From the Vault: Folkloric Cats of the British Isles

In this classic 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. (originally published 8/5/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We have a vault episode for you
here today. Of course, this is going to be the
Folkloric Cats of the British Isles. This one originally published
eight five, twenty twenty five as part of a cat
themed week, and in this we're going to discuss some
of the magical and folkloric cats of the British Isles.

(00:27):
What they're up to, what they want, what are the
dangers that they pose to the humans who glimpse them
in the night. All right, let's go ahead and have
at it.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
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.

(01:11):
They're involved in a vast array of animal welfare and
conservation products around the world, and that includes cats.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
And telling you when it's a cat related holiday.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
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 (01:40):
Now wait, somehow we decided we're doing a whole week
of cat themed stuff. What's going on? Where'd that come from? Rob?

Speaker 1 (01:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Keeps us disciplined.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, yeah, So you know, if listeners out there have
any ideas for other theme weeks that you would like,
write in and let us know. But today is going
to be about cats. All the episodes this week are
about cats one way or another, And in today's episode,
we're going to return to a topic that we previously
discussed with a focus on Japanese traditions supernatural cats, only

(02:18):
this time we're going to draw from the rich folk
traditions of the British Isles. They have quite a few
to select from. We're not going to be able to
get to them all, of course, but we've picked out
a few of them here, and we should note that,
of course, as far as the house cat goes in Britain,
these seem to date back at least to the Roman occupation.
And then, of course then we also have wildcats in

(02:40):
the British Isles as well, and those of course predate
the Romans. And so a lot of the stories we're
going to be talking about here today, you can kind of,
like I guess, you can sort of pick and choose, like,
how much of this is inspired by traditions involving the
domesticated cat, how much of this is involving traditions about wildcats,
And then you know the melding of the two.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
That gets especially funny when some of these monster cat
stories do not specify the size of the cat. Yeah. So,
throughout research for this episode, you know, in learning about
cats that killed one hundred and eighty men or killed
famous folk heroes, I certainly was in a mindset of
like the Beast of Cayirbannag from Monty Python and the

(03:24):
Holy Grail, where it's a regular size bunny that attacks
and kills. I was thinking about a regular sized cat
the sources don't say that.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, I think with a lot of these stories, you
have to sort of think about these varying inspirations. Like
you can definitely think about various actual wildcats. You can
then think about sort of cryptids and wildcats that were
supposed to exist or thought to exist by some and
then of course just purely mythological imaginings as well. But

(03:55):
even if you're just limiting things to the domestic cat,
being around a domestic cat is in and of itself
kind of a contemplation of these different dimensions, because a
domestic cat that never leaves your home at times acts
like this comforting little snuggle buddy, other times like a
vicious hunter, other times like some sort of strange specter

(04:18):
of the night eyes twinkling in the dark. So you
know that experience alone lends itself to a lot of
these ideas. Oh.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
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 1 (04:34):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
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

(04:56):
a mesh backpack kind of carrying it. Have you seen
one of these?

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Ye?

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Yeah, it's like a little sort of playpen with mesh,
and 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's a very special time. But I
was but I was thinking about monster cats while while
that was going on, and just turning my mind over.
You know what savagery lay in the intentions of this beautiful,

(05:22):
pitiful little creature in my you know two year old
daughter's arms.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well that they scratch, so there is always the threat
of the scratch.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
This one was being gentle.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
All right, Well, I want to start by talking about
a particular cat that I actually don't have a lot
on this one, but it's going to lead into some
more lengthy discussions. But there's one that comes to us
from Celtic traditions that is known as the cat she.
It looks like cat sith as it's often spelled, but

(05:56):
I'm to understand this is pronounced cat she or something
close to that that I'm unable to actually capture. So
this is sometimes described as a black cat that is
about the size of a large dog, and it's said
to have a white mark on its front, and visual
depictions of this it's often a white mark on the

(06:16):
cat's chest. According to Carol Rose and her Monster Encyclopedia books,
it's a rough, bristly creature and it's often seen arching
its back, so you know, classic Halloween cat scenario here,
and she points out that in Scottish Island traditions this
is sometimes thought to be the animal form of a witch.

