers for yet another hopeless desperate vet follow-up even as treatments failed, a first round of homeopathy too.  But then one of the vets finally diagnosed FIP, the stealth disease that kills millions of kittens and young cats a year in the US alone.  

The diagnosis should have spelled relief but it only heightened the stakes.  The kind vet offered to put Artemis out of his misery right there and then.  But something in me rose up.  I imperiously whisked him back to our home and to his brother Melchizedek.  My only thought in that moment was, Artemis will die at home with us.

Later, I would understand that had I acted on the finality of the diagnosis and exercised my right as a cat owner to cull the life of my animal at will, I would have culled our descent into the shadow realms of FIP and the fields of human generated bad death it entangles with.  I would have also kept the wondrous healing movements of repairing the world that Artemis and Melchizedek were orchestrating with their experience of the fatal illness from happening.

I moved the sweet boy to my bed the night of the diagnosis and cradled him in my arms, already in deep mourning.  Melchizedek settled in the nook of my bent legs.  This time I was the one to take comfort in the warmth of Melchizedek’s little body propping me up.  At four am, having not slept a wink, I posted about my cat’s terminal diagnosis on Facebook uploading his green-eyed Goddess of Vegetation picture, an obituary of sorts.   Within 5 minutes, a human homeopath who occasionally treated animals was offering her unconditional help.  She didn’t want me to give up, not on Artemis and not on homeopathy.  My little cat had grabbed her heart.  As dawn whispered its pastel hues outside my window, hope surged in me for the first time in a long time.   

PICTURE 3.  Artemis as Goddess of Vegetation and Protectress of Small Creatures, healthy

Hope is a wonderful motivator but rarely a good indicator of outcomes.  I watched myself over the next several weeks peg my wishes for the cure I wanted on the synchronicities of that night and those that followed just as I had wanted to peg blame on his rabies MrNa vaccine, vets and a pathogen.  Miraculously it seemed to me, within 48 hours, my new homeopath friend had found the work of another homeopath, the late Irene de Villiers, who to her great credit had studied the latest lab research on FIP when her classical manner of prescribing remedies failed her too.  To my amazement, I learned the FIP viral mutation of the endemic coronavirus in cats’ bellies tricks symptoms just as my own Lyme and environmental illnesses had for years.  A paradigm shift was needed:  FIP like Lyme and EIs was a dis-ease emblematic of our dis-eased times, the FIP mutation exploiting stresses and weaknesses in immune systems to turn our body’s first line of defense against itself. 

This I could wrap my head around.  De Villiers explained kittens were weaned from their mothers or lost them too early; their immature immune systems shocked with strong vaccinations and surgeries; traumatized by vet visits and separation from littermates, and stays in cages in noisy shelters with other terrified animals; experienced often multiple re-homings filled with danger (dogs!); and fed highly processed specialty kitten foods. In other words, the vulnerable beginnings of young life where the nourishment and protection of the mother – her teachings too – were most needed were instead filled with shock and terror. 

As I read De Villiers, memories started to flood in forming a mosaic I had so far distributed across moments of my life but never recognized as a unified field of experience on Earth at this time.   For example:  a pediatric nurse barging into my friend’s maternity room, chatting breezily as the heavy door clanked loudly behind her; then, still chatting away, picking up the tiny foot of the sleeping baby not a day out from her mother’s womb to take an impression on a clay tray for the hospital’s discharge gift of a baby memory book.  Neither mother nor nurse seemed disturbed by the startled baby’s distressed cries.  For example:  an infertility doctor I was filming for The Child The Stork Brought Home casually reinserting a vaginal probe into his unconscious client to show me the shot I had missed and could still get now, overriding my protests.  For example: a swarm of fragile white butterflies crossing the four-lane highway to Sedona being ploughed by cars traveling at 70 mph, including my own.  How much life had gone into the emergence of those young butterflies? 

