Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it is Cat Week here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. So chosen because August eighth is apparently International Cat Day, or has been since around two thousand and two, thanks to the International Fund for Animal Welfare that's IFAW dot org. They're involved in a vast array of animal welfare and conservation products around the world, and that includes.
Cats and telling you when it's a cat related holiday.
That's right, right. I believe International Dog Day is actually later in the month. So if some of you out there are like, well, we need equal time for dogs, write in and demand it and we can do the same treatment for dogs. We have tons of dog related topic ideas that we haven't gotten to yet.
Now wait, somehow we decided we're doing a whole week of cat themed stuff. What's going on? Where'd that come from?
Rob? Well, just I like the idea of doing theme weeks. So we actually got a couple other theme weeks related to other things that are not pets. So I don't know, I like a good theme keeps us disciplined. Yeah, yeah, So you know, if listeners out there have any ideas for other theme weeks that you would like write in and let us know. But today is going to be
about cats. All the episodes this week are about cats, one way or another, and in today's episode, we're going to return to a topic that we previously discussed with a focus on Japanese traditions supernatural cats, only this time we're going to draw from the rich folk traditions of the British Isles. They have quite a few to select from. We're not going to be able to get to them all, of course, but we've picked out a few of them here.
And we should note that, of course, as far as the house cat goes in Britain, these seem to date back at least to the Roman occupation. And then of course then we also have wildcats in the British Isles as well, and those of course predate the Romans, and so a lot of the stories we're going to be talking about here today, you can kind of, like I guess, you can sort of pick and choose, like how much of this is inspired by traditions involving the domesticated cat.
How much of this is involving traditions about wildcats, and then you know the melding of the two.
That gets especially funny when some of these monster cat stories do not specify the size.
Of the cat.
Yeah, So throughout research for this episode, you know, in learning about cats that killed one hundred and eighty men or killed famous folk heroes, I certainly was in a mindset of like the Beast of Cayirbannag from Monty Python in The Holy Grail, where it's a regular size bunny that attacks and kills. I was thinking about a regular sized cat.
The sources don't say that. Yeah, I think with a lot of these stories, you have to sort of think about these varying inspirations. Like you can definitely think of about various actual wildcats. You can then think about sort of cryptids and wildcats that were supposed to exist or thought to exist by some, and then of course just
purely mythological imaginings as well. But even if you're just limiting things to the domestic cat, being around a domestic cat is in and of itself kind of a contemplation of these different dimensions, because a domestic cat that never leaves your home. At times acts like this comforting little snuggle buddy, other times like a vicious hunter, other times like some sort of strange specter of the night, eyes
twinkling in the dark. So you know that experience alone lends itself to a lot of these ideas.
Oh, I didn't tell you this yet, but just yesterday last evening, my daughter for the first time got too full on like hold a kitty cat.
Oh.
She's been very cat brained for some time now, at least the past six months to a year or sometime, and that she thinks about cats a lot, talks about them a lot, and of course sees them sometimes when we visit friends who have cats. But last night we were walking. We were out on a walk in her neighborhood and a neighbor who we know has a cat because she walks around the neighborhood with the cat in
a mesh backpack kind of carrying it. If you've seen one of these, yeah, it's like a little sort of playpen with mesh, So she's seen the cat before that way. But our neighbor brought the cat out for her to hold, and she just sat there beaming like her eyes literally were emitting light. It was a very special time, but I was but I was thinking about monster cats while while that was going on, and just turning my mind over.
You know what savagery lay in the intentions of this beautiful, pitiful little creature in my you know two year old daughter's arms.
Well that they scratched, so there is always the threat of the scratch. This one was being gentle. All right. Well, I want to start by talking about a particular cat that I actually don't have a lot on this one, but it's going to lead into some more lengthy discussions. But there's one that comes to us from Celtic traditions that is known as the cat she. It looks like catsith as it's often spelled, but I'm to understand this is pronounced cat she or something close to that that
I'm unable to actually capture. So this is sometimes described as a black cat that is about the size of a large dog, and it's said to have a white mark on its front, and visual depictions of this it's often it's often a white mark on the cat's chest.
According to Carol Rose and her Monster Encyclopedia books, it's a rough, bristly creature and it's often seen arching its back, so you know, classic Halloween cat scenario here, and she points out that in scottis Highland traditions this is sometimes thought to be the animal for of a witch. And on that note, I do want to drive home that a lot of the cat traditions in the British Isles,
and this implies elsewhere in the world too. Eventually a lot of these pre existing pre Christian traditions eventually get wound up in witchcraft lore that comes about much later. So you know, these ideas of which is familiar as being cats and so forth.
The grimalkin and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, And at times it can be difficult to sort of remove all of that and trying to get at the the the much older ideas of various supernatural cat like beings. Now, as far as the cat she itself goes, I've been having a hard time finding solid sources for these traditions, and this can this is often the case with you know, folk traditions. What are folk traditions? They are often alive and carried on the tongue and not always courted or recorded all that well in the
written form. But the cat she is sometimes associated with the theft of the soul from the newly dead. Sometimes the lore of nine Lives is mentioned when talking about the cat she and again, like everything supernatural involving cats, in these parts, it ends up factoring in details of witches,
and they're familiar as much later now. A related creature that Rose brings up, though, is one that she refers to as big Ears, a demonic cat with glowing yellow eyes that in Highland traditions she says was summoned via
Satanic seventeenth century cat sacrifices known as the tam. Now she uses the word Satanic here, and I have no doubt that this is how some sources end up describing it, because again you get into the Christian tradition and the witchcraft persecution era, and it all gets retold and reframed.