(06:39):
And on that note, I do want to drive home
that a lot of the cat traditions in the British Isles,
and this implies elsewhere in the world too. Eventually a
lot of these pre existing pre Christian traditions eventually get
wound up in witchcraft lore that comes up about much later.

(07:01):
So you know, these ideas of which is familiar as
being cats and so forth.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
The Grimalkin and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, yeah, and at times it can be difficult to
sort of remove all of that trying to get at
the the the much older ideas of various supernatural cat
like beings. Now, as far as the cat She itself goes,
I've been having a hard time finding solid sources for
these traditions, and this can This is often the case

(07:31):
with folk traditions. What are folk traditions? They are often
alive and carried on the tongue and not always recorded
or recorded all that well in the written form. But
the cat She is sometimes associated with the theft of
the soul from the newly dead. Sometimes the lore of
nine Lives is mentioned when talking about the cat She,

(07:53):
and again, like everything supernatural involving cats, in these parts,
it ends up factoring in details of witches and their
familiar as much later. Now. A related creature that Rose
brings up, though, is one that she refers to as
big Ears, a demonic cat with glowing yellow eyes that
in Highland traditions she says was summoned via Satanic seventeenth

(08:14):
century cat sacrifices known as the tam Now she uses
the word Satanic here, and I have no doubt that
this is how some sources end up describing it, because
again you get into the Christian tradition and the witchcraft
persecution era, and it all gets retold and reframed. But
apparently the Taguram might be more properly thought of as

(08:39):
an older Gaelic divination ceremony that when you dig into
it it often involves a hide and a river bank
or a waterfall, these implements used in order to seek
the guidance of an oracle, and then other times it
does involve the summoning of a supernatural cat, one of
the sots as I was looking at here for this

(09:01):
is a paper from twenty ten by andrew E. M.
Wiseman titled Catterwauling and demon Raising the Ancient Right of
the Tegurum. This was published in Scottish Studies thirty five
and it gets into a great deal of detail here.
If anyone out there wants to do a much deeper
dive into this topic, I recommend this paper. So. Wiseman

(09:23):
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, though, it seems that the
hide ritual was all about seeking divination via a person
that has been forced into an altered state of consciousness

(09:46):
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 putting this hide on your
body you're somehow suspended between life and death.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
Goody.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
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,

(10:29):
he's ready, now ask him what we need to know
about the future.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Interesting to imagine the practical pressure to confabulate on a
person in that situation.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
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 somebody
wrapped in a hide and then beaten with sticks on

(11:02):
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 (11:21):
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 setic lifestyle who, yeah, they might get into another
state by fasting or by doing something of their own will,

(11:44):
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 1 (11:54):
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

(12:15):
for this, right?

Speaker 3 (12:16):
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 1 (12:29):
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 Wiseman where he sort of

(12:49):
summarizes some of these ideas about the takaram. He says, quote,
one can theorize that the methods employed in performing the
tagaram cause sensory deprivation or a continuation, and that this
in turn caused heightened mental awareness or consciousness, thus inducing
a trance like meditation receptive to higher or preternatural intelligences.

(13:13):
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 elements.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
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 in an otherwise mentally typical person.
You can do it. It can have and with certain kinds

(14:01):
of sensory deprivation or certain kinds of sensory stimulation. We've
talked about how common it is for people to have
hallucinations if they simply look in a mirror in a
dark room for long enough or Yeah, sensory deprivation going
into total darkness will tend to cause hallucinations over time. Now,
of course, this is not necessarily talking about hallucinations. This

(14:21):
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 1 (14:29):
Yeah, and I can also imagine this is taking off
as a new trend in Silicon Valley with various highly
placed individuals. Instead of microdose thing psilocymon, they just they
wrap themselves up very loosely in a hide every morning
and are at least lightly tapped.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
With a stick. Have their interurns poke them.