And this: my 2-month-old kittens playing joyfully with their lactating mother in my friend’s back yard, the afternoon I picked them up.  “2 months is the vet approved age to separate kittens from mothers” ringing in my ears as the recoil in my body made me almost sick as I drove the terrified kittens home, to my home.  Did I weigh carefully what the separation would deprive them of?  No.  Instead I just felt pangs of distress in my body I worked to quell.  But what if these pangs were the pangs of a distressed world communicating through the viscera of my body?    

As my bed became a make shift hospital and my dresser a tracking surface for my notes and remedies, I began to feel like an oaf next to my gentle kitten, a grossly inadequate substitute mother for what he needed.  Melchizedek on the other hand seemed to know exactly what to do.  Folding himself up on his haunches like a Buddhist monk in deep meditation, he would hold space for hours near his brother, eyes closed.  He was Artemis’ groomer, licking his brothers’ sticky, sweaty, scabby FIP fur and face while purring loudly.  He inspected Artemis’ increasingly rare poos and pees, cleaning up the litter box after his brother because Artemis was too weak to do so.  Whenever Melchizedek broke out in kitten play or tried to wrestle Artemis as they used too, my heart would seize with love and gratitude for my little King of Righteousness. 

PICTURE 4 Melchizedek keeping his sick brother company

Nuzzling Artemis and listening to his raspy breath one night as I had many others, I wondered  again why I wasn’t putting him down.  Each time I had the same feeling – more of a sense and presence –that forbade my consenting to putting him down the day of the diagnosis.  Had their kitten names reached me from that same presence?  

I prayed, searching the depths of my mind and heart for a clue.  I felt myself slipping inside Artemis’ consciousness or maybe a dimension connecting us both.  Gradually, an icy cold began to seep into the room, a sucking black hole.  With a pang of fear, I recognized the energetic signature of cold-blooded cruelty, torture and bad death from my human systemic constellations work.  Artemis then showed me his neuter surgery:  the two brothers anesthetized and limp side by side on the steel table with other carriers lined up, the production line of “neuter day”; Artemis waking up before the vet had finished with his brother; the wrestling match that ensued to pin the strong six-month old down while the vet quickly clipped and stabbed him with the rabies vaccine not in the leg as is protocol, but along his lower spine.  Finally, I knew why Artemis had come home profoundly altered with a swollen face the clinic couldn’t adequately explain and developed a tumor by his kidney.  No wonder FIP had gripped him in the wake.

A feeling of furious protective love exploded in my heart.  Bad death was coming for Artemis but I would not allow it.  In my mind’s eye I fed the icy-cold black mouth with brilliant sun gold as in my Tibetan practice of feeding one’s demons.  I flooded my little kitten’s body, too, all the way down to his cells. The icy cold retreated.  I came out of trance, turning on the light.  Artemis was sleeping and now breathing quietly in the fold of my arm.  Melchizedek had moved across the bed in his meditation pose.    

The next morning Artemis looked better and insisted on wobbling off the bed alone and going outside with his brother in tow.  The little Goddess found a clump of grass to plop into and facing the morning sun, took the light rays in.  I was ecstatic.

PICTURE 5 and 6 Left Artemis under the spell of the darkness and outside in a clump of grass after the night of the exorcism.

“We have turned a corner,” I bragged prematurely to our homeopath and my two Reiki friends now sending healing almost daily.  When yet another fever soon ravaged Artemis, I was devastated.  I bundled up after administering the De Villiers protocols and went outside to smoke under the brilliant stars who, with the shiny sliver of moon, seemed to mock me with their wellness.  I drew hard on the cigarette, seething with self-pity and impotent rage, each inhale flooding my body with waves of excruciating fibromyalgia pain. 

I smoked on.  Artemis had been shocked out of his innocence and body on the surgery table.  Now I saw how I had been shocked out of mine as an infant and toddler as well, in rooms I could not escape with adults nearby seeming indifferent.  I had too been vaccinated every six months against my will in Algeria “for my own good.”  I smoked harder, taking almost sadistic pleasure in the pain.

