The Parliament Of Cats: The Strange Folklore, Hidden Societies, and Real-World Mystery of the Meow-Wow
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| Kevin Wikse meets the King of Cats at a predawn Meow-Wow, where the mysterious Parliament of Cats meets. |
* This article is written with the aid of my 13-year-old goddaughter, who would like to be known only as "Mysterious A." She brought this phenomenon to my attention after reading about it in a book about Old European folklore. When I told her I had personally witnessed a Cat Council, what I call a Meow-wow or Kočičí sněm from folklore, she demanded we write a blog about it together.
There are some things in this world that are strange because they are rare.
Others are strange because we have seen them a thousand times and never really stopped to consider what the hell we were looking at.
Cats belong firmly in the second category.
We invite them into our houses. We give them names. We buy them ridiculous little beds that they refuse to sleep in because the cardboard box the bed arrived in is apparently superior. They occupy our couches, patrol our windows, disappear into the neighborhood after dark and return several hours later looking suspiciously satisfied with themselves.
And we really have no idea where they went.
This arrangement has apparently been acceptable to humanity for thousands of years.
Perhaps it shouldn't be.
Because scattered throughout the folklore of Europe and beyond is a peculiar recurring idea: when humans are asleep, cats have another life.
They gather.
They communicate.
They recognize one another.
They hold assemblies.
Sometimes they dance.
Sometimes they conduct funerals.
Sometimes they have kings.
And sometimes an unfortunate human being happens upon one of these meetings and discovers, however briefly, that the ordinary house cat sleeping beside the fireplace may have considerably more going on than anyone suspected.
Call it a Cat Convention.
Call it a Cat Assembly.
Call it the Parliament of Cats.
I have another name for it.
A Meow-Wow.
And unlike some of the stranger subjects I investigate, I can begin this one by saying something important:
I have seen one.
THE MEOW-WOW OF ARTHUR STREET
It happened many years ago in Boise, Idaho, circa 2012 or 2013.
I cannot give an exact date anymore, and I don't want to manufacture details simply because a more precise story would sound better. Memory is memory. When dealing with unusual experiences, I think it is important to preserve the fuzzy edges rather than paint something into them afterward.
What I remember clearly is the situation.
It was extremely early in the morning—probably somewhere around 4:00 to 5:00 AM on or around Arthur Street, just off State Street in Boise.
I was in the driveway of a house.
And there were cats.
A lot of cats.
My best recollection is somewhere around eight to ten of them.
They appeared to be the sort of mixed feline population one might reasonably expect in an established residential neighborhood: some probably belonged to nearby houses, while others appeared to be strays or free-ranging cats.
Their presence wasn't what struck me.
It was what they were doing.
Most of them were sitting in that familiar upright feline posture. A few were lying down. But instead of wandering independently around the property, fighting, feeding, courting or simply passing through, they appeared to be oriented toward one another.
They looked like they had gathered.
I don't specifically remember a single dominant cat sitting in the center, and I certainly won't add one now for dramatic effect. There may have been one. There may not have been.
What I remember was the collective impression.
They were sitting together.
Facing one another.
At an hour when most of the human neighborhood was asleep.
It looked, quite frankly, like a meeting.
I had never heard the expression “Cat Convention” at the time. I certainly didn't know there were old European traditions describing remarkably similar gatherings.
I simply gave the phenomenon my own name.
A Meow-Wow.
As in a powwow.
For cats.
I thought I was being funny.
Years later, I discovered that people have apparently been encountering or at least imagining Meow-Wows for centuries.
And that is where this gets interesting.
WHEN THE CATS HOLD COUNCIL
There is a Central European folkloric concept known in Czech as Kočičí sněm essentially a cat assembly, cat council, or cat convention.
The surviving tradition describes magical gatherings of cats, frequently associated with old castle ruins and nighttime settings. One modern survey of the folklore notes surviving material from South Bohemia while describing the motif more broadly as Central European. Musicians returning late from village dances are among the characteristic witnesses.
That detail is almost perfect.
Of course it happens at night.
Of course it happens at a ruined castle.
And of course the poor bastard who discovers it is some musician walking home alone after everybody sensible has already gone to bed.
This is how folklore works.
The world becomes considerably larger after midnight.
In variants of the Cat Convention tradition, the animals are not merely congregating randomly. Their gathering possesses the character of an event. Human witnesses intrude upon something that apparently existed before they arrived and will continue after they leave.
That distinction is crucial.
The supernatural element isn't necessarily the presence of cats.
It is the suggestion that the cats have a society independent of ours.
Humans are not participants.
We are witnesses.
Occasionally, trespassers.
That same idea appears with remarkable force in one of Britain's strangest pieces of feline folklore.
THE KING OF THE CATS
The British Isles preserve a wonderful migratory legend generally known as “The King of the Cats.”