Speaker 4 (14:49):
Yeah, all right, so that's the hide side of the
ritual of the takaram.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
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 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

(15:26):
this individual through all this and we got them to
the oracular state, we ask them this question about the
future or about 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

(15:46):
compare the answers.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Okay, trust, but verify? Yes.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
Now, I want to issue a content content warning here
though I'm going to be discussing historic animal cruelty and
sacrifice in this section. I absolutely understand if you want
to skip ahead, maybe five minutes or so here, though
I will keep descriptions as PG as possible. Animal cruelty
is indefensible, especially in its most overt forms, but in

(16:12):
cases such as this, in which historical peoples seem to
have engaged in it for religio magical purposes, I imagine
we should at least try to place it within the
context of the times and try to imagine the perceived
stakes involved. Again, none of that makes it any easier
to swallow, though. All right, so you've been warned. I'm
going to proceed here. So what we're talking about here

(16:33):
is go ahead and pull off the band aid. Roasting
a live cat over a fire after it has been pierced,
skewered through in a way so as to not hit
any vital organs supposedly, and you can also see why
this practice was easily interpreted within the context of witchcraft

(16:54):
and devil worship as well, like the sacrifice of an animal,
the use of fire, and so forth. The idea here
boiling it down. And there are many different versions of
this and many different stories that involve it, but the
basic idea seems to be that by torturing like a
small normal cat, this might be like a wild cat

(17:15):
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 (17:33):
WHOA, That is grim logic but interesting that 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 1 (17:51):
Yeah. Now, one thing, the one thing that I don't
have an answer to though, is, Okay, we've been talking
about the right involving the hide carrying that out. You're
probably you're dealing with a human being. So you're going
to reach a point where that human being tells you something.
They are going to answer your question, either because they've

(18:12):
reached some state of altered consciousness, or because they simply
want you to stop, perhaps hitting them with a stick,
or they don't want to wear the hide anymore. With this,
I mean, you're not going to actually summon a great
supernatural cat. You cannot summon that which does not exist.
I mean, I guess there are various ways you could
slice this. Maybe again, you're it's involving the human imagination.

(18:34):
Maybe it involves just speaking to the night and imagining
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 (18:53):
Yeah, I don't have any special insight about this, but
my but my OPRIORI guess would be that it would
yet again involve like somebody would be translating from this being.
You know, you might have a priest or shaman of
some type of figure who's saying like ah, yeah, here
the here is the cat, and it's speaking to me,
and this is what it's saying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
So I'm gonna have less to say about the actual
cat torment moving forward, because I think we've discussed that enough.
But the stories about it, some of these are rather interesting.
And again there are many different accounts, many different stories.
The one that Wiseman shares tells the story of a
man named Ewan who undergoes the ritual of the Cat

(19:35):
in order to find out this, and this seems rather ironic,
what amends he needs to do in order to write
his past misdeeds. So, 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 (19:53):
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.
I'm not sure what it is. Help me figure it.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Out, all right. So, in the context of the story here, yeah,
he turns to this this this known right so that
he can find out what he needs to do. And
so he goes through the through all the steps, skewer
as a cat puts it over a fire, begins to
slowly roast this cat, which you know, it might be
a Scottish or European wild cat, but you know, I

(20:27):
guess it doesn't particularly matter. But he's he's torturing this cat,
roast in it, roasting it over the fire. It's turning
over the fire on a spit. And this does in
fact 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

(20:48):
hut where he is carrying on with the spit and
the tortured cat. And interesting here it's described as a
very tense ceremony. So these cats have come with the
intent to not only free their fellow feline from torment,
but to also rip the human torture to bloody.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Shreds oh cat revenge.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Yeah, So it's described here that Ewan is terrified as
he's doing this, like 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,

(21:27):
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 (21:36):
Yeah, don't open your eyes.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
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 to depart with the tormented cat,

(22:00):
they jump into the river and they all.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Swim away into the river. Huh, we'll get back to this, right,
This will become a theme. Yeah, but a cat owners
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 1 (22:17):
Probably not so. Wiseman discussedes 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

(22:40):
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

(23:04):
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? Oh 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

(23:26):
sometimes given a name, particularly the name of Erosan son
of Arosan in Irish traditions, and in fact, William Butler
Yeates included mention of Eroson in Irish fairy and folk
tales recounting the tale of Shan Shan, the Bard and

(23:47):
the King of the Cats.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
Oh okay, I've read a good bit of Yates over
the years. But I don't I don't know this one.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah, this is a This is a story that he
accounted that he collected from other sources and includes here
in the book. And 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 Chan is really good. It's it's ritually amusing,