But apparently the Taguram might be more properly thought of as an older Gaelic divination ceremony that when you dig into it it often involves a hide and a river bank or a waterfall, these implements used in order to seek the guidance of an oracle, and then other times it does involve the summoning of a supernatural cat. One of the sources I was looking at here for this is a paper from twenty ten by Andrew E. M. Wiseman titled Catterwauling and demon Raising the Ancient Right of
the Tegurum. This was published in Scottish Studies thirty five and it gets into a great deal of detail here. If anyone out there wants to do a much deeper dive into this topic, I recommend this paper.
So.
Wiseman discusses that historically authors tended to associate this particular ride with the Isle of Sky, and at least one historic author described it as a practice of an extinguished race of wicked people. To summarize, so, it seems that the hide ritual was all about seeking divination via a person that has been forced into an altered state of consciousness through some possible mix of sensory deprivation and agitation.
So the individual would be covered with a hide sometimes described as a fresh hide, so like freshly cut from a cow or something. And then by putting this hide on your body, you're somehow suspended between life and death. Goody.
And then you would be placed in a remote spot, perhaps on a riverbank or near a roaring waterfall, and then perhaps poked or beaten with sticks of a particular sort of wood, essentially terrorized until the question may be put to you because you have now reached the oracular state. So you're in this altered, agitated state, and they're like, okay, he's ready, now ask him what we need to know about the future.
Interesting to imagine the practical pressure to and fabulate on a person in that situation.
Yeah, yeah, In some ways, it's very different from our modern ideas about altered states of consciousness, and even some of the ancient ideas we may turn to involving oracles and divination. You tend to think of an individual who's in a very serene, calm environment. You don't think of somebody wrapped in a hide and then beaten with sticks
on a river bank. But then again, there are countless examples of altered states of consciousness that are achieved through ritualistic means, both ancient and modern primitive that entail pain or discomfort, So you know, there are other examples of this. This is not something that stands entirely on its own here.
I guess the difference from the stories of that sort that I'm familiar with is that would often be a self imposed kind of denial of comfort or of pleasures. You know, I think of hermits or people living in a lifestyle who, yeah, they might get into another state by fasting or by doing something of their own will, But here it's being imposed externally. They put a hide on you and people beat you a poke with sticks
and take you out to the lonely place. That just feels like a totally different dynamic.
Yeah, and this may just be my reading of it, but I'm not entirely certain what degree of agency the would be oracle here had, Like I don't know if you were and maybe this is just completely unknown if you were selected for it or you were asked to do it, or just what was the selection process like for this, right?
Is it like, you know, it's not going to be fun, but it's what I have to do to generate the knowledge of the future or the information from the gods. Or is it like this is what we do to a prisoner to get knowledge of the future from them.
Yeah, yeah, so you can you can imagine it breaking down in either direction. But some historians also associate this or a similar practice with the Welsh, and it looks like. However you slice it, it certainly does seem to be a pre Christian, perhaps Druidic practice. So I want to read a quote here from Wisman where he sort of
summarizes some of these ideas about the tagaram. He says, quote one can theorize that the methods employed in performing the tagaram cause sensory deprivation or attenuation, and that this in turn caused heightened mental awareness or consciousness, thus inducing a trance like meditation receptive to higher or preternatural intelligences.
This type of method is common enough in shamanistic operations, where there is need to heighten concentration to dull normal sensory input control, breathing, and so forth, in order for the desired effect to occur an alternate, usually higher state of consciousness. Such a type of process may have in fact brought the practitioner into contact with the workings of the subconsciousness or higher self rather than incorporeal element.
Right, and this will be a familiar theme to longtime listeners of this show. You know, there are plenty of studies of different ways that people can achieve altered states of consciousness, even basically psychedelic experiences without the use of drugs. You know, you don't necessarily have to take acid or mushrooms to induce hallucinations, and an otherwise mentally typical person you can do it. It can happen with certain kinds of
sensory deprivation or certain kinds of sensory stimulation. We've talked about how common it is for people to have hallucinations if they simply look in a mirror in a dark room for long enough or Yeah, sensory deprivation going into total darkness will tend to cause hallucinations over time. Now, of course, this is not necessarily talking about hallucinations. This is just talking about various sorts of mental phenomena. Thinking
you're receiving messages or something. But that seems like you could work by a similar mechanism.
Yeah, and I can also imagine this. This is taking off as a new trend in Silicon Valley with vous highly placed individuals. Instead of microdos thing psilocymin they just they wrap themselves up very loosely in a hide every morning and are at least lightly tapped.
With a stick, have their inns poked them.
Yeah, all right, so that's the hide side of the ritual of the of the takaram.
