Samhain - Irish curses and other tails ;)
Mallacht mo chait ort – The curse of my cats on you!
*Except not really! (more on my superstitious nature later.)
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For October I’m gonna share a ‘mallacht’ on a Monday,‘Mallacht’ Monday / Monday Curse! I’m gonna share an Irish curse and a bit about the history of Irish cursing, not your bog standard boring blasphemy here, real actual blood chilling curses!
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Before I go any further I will point out that I’m Irish to the bone and you bet your booty I am superstitious! So I will asterix all of them and add, an ‘only joking’ :) I do NOT mess with na daoine maithe / the good people / aka those of the otherworld! Especially coming up to Samhain! Instead I share these curses and Irish cursing culture all for fun and education. Throughout my research I have repeatedly read that a missed placed curse rebounds on the speaker!! So DANGER DANGER don’t play with curses! Have I bashed this point enough hmmmm.
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So this first one probably seems ok enough, cats are cute right? Except throughout Irish folklore cat’s are often linked to the otherworld and in some stories are a devil in disguise. I’ve read through stories featuring cats on duchas.ie and excerpts from some collected stories of the late 1800’s and they vary from whimsical to terrifying.
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But I like this curse specifically for its imagery, which is a big theme in Irish cursing. See, it's not just any ol cat, it's mo chait / my cats! To me this suggests harnessing your own army of otherworldly cat power to enact revenge and if there is anything we can agree on it is that cats have otherworldly power that they often use to enact revenge!
There are a number of references to the King of the Cats in Irish folklore. The earliest reference I could find was in the book of Lismore where there is a copy of a text called Imtheacht na Tromdhaimhe. This text is possibly from the 1300’s and tells a story based in 7th century Ireland parodying the practice of satire. From what I’ve read poetic satire was a huge fear among people in power in Ireland's history, if poets satirised you it could mean the end of you and battles were started over them. This text features Irusán the chief of cats who is not happy about his fellow cats being satirised and so confronts the poet and his patron who are pretty terrified and quickly switches to praising the cats.
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A reworked version of this tale features in the 1866 ‘Ancient Legends of Ireland’ by Lady Jane, where I also found her story about a fish stealing cat. When the narrators tried to keep the doors and windows locked to protect their fish, the cat still barged into the house scratching everyone inside into a bloody mess until they threw holy water on it, turning it into a devilish shadow which flew away! (I found the tales from this book interesting but definitely leaning on the “reworked” side of things)
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My favourite examples come (as always) from Duchas.ie One folk tale collected in 1938 tells of a man who got mixed up in gambling! Here are the highlights. So he gambled and lost, first his books, then his money and he thought, ‘eye’s they can’t take my eyes, I’ll wager them’ except when he lost they did. Now blind he found his way into an old ‘abandoned’ house to rest. This house happened to be where all the cats congregate to tell the king of the cats the day's news. And it seems they didn't notice the man in the corner. They told the king of the man who lost his eyes and asked if he could get them back. The cat King said the only way is ‘the well behind this house, but he will never find it’. The next morning the man went to the well, washed his eye in its water and got his sight back. He then finds his fellow gamblers who are surprised he has his eyes back and he tells them about the house. They then decide to sneak into the house. When the cats tell the Cat King that the blinded man has his eyes back the king cat exclaims ‘someone must have been listening’ and they pounce on the intruders and tear them to shreds!
References
Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018* by Thomas Waters
https://academic.oup.com/past/article/247/1/113/5721469
Irish Times - 54 Irish curses you won't have learned in school by Éanna Ó Caollaí
Duchas.ie
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5215784/5210320
More Cat tales on Duchas
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5008847/4960824/5077602
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4613720/4612609/4650468
The king of the cats
https://www.libraryireland.com/AncientLegendsSuperstitions/King-Cats.php
Talking cats / magic cats / connected to the good people sidhe
The druidical cat
https://www.libraryireland.com/AncientLegendsSuperstitions/Cat-Nature.php
Imtheacht na Tromdhaimhe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tromd%C3%A1mh_Guaire