(24:17):
pretty funny. 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 Chan here. He's
a moody and righteous poet who has been invited to
King Guari's banquet, where all the other poets of Ireland
have gathered, and there's gonna be a lot of feasting,
you know, a lot of one assumes a lot of

(24:39):
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 He's like, why is shan Chan
over there sulking? And he's a great poet. This is

(25:00):
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 Shannchen rejects
the food and insults the server. So the king says, okay,
I'll send my own foster daughter over to him with

(25:21):
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 Sean Chan's lips before he dies.
So he's had enough.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
I guess that was a really bad one back then.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
Now.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
While this is going on, though, finally a young serving
girl comes up to shan Chen and says, hey, I've
got a hens egg I can bring you if 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 that's sean Chan off. He immediately accuses the girl

(26:03):
of eating the eggs. He's like, oh, you couldn't bring
it because you ate it nice, And she said, no, no,
it wasn't me. It was probably the mice. They're mice
all over this place. They probably ate the egg That's
probably what happened.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
A lot of twist and turns in the story.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
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 Shan, 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 (26:39):
That's also a lot of mice to have just been
present anyway.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, but it did. I mean, that makes sense. That's
probably what happened to the egg.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, affair is a veritable schmorgasbord.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Now one assumes that shan Chan 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 Sean Jan. But the
cat is the one most to blame for it. Was
her duty to suppress the mice. Therefore, I shall satirize
the tribe of the cats and their chief lord, Urusan,

(27:14):
son of Arosan, 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
Rousan himself, for he is a king and answerable for
all the cats.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
I'm pretty sure my child made up these cat names.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
It does sound a little bit like Cat's the musical, right.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
He's the Purr and the growler.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
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, rosan monster of claws, who strikes
at the mouse, but lets it go, weakest of cats,
the otter did well, who bit off the tips of
thy progenitor's ears, so that every cat sens is jagged eared.

(27:59):
Let thy tale 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,
Shanshan has satirized me, But I will be avenged. Nay, father,
she said, bring him here alive, that we may all
take our revenge. I shall go then and bring him,

(28:21):
said Eusan, So send thy brothers after me. So obviously
things are about to really get out of hand. Shan
Chhan gets the sense that this is about to happen,
so he asked the king and all the people he's
been insulting to protect him. But none of them can
protect him from the coming of the King of the cats.
And there's this great description here where this is originally

(28:46):
all I was going to include, but then the story
was too good. But here's the description. And when the
cat appeared, he seemed to them the size of a bullock,
so a steer. And this was his appearance, rapacious, panting,
jagged eared, snub nosed, sharp toothed, nimble, angry, vindictive, glare eyed, terrible,

(29:09):
sharp clod. Such was his similitude. But he passed on
amongst them, not minding till he came to Shan Shan
and him he seized by the arm and jerked him
up on his back and made off the way he
came before anyone could anyone could touch him, for he
had no other object in view but to get hold
of the poet. So he swept him up, He's taken

(29:30):
him away. Okay, So at this point, the King of
the Cats rides off into the night with the terrified
poet on his back. Sean Shan, clearly in a tight spot,
tries flattery. He starts on telling Irasan love what a
marvelous beast he is, and this is not working, so
he invokes the saints, but Irasan is having none of it,

(29:51):
and he brings the bard straight to a forge at
a monastery, apparently so he can roast the poet within it.
And maybe there's some sort of maybe, maybe there's some
sort of intended twist here, right, the cat is not
being roasted here, the human is going to be roasted. Yeah,
But at this point, who's hanging out here by the forge?
But Saint Kiran, one of the twelve Apostles of Ireland,

(30:14):
and he refuses to see such a fine poet incinerated,
so he hits the King of the Cats with a
bar of red hot iron, killing him, and then Sean
Chan tells off the saint. He says, quote, I would
rather Irosan had killed me and eaten me every bit,
so that I might bring disgrace on guari the King