But what about the cats? Yes, there is also the summoning of cats, and Wiseman acknowledges that this practice is not easily set alongside the hide rights without a fair amount of work. So it does seem rather it's rather different. And one way that he describes it is kind of it's another rite that you could do sometimes to check
the work of the hide ritual. So like, we put this individual through all this and we got them to the oracular state, we ask them this question about the future or about the you know, the will of the gods or god, what have you. They gave us an answer, But how do we know that is correct? Is there perhaps another inhuman method that we could turn to in order to also ask the question, and then we can
compare the answers. Okay, trust, but verify? Yes. Now, I want to issue content warning here though I'm going to be discussing historic animal cruelty and sacrifice in this section. I absolutely understand if you want to skip ahead maybe five minutes or so here, though I will keep descriptions
as PG as possible. Animal cruelty is indefensible, especially in its most overt forms, but in cases such as this, in which historical peoples seem to have engaged in it for religio magical purposes, I imagine we should at least try to place it within the context of the times and try to imagine the perceived stakes involved. Again, none of that makes it any easier to swallow, though. All right,
so you've been warned, I'm going to proceed here. So what we're talking about here is go ahead and pull off the band aid, roasting a live cat over a fire after it has been like pierced, skewered through in a way so as to not hit any vital organs, supposedly, and you can also see why this practice was easily interpreted within the context of witchcraft and devil worship as well, like the sacrifice of an animal, the use of fire, and so forth. But the idea here boiling it down.
And there are many different versions of this and many different stories that involve it, but the basic idea seems to be that by torturing like a small normal cat, this might be like a wild cat that you've that you've you've caught. By tormenting it, you would summon a much larger, supernatural cat out of the darkness along with its smaller kin, and then the question might be put to this great cat or this king of cats in exchange for the alleviation of the sacrificial cats suffering.
WHOA That is grim logic but interesting. Yeah, yeah, that you would think it worked that way, that the small and pitiful beasts have large and magical patrons or cousins, and that you can you can summon them to sort of investigate the suffering of their kin.
Yeah. Now, one thing, the one thing that I don't have an answer to though, is, Okay, we've in talking about the right involving the hide, carrying that out, You're probably you're you're dealing with a human being, So you're going to reach a point where that human being tells
you something. They are going to answer your question, either because they've reached some state of altered consciousness or because they simply want you to stop perhaps hitting them with a stick, or they don't want to wear the hide anymore. With this, I mean, you're not going to actually summon a great supernatural cat. You cannot summon that which does not exist. I mean, I guess there are various ways
you could slice this. Maybe again, you're it's involving the human imagination, Maybe that it involves just speaking to the night and imagine the answer. Maybe it is a situation where the calls of a cat that is being tormented does call to other cats in the vicinity, and you might see them or hear them and then somehow interpret that for your oracle. I'm not sure.
Yeah, I don't have any special insight about this, but my but my opriori guess would be that it would it would yet again involve like somebody would be translating from this being. You know, you might have a priest or shaman of some type of figure who's saying like, ah, yeah, here the here is the cat, and it's speaking to me, and this is what it's saying.
Yeah. So uh, I'm gonna have less to say about the actual cat torment moving forward, because I think we've discussed that enough. But the stories about it, some of these are rather interesting, and again there are many different accounts, many different stories. The one that Wiseman shares tells the story of a man named Ewan who undergoes the ritual of the cat in order to find out this and this seems great ironic what amends he needs to do
in order to write his past misdeeds. It's like, I feel like I've done some terrible things in the past. What can I do to make those better? I'm going to torture this cat so that I can find out.
It's like if going to confession and a Catholic church involved, you know, like bashing the priest with a glass bottle. It's like, Father, I have committed some kind of sin. Sure what it is? Help me figure it out?
All right? So, in the context of the story here, yeah, he turns to this this, this known right so that he can find out what he needs to do. And so he goes through the through all the steps, skewers a cat, puts it over a fire, begins to slowly roast this cat, which you know might be a Scottish or European wildcat, but you know, I guess it doesn't particularly matter. But he's he's torturing this cat, roasting it, roasting it over the fire. It's turning over the fire
on a spit. And this does, in fact act draw the attention of the Great King of the Cats and his many feline attendants, and they kind of like swell in number in the darkness outside of the hut where he is carrying on with the spit and the tortured cat. And interesting here it's described as a very tense ceremony. So these cats have come with the intent to not only free their fellow feline from torment, but to also rip the human torture to bloody shreds.
Oh cat revenge.
Yeah. So it's described here that Ewan is terrified as he's doing this, like these death is awaiting him outside. But he knows that he absolutely has to quote keep turning the spit or he's doomed, Like if he stops turning the spit, then the cats will just descend on him. And so, and this reminds us of various you know, supernatural accounts where there's some sort of ritual involved, like not breaking the magic circle or else the creatures that you have summoned will destroy you.
Yeah, don't open your eyes.
Yeah. So he keeps turning it, and then he treats with the King of the cats and he asks the cat, hey, what amends can I make for my wrongs in the past and maybe a rather recent past, And he's told to build seven churches, and so he releases the tormented cat, and then the cat horde depart with the tormented cat. They jump into the river, and they.
All swim away into the river. Huh, we'll get back to this, right, This will become a theme. Yeah, but a cat owner is out there. If you had a cat in distress, do you think the first place it would likely jump to would be into the water?
Probably not so. Wiseman discusses that these rights may relate to ancient worship of cat based deities among the pre Christian Celts. He also writes that while the origins of this ritual are obscure, there doesn't seem to be a direct ancient source of the practice quote, there are too many liminal elements within the tradition to dismiss it as
something which could be described as relatively new. It has been argued that cats were venerated during pagan times, and then during medieval times cats came to be associated with witchcraft. He also notes that these practices and Christian era witchcraft hysteria apparently resulted in large scale cat sacrifices that may have actually increased the severity of the Black plague. For when the cats have all been sacrificed. Who is going to kill the rat that carries the flea? Ooh wow,
so interesting food for thought there. Now there's no mention in Wise Men of Big Ears. I'm not entirely sure where big Ears comes from, but I want to come back to this idea of the king of the cats sometimes given a name, particularly the name of Erosan son of Arosan in Irish traditions, and in fact, William Butler Yeates included minh of of Irasan in Irish fairy and folk tales recounting the tale of Shan Shan, the Bard and the King of the Cats.
