Why Do Cats Have Nine Lives? The Origin of the Myth

The phrase is far older than cartoons, and the number is not nine everywhere. Here is where it actually comes from.

The honest answer first

There is no single documented origin. Anyone who tells you the myth definitively started in one place is overselling. What we have is several converging strands, each independently plausible, that together explain why the idea stuck.

Strand one: nine as a sacred number

In Egyptian theology the Ennead of Heliopolis was a group of nine deities — Atum plus eight descendants. Nine is three threes, and three was already a number of completeness. A trinity of trinities reads as completeness intensified.

Given that Egypt also associated cats with divinity, and that the sun god could take cat form when killing the serpent Apep, the number and the animal had ample opportunity to associate. That said: no surviving Egyptian text says 'cats have nine lives'. The Egyptian thread is context, not evidence.

Strand two: the English proverb

The saying is well attested in English by the sixteenth century. John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs contains the line that a cat has nine lives, and Shakespeare has Mercutio demand one of Tybalt's nine lives in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) — which tells us the phrase was common enough by then to be a joke.

So the saying is at minimum ~500 years old in English and was already proverbial when first written down.

Strand three: the cat simply survives things

The least romantic explanation is probably the strongest. Cats possess a righting reflex that lets them rotate mid-air to land feet-first, a flexible spine, no functional collarbone, and a low body-weight-to-surface-area ratio that limits terminal velocity. Veterinary literature on falls from height in urban cats is genuinely striking.

People noticed. A creature that repeatedly walks away from what should kill it gets a reputation for having spares.

It is not nine everywhere

This is the detail that gives the game away — if the myth had one true origin, the number would not move.

• Nine — English, and much of the English-influenced world
• Seven — commonly cited in Spanish, and in several Arabic and Turkish traditions
• Six — reported in some Arabic traditions

What is constant across all of them is the underlying claim: this animal does not die when it should.

Why it matters here

TSUKI: Nine Lives takes the ninth life literally and makes it a physical object — a soul-flame that can be stolen. The premise only works because the myth is old enough and widespread enough that nobody needs it explained.

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