(30:36):
for the bad food he gave me for it was
all owing to his wretched dinners that I got into
this plight. I love that he's such a such a
grumpus and just so committed to this grudge that he's like,
I wish you hadn't saved me because I'm just so
mad at the king.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Amazing all time grouch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, But anyway, the story ends up with the king
and the art eventually make up and Sean Jen gets
on it gets an honored seed at all the feasts
moving forward. So in a way, I feel like the
King of the Cats really catches astray in this in
the story, if you ask me, Like he was just
kind of mining his own business until he was just
wretchedly insulted by this poet. And you know, he couldn't

(31:17):
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 (31:25):
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 1 (31:35):
Yeah, here given you know, given treatment within an amusing
story that I 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 a of a mortal so something like

(31:57):
a god, perhaps like Wiseman pointing out, connected to some
sort of a feline deity of you know, of pagan, dridic,
pre Christian origin. So it's yeah, it's interesting to see
that you kind of see it like peeking out of
the out ofus, 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 (32:19):
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 1 (32:31):
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 cautionary 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 (32:52):
But the advice is always just going to be build
seven churches. What it's going to tell you that every time?
You already know.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
That's why there's just so many over there.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Now, I guess, okay, are you ready to shift to
a new supernatural cat?

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Let us summon it out of the dark.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
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,

(33:37):
like Kathy without the y, so cat or cath, and
then the second word in the name could be pa
l u s b A l u g b a
l u s something like that, but I think it's
pronounced cat polog. The name comes from Welsh and it
is usually at least in the mainline tradition taken to

(33:57):
mean Pollug's cat, as in a cat below, looking to
a proper noun polag. There is also a French literary
variation known as Kappalou 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, cath Pollog is a monster

(34:20):
cat that does battle with a hero from Arthurian legend
named k sometimes spelled c Ai or Cei or Kay.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
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 novel by T. H. White,
but it plays a prominent role in that picture.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
The version in The Sword in the Stone is very
much the k you get in later Arthurian literature, where
he is an obnoxious, loudmouth 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.

(35:03):
But Kath Palack's enemy is not always Kay. In some
later yarns, the creature is fought by King Arthur himself,
and especially in some French tellings, the cat actually wins
this fight. What kills Arthur. We're gonna have to come
back to that.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
This is crazy. Is that is not any version of
the theory and legend that I've ever read or seemed
committed to film.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
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 fourteen edition of
the Triads of the Island of Britain, edited by a
scholar named Rachel Bromwich from the University of Wales Press,

(35:47):
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
preserve served in Middle Welsh manuscripts from the medieval period,
where you would essentially have three names of people or

(36:08):
things listed together under a common conceptual grouping. So examples
would be three generous men of the Island of Britain,
and then it would give you a list of three names,
all with an epithet the generous. You know Mordaff the generous.
A lot of these are lists of famous people, lists

(36:28):
of chieftains or rich people who add a lot of
sheep or something, or warriors and heroes from history and
from legend. Some of them are interesting, They've got interesting names,
and they're kind of confusing. One I remember I came
across in this book is three slaughter Blocks of the
Island of Britain. But I think it's not actually talking
about literal blocks. From the notes, it seems this means

(36:51):
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

(37:11):
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

(37:32):
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 1 (37:54):
I think so. Yeah, I remember at least reading about
King Arthur chasing pigs all over the British Isles.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
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
Dolweir Dalbin in Glenn dahlwere in Cornwall, and one of

(38:25):
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

(38:45):
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 in between giving birth to them. Yeah, it comes
back on land to have each batch or something. But anyway,
it says she ends up giving birth to a grain

(39:06):
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

(39:28):
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 our 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 Polyag fostered
it in Man to their own harm, and that was

(39:51):
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 a press 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

(40:12):
reference to a place. This a real 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 Poalag'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

(40:35):
that it could swim the straits. However, despite the fact
that in the core text here Pallag is treated as
a proper name, it is a person to which the
cat belongs Pallag's cat, there also seems to be a
more descriptive etymology that some scholars have proposed. Bromwich points

(40:55):
out that the Middle Welsh word pallock or baloch comes
from a root word which means to dig, pierce wound, hit,
scratch or claw, so it's kind of an all purpose
striking and gouging verb. And Bromwich cites another scholar named
Lloyd Jones, who argues that pollock was originally an adjectival

(41:19):
descriptor of the cat, as in scratching cat. So kat
pallag not the cat that belongs to pallick, but the
scratching cat. The aren't most cats scratching cats?