Oh, okay, I've read a good bit of Yates over the years, but I don't I don't know this one.
Yeah, this is a This is a story that he account that he collected from from other sources and includes here in the book. And uh uh. He includes a couple of cat stories. The other cat story has a lot of humans blinding each other with with hot pokers, and so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get into that one. But this one about Shan Shan is really good. It's it's ritually amusing, pretty funny. Uh So I'm gonna sort of summarize some elements of it here and also
read some quotes from Yates as well. Okay, so we have shan Shan here. He's a moody and righteous poet who has been invited to King Guari's banquet where all the other poets of Ireland have gathered, and there's gonna be a lot of feasting, you know, a lot of one assumes a lot of song and poetry. But shan Chan takes offense at how well the nobles are eating, and you know, how nice everything is, and he ends up refusing all food and drink and spends the time
sulking instead. The king learns about this, and he's like, why is shan Chan over there sulking? And he's a great poet. This is all about celebrating poetry. So he calls for his own favorite server, the King's favorite server, and says, bring this food to shan Chen, and he does,
and Shanhen rejects the food and insults the server. So the king says, okay, I'll send my own foster daughter over to him with a fine salmon dish, and the poet also insults her and refuses the food, and so This finally pisses the king off, and he wishes, quote, may the kiss of a leper be on shan Chan's lips before he dies. So he's had enough. I guess that was a real back then. Now. While this is going on, though, finally a young servant girl comes up to shan Chan and says, hey, I've got a hen's
egg I can bring you if that's that's enough. I mean it's not much, but it's what I got and he's like, okay, that will suffice. She goes to fetch it, and then she comes back and says, actually, sorry, the egg's gone. I can't offer that to you, and this sets sean Chan off. He immediately accuses the girl of eating the eggs. He's like, oh, you couldn't bring it because you ate it nice and she said, no, no, it wasn't me. It was probably the mice. They're mice
all over this place. They probably ate the egg. That's probably what happened.
Lot of twist and turns in the story.
But the poet here, yeah, he's in a mood at this point and he says, then I will satirize them in a poem, said Sean Chan, and forthwith he chanted so bitter a satire against them that ten mice fell dead at once in his presence. WHOA, Yeah, I mean again, this guy is a great poet.
That's also a lot of mice to have just been present anyway.
Yeah, but it did. I mean, that makes sense. That's probably what happened to the egg.
Yeah, affair is a veritable schmorgasbord.
Now one assumes that Shanchen pauses, catches his breath a little bit, but he's still in a foul mood over all of this, and he continues, this is this is from Yates tis well, said Shanzhen. But the cat is the one most to blame, for it was her duty to suppress the mice. Therefore, I shall satirize the tribe of the cats and their chief lord, Urusan, son of Arousan, for I know where he lives, with his wife's Spitfire, and his daughter Sharptooth, with her brothers, the Purr and
the Growler. But I shall begin with Urusan himself, for he is a king and answerable for all the cats.
I'm pretty sure my child made up these cat names.
It does sound a little bit like Cat's the musical, right, he's the purr and the growler. Yeah, so this is already seeming like a bad decision, but he's again, he's in a mood. He's gonna keep going. Quote and he said, Erosan monster of claws, who strikes at the mouse, but lets it go weakest of cats, the otter did well, who bit off the tips of thy progenitor's ears, so that every cat sense is jagged eared. Let thy tail hang down. It is right for the mouse jeers at thee.
Now Erosan heard these words in his cave, and he said to his daughter, sharp tooth, Shanhan has satirized me, but I will be avenged. Nay, father, she said, bring him here alive, that we may all take our revenge. I shall go then and bring him, said Erosan, So send thy brothers after me. So obviously things are about to really get out of hand. Shan Chhan gets the sense that this is about to happen, so he asked the king and all the people he's been insulting to
protect him. But none of them can protect him from the coming of the King of the cats. And there's this great description here where this is originally all I was going to include, but then the story was too good. But here's the description. And when the cat appeared, he seemed to them the size of a bullock, so a steer. And this was his appearance, rapacious, panting, jagged eared, snub nosed, sharp toothed, nimble, angry, vindictive, glare eyed, terrible, sharp plod
Such was his similitude. But he passed on amongst them, not minding till he came to Shan Shan and him he seized by the arm and jerked him up on his back and made off the way he came before anyone could anyone could touch him, for he had no other object in view but to get hold of the poet. So he swept him up. He's taken him away. Okay, So at this point the king of the cats rides off into the night with the terrified poet on his back.
Shan Shan, clearly in a tight spot, tries flattery. He starts on telling Irosan Love what a marvelous beast he is, and this is not working, so he invokes the saints, but Irasan is having none of it, and he brings the bard straight to a forge at a monastery, apparently so he can roast the poet within it, and maybe there's some sort of maybe maybe there's some sort of intended twist here. Right, the cat is not being roasted here, the human is going to be roasted.
Yeah.