Versions circulated in England and Scotland for centuries. Charlotte Sophia Burne recorded a Herefordshire version in The Folk-Lore Journal in 1884, while Joseph Jacobs later incorporated the tale into More English Fairy Tales in 1894. Related literary versions extend much further back, with the tradition connected to William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, written around 1553.
The basic structure is gloriously strange.
A traveler encounters something impossible.
In some versions he sees a procession of cats carrying a coffin.
Not metaphorically.
A cat funeral.
The animals proceed solemnly, sometimes with a particularly large or distinguished cat walking before them. In Joseph Jacobs' version, eight cats carry the coffin while another walks in front. The procession stops, and the witness receives an extraordinary message:
Someone must be informed that another cat has died.
The traveler eventually reaches a house and tells the story.
And there, listening beside the hearth, is an apparently ordinary domestic cat.
Upon hearing the news, the household cat suddenly reveals that it understands everything that has been said.
The revelation of the other cat's death means that it has inherited the throne.
The cat announces itself as the new King of the Cats and disappears.
One nineteenth-century poetic treatment makes the imagery even more explicit: cats are assembled around a dead tabby displayed with the symbols of royalty before the household cat discovers that the deceased monarch's passing has made him king.
Think about the underlying idea.
Your cat isn't merely your cat.
Your cat has political obligations.
There is another jurisdiction.
Another hierarchy.
Another world operating parallel to the human one.
You just happen to provide room and board.
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE HOUSE CAT
That is the motif I find most fascinating.
Folklore repeatedly treats cats differently from dogs.
The dog is historically imagined as the companion who belongs with us.
The cat often seems to belong beside us.
That is a subtle but enormous difference.
The cat sleeps in our house but retains an air of sovereignty.
It enters and leaves.
It watches.
It disappears.
It returns.
It can be affectionate without appearing subordinate.
Even domestication didn't completely erase that quality.
Modern behavioral research describes the domestic cat as a remarkably flexible social animal. Free-ranging cats can live independently, but when resources permit, they form genuine social groups with internal structure. Colony members recognize one another and establish preferred relationships; they greet, rub, groom, play and rest together. Researchers describe these colonies as socially complex rather than simply random aggregations of animals occupying the same food source.
Even more interestingly, feline colonies tend to contain strong matrilineal structures, with related females forming the social core and sometimes cooperating in raising kittens.
Cats also distinguish members of their social group from outsiders.
So underneath all the supernatural stories is an important biological fact:
Cats really do have societies.
Not kingdoms.
Not parliaments.
Not parliamentary sub-committees investigating the unacceptable decline in tuna allocations.
But societies nonetheless.
And those societies can operate largely outside human observation.
THE GODDESS WHO BECAME A CAT
Long before medieval Europeans were worrying about what cats were doing in ruined castles, the ancient Egyptians had already elevated feline nature into the sacred.
The Egyptian goddess Bastet became strongly associated with the domestic cat. She carried protective associations as well as connections with prosperity, fertility, childbirth, joy and dance. Cats were sacred to her, and enormous numbers of cat statuettes were dedicated as offerings. Cat mummies and feline votive objects were deposited at sites including Bubastis and Saqqara.
That cultural interpretation is almost the inverse of what later happened in portions of Christian Europe.
The Egyptian cat could represent protection.
Alertness.
Fertility.
Guardianship.
The poised cat wasn't necessarily watching something sinister.
It was watching for something sinister.
That distinction matters when tracing the cultural history of the animal.
Cats did not change.
We did.
WHEN THE SACRED CAT BECAME SUSPICIOUS
By medieval and early modern Europe, cats increasingly became entangled with ideas about witchcraft, darkness, heresy, and the Devil.
That history is more complicated than the internet version usually suggests. Medieval Europeans did not simply wake up one morning and collectively decide that all cats were evil, and cats remained enormously useful as controllers of rodents.
Nevertheless, associations between cats, demonic forces, and witchcraft became powerful cultural motifs. By the sixteenth century, cats were increasingly represented visually in connection with witches, and historical scholarship traces stories in which the Devil could appear in feline form or cats could assist witches in malefic activity.
Suddenly the nocturnal gathering acquires a different meaning.
Imagine encountering ten cats sitting together at midnight in a culture already convinced that witches could assume animal forms.
You don't see a feline colony.
You see a sabbath.
The observable behavior remains roughly the same.
The interpretation changes.
That pattern will follow us throughout the history of the Cat Parliament:
behavior → perception → folklore.
THE FAIRY CAT
In the Scottish Highlands, feline folklore crossed into the Otherworld.
The Cat Sìth belongs to Highland Gaelic tradition: an uncanny or fairy-associated cat, typically envisioned as an unusually large black animal marked with white on the breast. Traditions surrounding the creature connected it with witches, fairies and the dangerous liminal period surrounding death.