More images appeared:  my mother and grandmother, chain smokers both, shrouding their stifled, stiff upper lip unhappy selves and the indignities of their marriages in clouds of swirling tobacco smoke, pretending all was well and as it should be.  Inexplicably, I then saw the image of tobacco bundles hanging in a red drying barn surrounded by freshly harvested fields.  In a flash of recognition, I knew without knowing how that an ancestor of ours had travelled to the Americas in the early years and extracted his wealth from the human beings toiling to grow his tobacco, each cigarette or pipe smoked for pleasure shrouding in clouds of smoke the indignities and cruelties of plantation life for those trapped on it.  

Then I jumped to my father’s Dutch family living in the Dutch Caribbean from the 1930s on, the greatest hub of slave trading in the Americas.  Our neuter vet’s family happened to be from an old Dutch Caribbean family.  I had celebrated at the time this synchronicity but now I could see the web entangling all of us.  I remembered how the history of modern human and veterinary medicine, including gynecology, had had its beginnings in the colonies, to breed and keep humans and animals alive enough for the enterprise.  The fractal nodes of the miasma that Artemis was caught in were becoming clear.

When I put out the second cigarette that night, I knew it would be my last because the truly righteous thing to do for my cat. To continue to inflict pain on myself and shroud myself in smoke would have been a profound disrespect for Artemis’s suffering, an acquiescence no different than my chain-smoking mother and grandmother also caught in the same web of denial.   

Picture 7, 8:  Left Melchi in window, Artemis on bed; right, keeping track of remedies

In the days after, I began to twine even more intimately with Artemis, sharing his symptoms in a visceral telepathy with which we prescribed remedies.  The 19^th century homeopath Phineas Quimby reported this same phenomenon between mothers and babies, treating mothers in lieu of children even, love being a powerful transductor.  Quimby also cautioned against a despotic homeopathic approach to vanquishing an illness, speaking of the higher wisdom of trusting life regardless of outcome.[2]  I relaxed, taking my cues from the unperturbable Melchizedek.

“Artemis is definitely in charge,” texted one of his Reiki healers.  They too had started to experience his physical symptoms in their sessions:  icy cold extremities, digestion knotting up in balls, stabs of pain.  The Little Goddess was alternatively drawing on the healing energies insatiably, often through his eyes, or releasing volumes of stagnant and dark energies, clearly more darkness than belonged to him.  Both healers saw a pink energy around him more than once, a great love.  I wrote back, Artemis seems to be healing us of darkness.  As his end approached, he grew sweetly affectionate, tenderly touching my face and Melchi’s with his paw as if to reassure us, all was well.  

As his body withered and decayed, I noticed his eyes growing clearer.  I could now sense a great luminous presence looking back at me.  A few days before his death, he regaled me with another vision, this time joyful.  He showed himself as a gorgeous vibrantly healthy huge version of himself – a big cat in a spacious cave with large openings to a luminous blue sky.  To my utter surprise and delight, he had a Mrs. and four little cubs crawling all over him.  A big cat family whole, healthy and free.  I wept with immense gratitude for all that my little Goddess and High Priest Melchizedek were gifting me.

I was not prepared for the day of his passing.  I woke up in the wee hours of the morning to Artemis in full body seizure – the hideous neurological phase of FIP – and a growl so gryphon-like it was hair-raising.  When I turned on the light, I found Melchizedek a few feet from us on the bed on his haunches facing his brother, his face composed. 

PICTURE 9 Melchi resting from his long vigil. 

I moved Artemis to the living room to our day hospice set up and lit a votive and gave the end-of-life remedy.  Melchizedek sat in his Buddhist monk pose about two feet from his brother, face to face, and stayed in this pose other than to sleep.  Not once did Melchizedek react to the harrowing growls and then soundless seizures that continued to wrack Artemis’s body until his passing 10 hours later.  The energy passing between the brothers was palpable.