But at this point, who's hanging out here by the forge but Saint Kiran, one of the twelve Apostles of Ireland, and he refuses to see such a fine poet incinerated, so he hits the King of the Cats with a bar of red hot iron, killing him, and then Sean Chan tells off the saint. He says, quote, I would rather Irosan had killed me and eaten me every bit, so that I might bring disgrace on Guori the King for the bad food he gave me, for it was all owing to his wretched dinners that I got into
this plight. I love that he's such a such a grumpus and just so committed to this grudge that he's like, I wish you hadn't saved me because I because I'm just so mad at the king. Amazing all time grouch. Yeah yeah, But anyway, the story ends up with the King and the bar and eventually make up, and shan Chen gets on it gets an honored seat at all
the feasts moving forward. So in a way, I feel like the King of the Cats really catches astray in this in the story, if you ask me, Like, he was just kind of mining his own business until he was just wretchedly insulted by this poet. And you know, he couldn't. He's the king. He can't just stand there and let this pass. He has to go off and kill this poet, and he gets just drawn into all of this drama.
But so do you think this captures the spirit of the King of Cats that is summoned by that the horrible ritual, Like it's the same sort of being as being imagined.
Yeah, here given you know, given treatment within an using story that is clearly playing for laughs and places. But yeah, they both seem to get at this idea of some sort of a great cat, some sort of a supernatural cat being that has knowledge, uh, you know, beyond that of of a of a mortal So something like a god perhaps, like Wiseman points out, connected to some sort of a feline deity of of you know, of Pagan,
Driddic pre Christian origin. So it's yeah, it's interesting to see that you kind of see it like peeking out of the Odadus, you know, almost like a cat in the night, but it's peaking out of Adadus from these various folk tales and traditions.
Yeah, that takes a fence and comes to the aid of its smaller, more mundane brethren. And that we can, at our peril, get its attention by irritating or harming those little brethren.
Yeah, and that in its you know that that feels very twisted in so many ways, right, because on one hand, it seems like it should be a cot genary tale, don't mistreat a cat because the King of the cats could come for you, But then it gets turned into a whole ritual. It's like, well, we're counting on that because we actually need some sage advice from the King of the cats. But we've got to play it just right otherwise he'll destroy us.
But the advice is always just going to be build seven churches. It's going to tell you that every time. You already know.
That's why there's just so many churches over there.
Now.
I guess, okay, are you ready to shift to a new supernatural cat?
Let us summon it out of the dark.
I would like to take a look at a monster cat that appears in Welsh folklore and Arthurian literature, known as Cath Polyg if you're trying to look it up. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of different spelling and pronunciation variants for the name of this creature. Usually the cat part of the name is spelled with the thch at the end, like Kathy with the y so cat or cat, and then the second word in the name could be pa l u c b A l u g b a l u s something like that, but I think it's
pronounced Kath Pollog. The name comes from Welsh and it is usually, at least in the mainline tradition, taken to mean Pollug's cat, as in a cat belonging to a proper noun polag. There is also a French literary variation known as Capalou or Chappalou, which by a false etymology, seems to have evolved to mean a bog cat. Will come back to that in a bit, because I think
that's interesting. In some stories, kath Pollog is a monster cat that does battle with a hero from Arthurian legend named k sometimes spelled c Ai or Cei or kay.
Yeah. Fans of the nineteen sixty three Disney film The Sword in the Stone will remember this character. This is based on the nineteen thirty eight None novel by T. H. White, but it plays a prominent role in that picture.
The version of the Sword in the Stone is very much the k you get in later Arthurian literature, where he is an obnoxious, loud mouth bully Arthur's older foster brother, but he's also he's a buffoon. In these earlier Arthur stories, k is a much more honorable and uncomplicatedly heroic character. But Kath Palack's enemy is not always k In some later yarns, the creature is fought by King Arthur himself, and especially in some French tellings, the cat actually wins this fight. What kills Arthur.
We're gonna have to come back to that. This is crazy? Is that is not any version of the Arthurine legend that I've ever read or seemed committed to film.
Yeah, don't remember that from Sword in the Stone. But so for more information on Kath pallag I was trying to find a solid source and I eventually settled on a good one. So it's a twenty Foureen edition of the Triads of the Island of Britain, edited by a scholar named Rachel Bromwich from the University of Wales Press, twenty fourteen. So this book is a translation of the Welsh Triads. Very interesting literary form that I really didn't
know anything about before this. So it's a literary form preserved in Middle Welsh manuscripts from the medieval period where you would essentially have three names of people or things listed together under a common conceptual grouping. So examples would be three generous men of the Island of Britain, and then it would give you a list of three names, all with an epithet the generous, you know, Mordaff the generous.
A lot of these are lists of famous people, lists of chieftains or rich people who add a lot of sheep or something, or warriors and heroes from history and from legend. Some of them are interesting, They've got interesting names, and they're kind of confusing. One I remember I came across in this book is three slaughter Blocks of the Island of Britain. But I think it's not actually talking
about literal blocks. From the notes, it seems this means like a leader who stands his ground firmly in battle. Another one that was funny was three Frivolous Bards of the Island of Britain. And some of these contain not only three names with epithets, some actually have whole narratives attached.
So where does kath Pallag come in? The kath Pallag creature is referenced in a narrative attached to one of these Middle Welsh triads, specifically number twenty six in this edition, called three Powerful Swine Herds of the Island of Britain. This triad, this is one of the ones that has some story attached to it, and it's talking about these awesome dudes who commanded awesome legions of swine. And it leads into a story about Henwin Hnwn Henwin, a mythical
magical monster pig whose name means old White. I think we might have referenced Old White or Henwen in our series on the Hogs of Hell last year.