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, if you look at them the wrong way.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah, I think it's supposed to make this monster cat
sound dangerous and deadly. So maybe scratching isn't the best
English translation in terms of connotations. Maybe it should be
like striking or gouging cat.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Perhaps some 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 (41:54):
As I said earlier, this version of the story does
not say how big the cat is though, so maybe
maybe it is scratching. Maybe we should understand it that way,
but anyway, The name of the caath polaic here may
also have survived in the common name for an herb
called pallagspaul, known in English as silverweed. So apart from

(42:16):
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 adventures of

(42:38):
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 Ka 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

(43:00):
related to the word lions, So it seems to refer
to monsters here. But it goes on to say his
shield was a fragment against cath Pallag. When people ask
who killed kath Pallag, nine score fierce men fell for
its food, nine score warriors. All right, So this this

(43:20):
cat killed one hundred and eighty warriors, and then the
night Ka 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 tail, so we don't actually
get the part where he kills it if he does,
but that seems to be implied because Kay like survives
the encounter, and.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
That's usually where these stories go with yeah somes, not
always but often.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
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 kath Pallag, but it says may the
speckled cat and her strangers make an uproar? Seems to
be phrased the kind of curse.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
That in 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

(44:24):
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 (44:40):
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

(45:01):
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

(45:24):
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 bores tusks, had he
furzy hair upon him. And when I saw a furzy
I was like, is that a TYPEO? No, that is

(45:45):
not a type furze. F r 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 it goes on
to say he had the maw of a leopard, with
the strength of a lion and the veracity of a hound,

(46:08):
which the comparisons kind of lose steam for me there
at the end, because it's saying this monstrous cat had
a mouth like a big cat. You know, it had
a mouth like a lion. So it was like a lion,
like the real animal, like.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
WHI, she is a cat, But it is to be clear,
some sort of sea creature in this.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
That's what they're saying here. Yeah, so this monster cat
is said to live in the sea. Kath Pallack also
apparently has sea related powers, since it is said to
swim the Mini Straits, the waterway that separates the Isle
of Anglesea from the mainland of Whales. We don't know
exactly how much of the story of cath Pallack is

(46:49):
influenced by these Irish cat beast tails, but they seem
probably related. There are more sources on these Irish monster cats,
and Bromwich says that they were sometimes sort of a
ware cat a human being who has been bewitched, or
one who can magically transform themselves with a cat skin disguise.
They sometimes guard hidden treasure troves, so that's kind of cool. Again,

(47:12):
this is not necessarily cath Pallag, 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

(47:41):
French variation on caath Pallag, the Capellou or the Chappalou.
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 so
sometimes loses the fight disastrously. So I'm going to start

(48:04):
with that version. So from a late twelfth century text
known as Romance de France, 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 Capellalou into the bog and the cat killed
him in war, then passed over to England and was

(48:27):
not slow to conquer it, then wore the crown in
the land and was the lord of the country. Where
did they get such a tale? It is a proven lie,
God knows.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
I love that. That's amazing.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
It is not true.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Yeah, I'm very much imagining the French people from Monty
Python in the Holy Grail here creating a scandalous story
about a cat killing King Arthur and becoming the King
of the Britons. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
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

(49:22):
to mean bog cat, and note that this allows the
capellou or chappalou to retain the characteristics of a water
monster like the Irish sea cats. These false folk etymologies
are always really interesting to me. We've talked about a
number of them on the show before. I know one
that's come up is the English. This is certainly the

(49:45):
case for English speakers. Is the word muskrat. People assume
that because of the way the name sounds, it must
be a rat that produces a musk, meaning a smelly rat.
But actually muskrat is an English trans literation of an
Algonquin word. And so it seems like that may have
been going on with the French understanding of capealou here

(50:07):
that it's like sounds like the French for cat from
a bog bog cat, so that's what they thought it meant.
So the stories are set in a bog or a swamp.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Wow, and that ends up coloring the shape of the
folk tale.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
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 Estoi
de Merlin I think the History of Merlin or the

