Transubstantiation, a power ascribed to the Eucharist within the Catholic Mass, transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. It is to be noted that only that which IS the Lord Jesus Christ himself is transubstantiatied. In communion, neither Jesus’s loin cloth (technical name, “Perizoma”) nor his crown of thorns are tasted by the faithful – only his body and his blood. This is because transubstantiation only metamorphoses the body but does not transform the objects that belong to that body.
In the final days of the Cat Planet, the Cat Priestesses found themselves in a terrible predicament: Theirs was a power of transubstantiation dependent on a magical crystal, the “Orb of Holofelinity”, and if they could escape their doom through transubstantiation they could not take the Orb with them, and so they took a chance doing something that had been made taboo since time immemorial upon Lemewria: They chose to translate themselves into the Orb of Holofelinity itself. Doing this would shatter the Orb and also they could never return to their physical forms, but the most important thing – the power of Holofelinity – would be preserved. That power they would not allow the Reptilians to destroy.
A central motif throughout Arthur C. Clarke’s writings is the evolution of human consciousness through extraterrestrial – and seemingly divine – influences. In 2001: A Space Odyssey we are introduced to the “Monoliths”. These mysterious dark metallic oblong objects appear consequentially and seem to bestow a decisive blessing resulting in an evolutionary leap in consciousness: Immediately after touching the monolith in curiosity, the primitive early man (indeterminate hominid?) picks up the femur of a tapir and strikes his enemy dead: The use of tools.
Like the Monoliths of 2001, the Catoliths appeared on Earth mysteriously before the dawn of human civilization, before humans as we know ourselves existed. These were the shards of the Orb of Holofelinity that had transubstantiated from Lemewria to Earth. These shards were the Cat Priestesses themselves, the consciousness of the Cat Priestesses lived within these mighty crystals. The crystals took the form of tall, elegant, mystical cat statues that evoked the beautiful forms of the Lyran Cat Priestesses. The design of the Catolith Cat Statue of Cathenge is a replica of the ancient Catolith of the Cat Priestesses, the Catolith formed from the Orb of Holofelinity. The Catolith is the sacred icon of Holofelinity, Universal Cat Consciousness.
The Catoliths materialized on Earth at carefully chosen geographic coordinates that would amplify the Power of Holofelinity. There were only 9 Catoliths, and their locations are no longer certain – some may have been under the sea or deep within caves, but in Africa it was upon the banks of the Nile in Ancient Egypt that a Catolith stood. The Cat Priestesses, now consciousness bound to crystals, were pleasantly surprised by the pliability of life on Earth. Here was a primeval planet, beautiful, rich in resources, and with a pre-existing abundance of complex genetic diversity, yet no civilization whatsoever – all of Earth’s creatures were just animals.
The Cat Priestesses found that their minds could play here freely and that they could not only invest their consciousness into the life forms a round them and thereby experience physical existence once again, but that they could, using their minds, manipulate the DNA of all living things on Earth. This is how they became the animal headed Egyptian Gods. They melded the humanoid Lyran form (yes, lyrans were humanoid – but with feline characteristics) with animal forms – somewhat whimsically.
The Cat Priestesses created human beings to be the vessels of Lyran consciousness – their consciousness – and to fulfill the Lyran impulse to create physically. The early civilizations of Lemewria and Catlantis were formed by the humans newly mutated from an existing hominid race (like Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon). Cat Lords and Cat Priestesses were beautiful humans with cat heads and other feline characteristics. This drastic difference in morphology denoted their higher rank and power – they were the “gods” on Earth who carefully taught the newly created humans the arts of Civilization, and inculcated the Lyran ethos of beauty and pleasure before all else, and the practical principle of Holofelinity.
I’m running out of time for describing the practical use of Holofelinity, but I think that it is summed up well in this clip from “The Cat from Outer Space” (Disney, 1978);