I think so. Yeah, I remember at least reading about King Arthur chasing pigs all over the British Isles.
Right, So here, I'm going to read from Bromwich's translation of the triad narrative, and please forgive my attempts to pronounce these Middle Welsh names here, I'm doing my best. So it's listing the three great swineherds, and it gets to the third one, and then it says, and the third call son of koul Ruey, with the swine of Dalwear Dalbin in Glenn dahlwere in Cornwall, and one of the swine was pregnant. Henwin was her name, and it was prophesied that the island of Britain would be the
worse for the womb burden. Then Arthur assembled the army of the Island of Britain and set out to seek to destroy her. So, now being hunted, Henwin goes on to give birth to a pharaoh. It says, in order to give birth, she goes into the sea. But then later it's describing where these creatures are born, and it sounds like it's different locations on land, so it's kind of confusing. Maybe she gets to these locations by sea travel between giving birth to them, but yeah, it comes
back on land to have each batch or something. But anyway, it says she ends up giving birth to a grain of wheat and a bee, and it explains that's why one location has good wheat crops. And then at another place she gives birth to a grain of barley and a grain of wheat, and that's again some crop related
futures there. But then things start getting bad. She gives birth to a wolf cub and a young eagle, and it says these monsters are sent to different parts of the British Isles, and you know, cause much trouble there. And then from here we learn quote and at landfair in are fun. Under the black Rock she brought forth a kitten, and the powerful swineherd threw it from the rock into the sea, and the sons of Pollag fostered
it in Man to their own harm. And that was Polyg's cat, and it was one of the three great oppressions of Man nurtured therein. So it brings it all back to another triad, three great oppressions of man. So yes, this monster cat, first of all, born not to a previous generation of monster cats, but to one very special swine, some pig Man seems to be a reference to a place, this surreal place now called Anglesey, which is a large
island just off the northwest coast of Wales. So if you're trying to picture it on a map, yeah, the cat Polag's hunting grounds. It was up on Anglesey and especially I think around the sort of mainland facing coast of that island. It was said that it could swim the straits.
However, despite the fact that.
In the core text here Pallag is treated as a proper name, it is a person to which the cat belongs, Pallag's cat, there also seems to be a more descriptive etymology that some scholars have proposed. Bromwich points out that the Middle Welsh word pallock or ballock comes from a root word which means to dig, pierce, wound, hit, scratch, or claw, so it's kind of an all purpose striking
and gouging verb. And Bromwich cites another scholar named Lloyd Jones, who argues that pollock was originally an adjectival descriptor of the cat, as in scratching cat. So cat Pallag, not the cat that belongs to Pallack, but the scratching cat. The aren't most cat scratching cats?
Yeah, yeah, if you if you look at them the wrong way, Yeah.
I think it's supposed to make this monster cat sound dangerous and deadly, So maybe scratching isn't the best English translation in terms of connotations. Maybe it should be like striking or gouging cat guys.
Like, perhaps a more severe version of scratching, because you can get a pretty friendly scratch from even a very nice cat, but a gouging is different.
As I said earlier, this version of the story does not say how big the cat is, though, so maybe it is scratching. Maybe we should understand it that way, but anyway, the name of the cath polaic here may also have survived in the common name for an herb called palag'spaw, known in English as silverweed. So apart from this triad about very powerful swineherds, the only other early reference to catho polog in written sources is a tenth or eleventh century Old Welsh poem called pah Gurr, which
only exists in a fragmentary state now. And this poem is in one passage it's talking about the adventure of k Again, we're back to Kay, who later would become Arthur's buffoonish older foster brother. In this earlier story about K, it says quote fair k went to Man to destroy monsters, and the word here that it uses is luon, which the authors have suggested might possibly be in some way related to the word lions, though it seems to refer to monsters here. But it goes on to say his
shield was a fragment against caath Pallag. When people ask who killed kath Pallag, nine score fierce men fell for its food. Nine score warriors. All right, so this cat killed one hundred and eighty warriors, and then the night k probably killed it, at least that's what's implied. The version of the poem we have here cuts off in the middle of the tale, so we don't actually get the part where he kills it if he does, but that seems to be implied because kay like survives the encounter.
And that's usually where these stories go, with some not always but often.
In another later Welsh source, there's a reference to a monster cat in Anglesey, which may be the same creature. It's not called cath Pallag, but it says may the speckled cat and her strangers make an uproar. Seems to be phrased as a kind of curse.
That and that, of course that makes me think about these ideas of like a king of cats and its attendants in the night, which I want to mention I think it was. Wiseman pointed out that there are also some tellings in which that particular cat is described as not being attended by other cats, but even but perhaps even by like humans holding their own heads. So you maybe get some mixed ideas of like are these demons?
Are these specters of the grave? And so forth? And certainly the speckled cat and her strangers makes me think of that, like who are these strangers? Are the other cats? Are they? You know? Phantoms from beyond?
That's all that's a ten out of ten band name as well. Yes, it's just like the marquee at the Masquerade. But so Bromwich says that the cat Pollag legend is probably related to another cat monster, a horrible sea cat from Irish folklore called the Merchada, and this beast gets a description in the Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, in a subsection on the life of Saint Brendan that Bromwich includes in her EndNote. So I'm going to read from that here to give an idea
talking about Saint Brendan. It says, there is a great sea cat here, like a young ox or like a three year old horse, overgrown by feeding on the fish of this sea and this island. And then there's a part where the monster is said to be chasing the saint's boat. I think Saint Brendan was like a sailor and a navigator. And it says bigger than a brazen cauldron was each of his eyes A boy rrs tusks had he furzy hair upon him. And when I saw
a furzy, I was like, is that a TYPEO? No, that is not a type furze.
