August 5, 2025 • 60 mins
In this special CAT WEEK episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the magical and folkloric cats of the British Isles, including Scotland's cat-sith and the Grimalkin.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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.
(00:34):
They're involved in a vast array of animal welfare and
conservation products around the world, and that includes.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Cats and telling you when it's a cat related holiday.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Now wait, somehow we decided we're doing a whole week
of cat themed stuff. What's going on? Where'd that come from?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:48):
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
(02:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That gets especially funny when some of these monster cat
stories do not specify the size.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Of the cat.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
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
(02:51):
sized cat.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
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
(04:18):
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.
(04:41):
You know what savagery lay in the intentions of this beautiful,
pitiful little creature in my you know two year old
daughter's arms.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:54):
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
(06:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
The grimalkin and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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.
(07:55):
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
(08:17):
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.
(08:39):
If anyone out there wants to do a much deeper
dive into this topic, I recommend this paper.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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
(09:07):
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.
(09:28):
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,
(09:51):
he's ready, now ask him what we need to know
about the future.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Interesting to imagine the practical pressure to and fabulate on
a person in that situation.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
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
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
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,
(11:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
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
(11:37):
for this, right?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
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
(12:11):
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.
(12:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
With a stick, have their inns poked them.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Yeah, all right, so that's the hide side of the
ritual of the of the takaram.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
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
(14:48):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:28):
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,
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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,
(16:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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
(17:33):
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
(17:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
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
(18:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
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
(19:50):
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
(20:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Oh cat revenge.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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,
(20:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, don't open your eyes.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
(21:22):
They jump into the river, and they.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:26):
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
(22:48):
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
(23:09):
and the King of the Cats.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Oh, okay, I've read a good bit of Yates over
the years, but I don't I don't know this one.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
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.
(23:37):
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
(24:00):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Lot of twist and turns in the story.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That's also a lot of mice to have just been
present anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, but it did. I mean, that makes sense. That's
probably what happened to the egg.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, affair is a veritable schmorgasbord.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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
(26:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
I'm pretty sure my child made up these cat names.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
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,
(27:15):
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
(27:38):
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
(28:01):
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,
(28:25):
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
(28:47):
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,
(29:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
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
(29:50):
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,
(30:12):
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
(30:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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
(31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
But the advice is always just going to be build
seven churches. It's going to tell you that every time.
You already know.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
That's why there's just so many churches over there.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Now.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
I guess, okay, are you ready to shift to a
new supernatural cat?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Let us summon it out of the dark.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
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,
(32:59):
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
(33:19):
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
(33:42):
cat that does battle with a hero from Arthurian legend
named k sometimes spelled c Ai or Cei or kay.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
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.
(34:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
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,
(35:09):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:53):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:33):
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
(36:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I think so. Yeah, I remember at least reading about
King Arthur chasing pigs all over the British Isles.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
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
(37:47):
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
(38:07):
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
(38:28):
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
(38:50):
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
(39:13):
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,
(39:37):
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
(39:57):
the straits.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
However, despite the fact that.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
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
(40:24):
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
(40:47):
the cat that belongs to Pallack, but the scratching cat.
The aren't most cat scratching cats?
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, yeah, if you if you look at them the
wrong way, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
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
(41:38):
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
(42:00):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And that's usually where these stories go, with some not
always but often.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
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
(43:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (44:02):
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
(44:23):
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
(44:46):
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,
(45:06):
that is not a type furze.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
F you are.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
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
(45:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
It is to be clear some sort of sea creature
in this.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
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
(46:11):
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.
(46:31):
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
(47:03):
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
(47:27):
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
(47:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
I love that. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Is not true?
Speaker 2 (48:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
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
(48:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
I know.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
One that's come up is the English. This is certainly
the case for English speakers. Is the word muskrat.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
People assume that.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
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
(49:34):
bog cat so that's what they thought it meant. So
the stories are set in a bog or a swamp.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Wow, and that ends up coloring the shape of the
folk tale.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
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
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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
(50:49):
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
(51:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:42):
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.
(52:02):
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
(52:24):
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.
(52:45):
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
(53:06):
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
(53:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
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
(54:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:23):
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
(54:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
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
(55:45):
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
(56:06):
to him is an enormous monster like a kaiju that
is trying to get at him in a doll's house.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
There's no kaiju as cruel as a cat, though.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
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
(56:39):
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
(56:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:10):
We shall not underestimate them. I don't think you and
I would have anyway, but especially not after today.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
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?
(57:37):
Maybe I would be in trouble.
Speaker 3 (57:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (57:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
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.
(58:33):
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
(58:55):
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,
(59:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (59:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Due yeah next year for CATWEK.