(50:42):
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

(51:04):
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

(51:27):
there may have arisen in an attempt to like blend
together popular Arthur versus bogcat battle stories with the more
well known or canon details 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

(51:51):
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 Kenoba be in
taking him to the Death Star so he can meet
his canonical ending.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Right right, Because it's like, well, we're talking about ob Wan,
so of course we have to have the Fluke band,
but we need to actually come back to the the
major beats in the overarching story, and we've got to
have Fluke band there for that as well.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Right, So yeah, I like that. But also I wanted
to come back to the question you raised about the
version where Arthur is killed in the bog or killed
by the bogcat, because Arthur he just gets crumpled and
the cat becomes king. Is it possible this was meant
as a spoof or a kind of cross channel national

(52:38):
ridicule by the French. I don't know of a strong
reason for thinking that's the case, though I'm very tempted
to wonder along those lines. 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

(53:00):
is actually the oldest known variant of the Arthur versus
the Bogcat story, and thus she argues it's possible that
this reflects a quote genuine variant tradition of Arthur's end
which existed in antecedent Welsh and or Breton tradition, but
which by the time of the extant records has given

(53:21):
place to other alternative traditions. Arthur's death at Camlin became
conflated with a story of his removal to Avalon, so
that the story of his terminal fight with the cat
monster is yet another variant which survives only in certain
tantalizing illusions. So does that make sense that this is
obviously here limited to the realm of speculation. We don't

(53:42):
know about what the earliest versions of the story were,
but in Bromwich's opinion, it could be that this bizarre
version of the story of King Arthur, where King Arthur
is killed by a wicked swamp cat, may actually reflect
a genuine early variant of the case Arthur's story, which
has since disappeared in Welsh and Breton sources, but survives

(54:05):
in this altered derivative form in these references from French
texts like what if? What if it were that the
actual og King Arthur was pushed into a bog by
a kitty cat?

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, that's that's amazing to think about. Yeah, the idea
that this is not just some sort of one off,
not the result of some you know, just from some
translation accidents and and so forth. It kind of gives
us this this curio of a tale, but it may
represent like a significant strain of fiction or ar Theian
tradition going back quite a ways. That's that's fascinating to

(54:40):
think about. 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. Uh,
you know, those are exactly the sort of entities that
a hero might might die fighting.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
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

(55:22):
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 1 (55:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And now I am going to refuse
to imagine this as anything less than like a tiger
sized cat, though I just can't. I can't imagine King
Arthur falling to something that's housecats sized.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
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 and 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 1 (56:00):
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

(56:23):
mean 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 in which our Incredible Shrinking Man has to flee
for his life from a normal sized house cat that

(56:44):
to him is an enormous monster, like a kaiju that
is trying to get at him in a doll's house.

Speaker 3 (56:50):
There's no kaiju as cruel as a cat, though.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it goes back to that
old bit of folk wisdom that you know, 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

(57:15):
vicious monsters, sometimes played for laugh certainly, but although other
times there's at least an attempt to play it seriously.
The movie we'll be watching this Friday for Weird House
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

(57:36):
to see that cat running around and killing people, even
though it's not shooting lightning out of its eyes. It's
not the size of a tiger, it's just the size
of a house cat. But it's really fast and really vicious.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
We shall not underestimate them. I don't think you and
I would have anyway, but especially not after today.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
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?

(58:14):
Maybe I would be in trouble.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
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 1 (58:23):
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,
delaying feeding by even fifteen minutes. So just be very
careful out there, everyone.

Speaker 3 (58:43):
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 1 (58:50):
All right. So that is our look at folkloric cats,
or 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 modern
cat cryptids and supposed sightings of big cats. And then
of course again you have the reality of wildcats and
feral cats and so forth. So there's a lot. There's

(59:11):
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,
write in with those. We would love to read those,

(59:33):
perhaps on a future episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Listener mail. Just a reminder to everyone out there, the
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 talk about a weird movie on
Weird House Cinema. And again, this is cat Week. Cat
episodes will continue all week, and dog People, if you

(59:55):
want a dog Week, write in and let us know
that we should do talk week and we'll try and
make it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
Part due yeah next year for Cat Week.

Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
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 2 (01:00:33):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.