I found Artemis’ suffering hard to take.  Should I call the roaming vet now?  Again, the answer was no.  I was being called to look at the suffering that young life pays for our human disconnect and hubris without flinching away.  To see it to its end.  After all, Artemis had taken on the sickness of my civilization’s violence against young life, of my ancestry.

After his last seizure, the Little Big Goddess looked into my eyes with his beautiful green eyes free of all darkness.  I knew his death would be good and despite appearances, free of FIP.  Together with Melchizedek we had somehow passed through the gauntlet to the other side.  Artemis and Melchizedek locked into in a long mutual gaze.  Then he was gone.   

PICTURE 10. Artemis dead with his brother still holding space

Melchizedek continued to stay in deep in meditation with his now dead brother.  That evening I went out to buy white roses and more votive candles.  Come sunrise, I would shroud Artemis in one of my linen sheets to the chants of the Tibetan Tara Arya for the Deceased in a funeral ceremony fit for a Pharaoh.  

As I reverently worked at dawn, Melchizedek with us, the room began to palpably fill with presence, the air thickening.  I knew it to be filling with thousands and thousands of young cat souls that had suffered bad deaths by FIP and the many little-big violences of our times.  I thought of the little ones trapped, tortured and dying in science lab for the “good” of human health.  Animals that no one remembers when sitting in charming vet clinic rooms with our pet children.  This ceremony was for all of them.  Artemis was calling them to him, a liberator of souls.  I was awed by the magnitude of the phenomena.

PICTURE 11. Left, Artemis washed and anointed with tufts of our hair and a bag of kibbles; right, the card I pulled from Alana Fairchild’s Earth warrior deck, fittingly Panthera: The Precious and the Rare.

In the last picture I took for his healing team, Artemis’s shrouded body to my astonishment, lay in an unmistakable beam of brilliant white light.  Such a beam had been theoretically described to me as a spirit track, a portal that opens between dimensions for the safe passage of souls at death.  It confirmed my intuition that Artemis was transitioning souls with him. 

Three other extra-ordinary things happened:  the rose I laid on his shroud did not wilt for 36 hours; Melchizedek stood vigil at the threshold of the door to the healing room where I placed his brother for about the same time; and when I drove Artemis’ body to the cremation pick up, a flock of goldfinch that feed at the feeder in Artemis’s favorite tree – the tree of his Goddess of Vegetation portrait above – escorted us down the road like a cortege.  As they flew off, they turned and crossed in front, flashing their white bellies as if in final salute to a Great Soul.

PICTURE 12 and 13. Left, Artemis in the beam of light; right, Melchizedek standing guard and vigil.

Artemis left a big hole in our lives, in Melchizedek’s especially.  With his brother gone, Melchizedek’s FIP resurged, maybe held at bay by the great love he shared with his brother.  By now familiar with the De Villiers protocols, I treated him successfully but could not fill his broken heart.  He got injured in nasty fights with neighbor cats. Two months to the day of Artemis’ passing, he left the house and did not come home, at least not to me.  I consoled myself by imagining him reunited with Artemis in his big cat form.

For my part, a wave of synchronicities found me treating FIP kittens at a local rescue with about the same success rate as De Villiers, 50 percent, another gift of Artemis.  When my new cat had a litter, I kept the family together until the mother chose to wean her kittens.   Having learned from Artemis and Melchizedek, I also put up the kittens for adoption in their chosen sibling pairs.  And life still calls for more respect.

Note:  I thank Sharon English and Lise Weil for the flawless editing that made this essay so much stronger.

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[1] FIP or “Feline Infectious Peritonitis” – its 1965 given name – is now afflicting and killing millions of kittens and young cats each year in the US alone.  Thought to be an infection of the lining of the gut, recent science shows it to be a mutation of the coronavirus in the digestive system of cats with severely stressed and immature immune system, a feline AIDS of sorts.

[2] “Cause of Disease,” 1863, ppquimby.com/articles/cause_of_disease.htm, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Resource Center.  I wish to thank the homeopathic vet Richard Pitcairn for this reference.

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