Speaker 3 (59:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. M
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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.
(00:34):
They're involved in a vast array of animal welfare and
conservation products around the world, and that includes.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Cats and telling you when it's a cat related holiday.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Now wait, somehow we decided we're doing a whole week
of cat themed stuff. What's going on? Where'd that come from?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:48):
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
(02:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That gets especially funny when some of these monster cat
stories do not specify the size.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Of the cat.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
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
(02:51):
sized cat.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
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
(04:18):
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.
(04:41):
You know what savagery lay in the intentions of this beautiful,
pitiful little creature in my you know two year old
daughter's arms.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:54):
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
(06:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
The grimalkin and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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.
(07:55):
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
(08:17):
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.
(08:39):
If anyone out there wants to do a much deeper
dive into this topic, I recommend this paper.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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
(09:07):
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.
(09:28):
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,
(09:51):
he's ready, now ask him what we need to know
about the future.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Interesting to imagine the practical pressure to and fabulate on
a person in that situation.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
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
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
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,
(11:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
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
(11:37):
for this, right?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
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
(12:11):
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.
(12:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
With a stick, have their inns poked them.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Yeah, all right, so that's the hide side of the
ritual of the of the takaram.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
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
(14:48):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:28):
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,
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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,
(16:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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
(17:33):
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
(17:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
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
(18:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
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
(19:50):
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
(20:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Oh cat revenge.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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,
(20:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, don't open your eyes.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
(21:22):
They jump into the river, and they.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:26):
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
(22:48):
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
(23:09):
and the King of the Cats.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Oh, okay, I've read a good bit of Yates over
the years, but I don't I don't know this one.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
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.
(23:37):
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
(24:00):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Lot of twist and turns in the story.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That's also a lot of mice to have just been
present anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, but it did. I mean, that makes sense. That's
probably what happened to the egg.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, affair is a veritable schmorgasbord.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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
(26:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
I'm pretty sure my child made up these cat names.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
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,
(27:15):
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
(27:38):
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
(28:01):
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,
(28:25):
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
(28:47):
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,
(29:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
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
(29:50):
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,
(30:12):
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
(30:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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
(31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
But the advice is always just going to be build
seven churches. It's going to tell you that every time.
You already know.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
That's why there's just so many churches over there.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Now.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
I guess, okay, are you ready to shift to a
new supernatural cat?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Let us summon it out of the dark.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
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,
(32:59):
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
(33:19):
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
(33:42):
cat that does battle with a hero from Arthurian legend
named k sometimes spelled c Ai or Cei or kay.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
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.
(34:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
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,
(35:09):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:53):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:33):
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
(36:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I think so. Yeah, I remember at least reading about
King Arthur chasing pigs all over the British Isles.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
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
(37:47):
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
(38:07):
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
(38:28):
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
(38:50):
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
(39:13):
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,
(39:37):
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
(39:57):
the straits.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
However, despite the fact that.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
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
(40:24):
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
(40:47):
the cat that belongs to Pallack, but the scratching cat.
The aren't most cat scratching cats?
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, yeah, if you if you look at them the
wrong way, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
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
(41:38):
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
(42:00):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And that's usually where these stories go, with some not
always but often.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
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
(43:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (44:02):
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
(44:23):
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
(44:46):
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,
(45:06):
that is not a type furze.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
F you are.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
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
(45:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
It is to be clear some sort of sea creature
in this.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
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
(46:11):
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.
(46:31):
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
(47:03):
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
(47:27):
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
(47:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
I love that. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Is not true?
Speaker 2 (48:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
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
(48:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
I know.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
One that's come up is the English. This is certainly
the case for English speakers. Is the word muskrat.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
People assume that.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
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
(49:34):
bog cat so that's what they thought it meant. So
the stories are set in a bog or a swamp.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Wow, and that ends up coloring the shape of the
folk tale.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
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
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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
(50:49):
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
(51:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:42):
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.
(52:02):
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
(52:24):
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.
(52:45):
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
(53:06):
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
(53:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
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
(54:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:23):
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
(54:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
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
(55:45):
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
(56:06):
to him is an enormous monster like a kaiju that
is trying to get at him in a doll's house.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
There's no kaiju as cruel as a cat, though.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
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
(56:39):
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
(56:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:10):
We shall not underestimate them. I don't think you and
I would have anyway, but especially not after today.
Speaker 2 (57:16):
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?
(57:37):
Maybe I would be in trouble.
Speaker 3 (57:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (57:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
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.
(58:33):
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
(58:55):
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,
(59:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (59:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Due yeah next year for CATWEK.
Speaker 3 (59:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. M
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