Cat Sìth

Also Known As: also Cat Sidhe, Cait Shìth in the plural; Irish cat sí; the elfin or fairy cat
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology, Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A wild black cat the size of a dog that many Highlanders held to be no fairy at all but a witch wearing a cat.
Role in Mythos: It is the uncanny animal at the edge of the settlement, and in the taghairm rite it is the thing whose torture drags a legion of speaking cats out of the dark.
Relation to Humans: Highlanders did not court it, feed it or bargain with it in any tale that survives, and the only recorded dealings run one way, with men compelling the cats rather than the cats troubling men. What the record shows is a creature people preferred to leave alone.

The cat came in from the dusk at the size of a collie, black from ear to tail-tip except for one white blot on the breast, and it did not hurry and it did not run. Its back was up. Every hair along it stood out stiff. In the Highlands that was not a stray to be shooed off the byre floor, and the sensible thing to do was to find work at the other end of the building and keep your eyes on it.

John Gregorson Campbell, minister of Tiree and the most careful collector the Gaelic west produced in the nineteenth century, gave the creature four lines. Elfin cats, cait shìth, of a wild breed and not a domesticated one, as large as dogs, black with a white spot on the breast, crotach agus mùrlach, arched and bristling. Then he added the sentence that quietly dismantles most of what has been written about them since. Many people, he wrote, maintained that these wild cats had no connection with the fairies at all. They were witches in disguise.

That witch reading is not a footnote. It is very nearly the whole surviving body of belief. A schoolgirl in County Kerry wrote down a version of it in 1937 for the great national collection of Irish folklore, and the shape of it is the shape the story keeps everywhere it turns up. A man near Ballymalis Castle came home from buying sheep to be told the household cat had wailed around the house all day. Next morning his sheep had strayed. He went looking for them by the castle, heard a great mourning inside the walls, waited an hour, and a big cat came out on the top of the ruin and spoke to him. Tell my sister at home that our mother is dead. He drove his sheep back, repeated the message in his own kitchen, and the cat by the fire got up and went out and was never seen again. Both of them were witches, the story says, and they went back to the castle and stayed there for years.

That is the tale the indexes file as ATU 113A, and Joseph Jacobs printed the polished English version in 1894, where a man comes home to report nine black cats with white breasts carrying a small coffin with a crown on it, and the family’s old Tom leaps up crying that he is King o’ the Cats now and goes straight up the chimney. Ireland had a king of the cats long before that. Irusan son of Arusan kept a cave near Clonmacnoise, and when the poet Senchán satirised his whole tribe over a matter of mice, Irusan swelled to the bulk of a bullock and came for him, and it took Ciarán to put the animal down. He is enormous and he is furious and he is genuinely old, and he is not called a cat sìth anywhere in the literature that carries him.

The Highland cat’s real notoriety comes from somewhere darker, and it belongs to a rite rather than to the animal. Martin Martin, travelling his own islands around 1700, listed three ways of consulting what he called an invisible oracle, and the third was the worst. A live cat was put on a spit and turned over the fire while one of the company asked the turner what he was doing, and the turner answered that he was roasting the cat until its friends answered the question. Then, Martin wrote, a very big cat comes, attended by a number of lesser cats, wanting the one on the spit released, and it answers. Robert Kirk had noted something like it fifteen years earlier, in a kiln with two doors, one man under a cauldron and another calling the devil.

Campbell knew of only three performances in the whole of the Highlands, and thought the two best-known accounts were versions of one migratory legend, since the dialogue in them runs word for word alike. In the Mull telling, two men shut themselves into the big barn at Pennygowan on the Sound of Mull and began. Cats came in off the night and took to the roof beams until the timbers were crowded with them and the caterwauling filled the building, and the largest of them started to say that when his brother the Ear of Melting came, and Allan mac Eachainn cut him off with the line that afterwards became a Highland proverb for sticking to a job whatever the discouragement. Whatever you see or hear, keep the cat turning. The Ear of Melting arrived, named Dun Lachlan by his father and grandfather, and told him that whomsoever he made water upon would never see the face of the Trinity. Dun Lachlan answered him with the cross of the sword and struck him across the head with the hilt, and the shape broke, and the devil stood there in his own person asking what they wanted. One man asked for prosperity and children. Dun Lachlan asked for property and a long life to spend it in. They got both, and some say they had to repeat the whole thing every year to hold him to it. The Lochaber version puts the fire at a place still called Dail a’ Chait, the cat meadow, and brings in the king of the cats himself, a gigantic one-eyed black animal called Cam Dubh, who silenced the rest, asked why his brother was being tortured, and set the price at seven churches.

What these cats can do is bounded by the rite that calls them. They speak. The great one commands the lesser ones into silence. It answers truthfully, or truthfully enough that men risked this to hear it, and it grants what is asked. What it cannot do is stay away while one of its own is on the spit, and that compulsion is the entire mechanism. Nor can it hold its shape against iron and the sign of the cross together. The limits are not the animal’s; they are the bargain’s.

Almost everything else attached to the cat sìth online is recent. The nine transformations after which a witch is trapped as a cat come from an American encyclopedia of Wicca published in 2000. The soul-stealing at wakes, the vigil called Fèill Fhadalach kept with catnip and riddles and no fire in the room, the saucer of milk left out at Samhain, none of it appears in Martin, in Kirk, in Campbell or in the Gaelic collections, and the phrase itself will not carry the meaning given it, since fèill is a feast or a fair and not a watch over a corpse. The nine lives and the stolen souls are not Highland. What the Highlanders actually said was smaller and stranger: that the big black cat in the byre was of the wild breed, that it would not give ground, and that it might well be somebody’s neighbour.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cat Sìth?

The Cat Sìth is a large black cat of Scottish Highland folklore, described as being of a wild rather than a domestic breed, dog-sized, with a white spot on its breast, an arched back and raised bristles. The folklorist John Gregorson Campbell recorded it in the nineteenth century and noted that many Highlanders did not consider it a fairy at all.

Is the Cat Sìth a fairy or a witch?

Both readings existed side by side, and the witch reading was the more common one Campbell encountered. Many people in the Highlands held that these wild cats had no connection with the fairies and were witches who had taken cat shape. Almost all the surviving stories in this tradition turn on a cat that speaks and turns out to be a person.

Does the Cat Sìth steal souls from the dead?

There is no soul-stealing in the older Highland record. The story that a Cat Sìth could take a soul by crossing a corpse before burial, and that a vigil called Fèill Fhadalach was kept to prevent it, does not appear in Martin Martin, Robert Kirk, John Gregorson Campbell or the Gaelic folklore collections. It is a modern addition circulated through popular writing.

What was the taghairm?

The taghairm was a Highland divination rite, and its most notorious form involved roasting a live cat on a spit until a very large cat arrived with a train of lesser cats and answered the question put to it. Martin Martin described it around 1700 and Robert Kirk noted a version around 1685. Campbell knew of only three reported performances, the best-known set in a barn at Pennygowan on Mull and at Dail a’ Chait in Lochaber.

Who is the King of the Cats?

In the Lochaber taghairm legend the king of the cats appears as Cam Dubh, a gigantic one-eyed black cat who commands the others and negotiates his brother’s release. Irish tradition has an older cat-king, Irusan son of Arusan, who lived in a cave near Clonmacnoise and grew to the size of a bullock when the poet Senchán satirised him. The widely told nursery version, in which a man reports a cat funeral and the household cat announces its own succession, is catalogued as tale type ATU 113A.