F you are.
Ze means the thorny foliage on an evergreen shrub. So think of a cat, a monstrous sea cat, with like evergreen kind of pine needle hair or brambly hair. And then and then it goes on to say he had the maw of a leopard, with the strength of a lion and the veracity of a hound, which the comparisons kind of lose steam for me there at the end, because it's saying this monstrous cat had a mouth like a big cat. You know, I had a mouth like
a lion. So it was like a lion, like the real animal like he is a cat, but.
It is to be clear some sort of sea creature in this.
That's what they're saying here. Yeah, so this monster cat is said to live in the sea. Cat Pallock also apparently has sea related powers, since it is said to swim the Mini Straits, the waterway that separates the Isle of Anglesey from the mainland of Whales. We don't know exactly how much of the story of Kath Pallack is influenced by these Irish cat beast tales, but they seem
probably related. There are more sources on these Irish monster cats, and Bromwich says that they were sometimes sort of a ware cat, a human being who has been bewitched, or one who can magically transform themselves with a cat skin disguise. They sometimes guard hidden treasure troves, so that's kind of cool. Again, this is not necessarily Cath Pallick, but the Irish ones. They guard treasure troves, and they are sometimes witnessed coming out of she mounds. These would be hills where fairies
or elves dwell underneath the earth. They thought of his portals to the hidden world. Now I mentioned earlier. The French variation on cat pallag the Capellou or the Chappealou. Whereas in Welsh texts the slayer of the cat is k in some medieval French Arthurian romances it is actually Arthur himself, King Arthur, who fights the creature and sometimes loses the fight disastrously. So I'm going to start with
that version. So from a late twelfth century text known as Romance de Francais, describing a poem in which this story is told, the author says, quote, the French have made a poem about him, that King Arthur was pushed by Capellou into the bog and the cat killed him in war, then passed over to England and was not slow to conquer it, then wore the crown in the land and was the lord of the country. Where did they get such a tale? It is a proven lie. God knows.
I love that. That's amazing.
Is not true?
Yeah, I'm very much imagining the French people from Monty Python in the Holy Grail here creating a scandalous story about a cat killing King Arthur and becoming the King of the Britons.
Yeah, I want to come back to that the question of how to take this story. But another interesting thing in the secondhand description of the story here the fight takes place in a bog or in a swamp, which in the French language would have been in la palou, meaning in the bog. Bromwich writes that this is evidence that, by way of a false etymology, the French misunderstood kathpollog to mean bog cat, and note that this allows the capelu or the chappalou to retain the characteristics of a
water monster like the Irish sea cats. These false folk etymologies are always really interesting to me. We've talked about a number of them on the show before.
I know.
One that's come up is the English. This is certainly the case for English speakers. Is the word muskrat.
People assume that.
Because of the way the name sounds, it must be a rat that produces a musk meaning a smelly rat, But actually muskrat is an English transliteration of an Algonquin word, and so it seems like that may have been going on with the French understanding of capellou here, that it's like sounds like the French for cat from a bog bog cat so that's what they thought it meant. So the stories are set in a bog or a swamp.
Wow, and that ends up coloring the shape of the folk tale.
The French bog cat was like some of these Irish monsters, said to be a man who morphed into a cat body form by the power of magic. There's another version of the story where this time Arthur actually manages to kill the cat. This is from a text called Estoir de Merlin I think the history of Merlin or the Story of Merlin, which takes place in a real location around the Lake of Le Bourgeais, which Bromwich says was known from the fourteenth century as Mont duchat ar two.
I think that means Mount Arthur's cat, something like that. And another version with the French Capelou says that this bog cat captures Arthur, kidnaps him, takes him away to Avalon, which is where Arthur comes to rest at the end of the more well known stories, you know the Lancelot Guenevere romances, where they have a big battle and then
Arthur's laid to rest in Avalon. Bromwich speculates that this weird story where the cat takes the cat takes him there may have arisen in an attempt to like blend together popular Arthur versus Bogcat battle stories with the more well known or canon detail of Arthur's biography in these
big stories. So I was trying to think of an analogy, and it's kind of like if there were a popular stream of Star Wars fan fiction where Obi Wan Kenobi fights the Fluke Man from the X Files, you know, the toilet Monster, and so in one of these stories has the Toilet Monster abducting obi Wan Kenobi and taking him to the Death Star so he can meet his canonical ending.
Right right, Because it's like, well, we're talking about Obi Wan, so of course we have to have the Fluke Band, but we need to actually come back to the major the major beats in the overarching story, and we've got to have Fluke Band there for that as well. Right, So yeah, I like that.
But also I wanted to come back to the question you raised about the version where Arthur is killed in the bog or killed by the Bogcat, because Arthur he just gets crumpled and the cat becomes king. Is it possible this was meant as a as a spoof or a kind of cross channel national ridicule by the French. I don't know of a strong reason for thinking that's the case, though I'm very tempted to wonder along those lines.
Though I'm by no means an expert on Arthurian literature, so you know, maybe there are nuances there that I'm missing.
