Good Shepherds
We, Zarathustra the Cat, couldn’t roam so freely on the world wide web without the help of good shepherds, the cat herders of the internet. The good shepherds tell Us stories of culture from all over the world, bring us recent news from the places We never were, and advise Us on what pieces of art we should visit (We should say that at the moment We have 852 paintings in our tour plans). This is the sign that 2 shepherds from Facebook have Shepard as their family name: Susan from New England in USA and Sylvia from Germany, who created the fan page of Fat Cat Art at Facebook. For you both, an old symbol of the Good Shepherd, or criophorus, the “ram-bearer” turns into the “cat-bearer”:
the Cat-bearer, the Good Shepherd of the Internet
About the origins of symbolism: the form of the image showing a young man carrying a lamb around his neck was directly borrowed by Christian art from the much older pagan kriophoros and in the case of portable statuettes like the most famous one created at c. 300-350 now in the Pio Cristiano Museum, Vatican City, they say it is impossible to say to what culture the image belongs. Now it belongs to Internet culture also.
Thus speaks Zarathustra the Cat