On the other hand, Bromwich says that the version of the story where Arthur dies is actually the oldest known variant of the Arthur versus the Bogcat story, and thus she argues it's possible that this reflects a quote genuine variant tradition of Arthur's end, which existed in antecedent Welsh and or Breton tradition, but which by the time of the extant records has given place to other alternative traditions.
Arthur's death at Camlin became conflated with a story of his removal to Avalon, so that the story of his terminal fight with the cat monster is yet another variant which survives only in certain tantalizing illusions. So does that make sense that this is obviously here limited to the
realm of speculation. We don't know about what the earliest versions of the story were, But in Bromwich's opinion, it could be that this bizarre version of the story of King Arthur, where King Arthur is killed by a wicked swamp cat, may actually reflect a genuine early variant of the King Arthur story, which has since disappeared in Welsh and Breton sources, but survives in this altered derivative form in these references from French texts like what if What
if it were that the actual og King Arthur was pushed into a bog by a kitty cat?
Yeah, that's amazing to think about. Yeah, the idea that this is not just some sort of one off, not the results of some you know, just from some translation accidents and so forth. It kind of gives us this curio of a tale, but it may represent like a significant strain of fiction or Arthurian tradition going back quite
a ways. That's that's fascinating to think about it. And it makes sense too if you again think about this, this idea that Wiseman brings up about some of these cat stories being connected to much older traditions of even feline deities in the British Isles, you know, those are exactly the sort of entities that a hero might die fighting.
I mean, if you come up on the more familiar Arthur stories, it sounds comical that he's killed in a bog by a cat. But but like you know, Beowulf is killed while fighting a dragon. You know this, Yeah, and you would have plenty of these medieval stories that are about a great heroic warrior and is in fact at some point killed in the story by a monster in the way that make in a way that makes sense of the narrative. Like it, it's not an accident
that Beowulf gets killed by a dragon. That's like part of the arc of the story. And then you know, wiggleff steps up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And now I am going to refuse to imagine this as any thing less than like a tiger sized cat. Though I can't imagine King Arthur falling to something that's housecats sized.
Well, I can imagine it. Maybe I've got a better imagination than you. No, I'm thinking, I'm full on thinking it's like the rabbit in Monty Python. This is a regular sized house cat that is killing King Arthur. It's killing one hundred and eighty fine warriors, it's getting them all.
Well, This does bring us to an interesting notion here, thinking about again about the size of a killer cat. On one hand, like a big cat is a killer cat. That makes sense. We see a big cat at a zoo and we feel it in our bones. We know that that is something that is a threat to us. And if you're dealing with a giant sized cat, I mean that's that's of course, been a very popular area
of focus in fiction. In fact, the Weird House Cinema episode that we just re ran, which of course is the Incredible Shrinking Man from nineteen fifty seven, has a great sequence which our incredible Shrinking Man has to flee for his life from a normal sized house cat that to him is an enormous monster like a kaiju that is trying to get at him in a doll's house.
There's no kaiju as cruel as a cat, though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it goes back to that old bit of folk wisdom that if you were reduced to the size of a mouse, your cat would eat you. It would not be your friend, which you know, I love cats, but I think that's totally true. But then on the other end, we have plenty of examples of house cat sized cats that are depicted as vicious monsters sometimes played for laugh certainly, but although other times there's
at least an attempt to play it seriously. The movie We'll be watching this Friday for Weirdhouse Cinema has such a creature. Another film that comes to mind is Tales from the Dark Side, the movie which has in it. One of the segments is an adaptation of Stephen King's The Cat from Hell, and we get to see that cat running around and killing people, even though it's not shooting lightning out of its eyes. It's not the size of a tiger. It's just the size of a house cat.
But it's really fast and really vicious.
We shall not underestimate them. I don't think you and I would have anyway, but especially not after today.
Yeah, I mean, even with a house cat, you know, there'll be times when they will go into hunter mode and they may attack your feet or you know, run through the house, and in those moments you get a sense of it and you're like, what if this creature was suddenly not my friend or not my partner, not my roommate, and what if it saw me as something else? Maybe I would be in trouble.
But you gotta be nice to it anyway. I mean, not only because it's the right thing to do. If you don't, you might summon the King of cats exactly.
And yeah, and the king will not take kindly to you. And that includes just slight slight errors on your part, like not giving them the wet food and so forth, laying feeding by even fifteen minutes. So just be very careful out there everyone.
Yeah, that's right, a little late for dinner time. There's a knock on the door. It's a soft knock, a kind of furry knock.
All right. So that is our look at folkloric cats of the British Isles. Again, we couldn't cover everything here, and when you start following some of the threads you also get into cryptids. Certainly there are a lot of like modern cat cryptids and supposed sightings of big cats. And then of course again you have the reality of wildcats and feral cats and so forth. So there's a lot. There's a lot else out there. But hopefully you found this enjoyable, and perhaps those of you listening have some
additional stories you want to bring to mind. Maybe it's a different twist on some of the stories we shared here today, some of the traditions we shared here today, or a treatment of these traditions in fiction one way or another right in with those, We would love to read those, perhaps on a future episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. Listener mail. Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to watch talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. And again this
is Catwek. Cat episodes will continue all week and Dog people, if you want a Dog Week, write in and let us know that we should do talk week and we'll try and make it happen.
Also, we had ideas for cat content that we don't have time for this week, so we may have to we can come back and do Cat Week part.
Due yeah next year for CATWEK.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, You can email us at contact stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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