Here again, the cat occupies a boundary.
House and wilderness.
Domestic and wild.
Living and dead.
Natural and supernatural.
That may be one of the fundamental reasons cats accumulate this kind of folklore so easily.
They are liminal animals.
A dog generally makes its allegiance obvious.
A cat can be sitting on your lap at eight o'clock and standing silently beneath a tree three streets away at three in the morning.
You have no idea what happened in between.
The cat isn't telling.
JAPAN AND THE CAT THAT BECOMES SOMETHING ELSE
Japan developed its own extraordinary supernatural feline traditions.
Among the best known are the bakeneko and nekomata—cats capable of crossing the boundary between ordinary animal and yōkai.
Japanese cat lore became particularly elaborate during the Edo period. Stories could portray cats as loyal supernatural benefactors, but others transformed them into dangerous creatures capable of deception, shape-changing and violence. Historical discussions of Japanese feline folklore note attempts to explain some monster-cat traditions through actual feline behavior, including the unsettling things starving cats might do around human corpses.
Once again, ordinary biology appears to be feeding supernatural interpretation.
But Japan adds another recurring idea:
longevity produces knowledge.
A cat lives long enough.
Sees enough.
Learns enough.
And eventually it stops being merely a cat.
That concept would fit comfortably beside the European King of the Cats.
Both traditions suspect that the animal sitting beside the fire possesses an identity the human household does not fully understand.
THE CAT OF BLESSING AND THE CAT OF THE JINN
Persian and Islamic traditions add still another layer.
Cats generally acquired positive associations within Islamic tradition, including stories emphasizing kindness toward them and their ritual cleanliness. A widespread traditional account tells of cats appearing aboard Noah's Ark after a lion sneezes them forth to solve the ship's mouse problem.
At the same time, regional folklore could associate particular cats, especially unusual cats encountered under suspicious circumstances, with jinn.
And importantly, that association was not necessarily evil.
Persian folkloric sources record beliefs in which black cats could be interpreted as Muslim jinn and potentially helpful, while other feline manifestations might be regarded as dangerous or ominous.
Again:
Same animal.
Different cosmology.
To one observer, a strange cat is a witch.
To another, a fairy.
To another, a jinn.
To another, a manifestation of divine protection.
To another, somebody's pet who has apparently joined a neighborhood committee without informing its owner.
WHY CATS?
This is where I think the Parliament of Cats becomes something larger than a collection of amusing folktales.
Why do cats attract these stories?
Part of the answer is obvious.
Their biology is practically engineered to create folklore.
Cats see extremely well under low-light conditions.
They move quietly.
Their pupils transform dramatically.
Their eyes reflect light.
They freeze and stare at things humans cannot immediately perceive.
They are predators small enough to live in our homes but sufficiently independent to leave them.
They communicate extensively through scent and posture that humans barely notice.
They can vocalize dramatically one moment and become completely silent the next.
And perhaps most importantly:
they possess a social world we don't completely participate in.
Modern science has dismantled the old caricature of the domestic cat as simply a solitary, antisocial animal. Research instead describes flexible sociality. Cats can form stable groups when ecological conditions support them, develop preferred associates, distinguish insiders from outsiders and maintain relationships through rubbing, grooming, resting proximity and other affiliative behaviors.
Recent feline-behavior research continues investigating how social behaviors such as allogrooming function within those relationships.
In other words, science hasn't discovered the Parliament of Cats.
But it has discovered that cats are considerably more socially organized than the old stereotype suggested.
That is enough.
Because now we can return to Arthur Street.
WHAT DID I ACTUALLY SEE?
The most likely explanation for my Boise Meow-Wow is not supernatural.
And I don't need it to be.
That is important.
Eight or ten neighborhood cats gathering between four and five in the morning is biologically plausible.
A dependable food source could produce it.
Overlapping territories could produce it.
A stable neighborhood colony could produce it.
Mating activity could bring cats into proximity.
Related females and their associates might constitute part of an established social network.
The hour itself isn't particularly mysterious. Cats are naturally active during the darker transitional periods when much of the human population isn't.
What continues to interest me is the configuration.
They weren't, as I remember them, scrambling over a plate of food.
They weren't fighting.
They weren't simply passing one another.
Many were sitting.
A few were lying down.
And they appeared oriented toward one another.
That looks remarkably different to a human observer.
It looks intentional.
It looks social.
It looks like a meeting.
And perhaps that is exactly what generations of people before us encountered.
FROM CAT COLONY TO CAT PARLIAMENT
Consider a European traveler several centuries ago.
He has no electric streetlights.
No veterinary ethology.
No understanding of flexible feline sociality.
He is walking home at two in the morning.
The moon is out.
He passes the ruins of an abandoned structure.
There are twelve cats sitting there.
Quietly.
Together.
One looks at him.
Then another.
Then another.
Suddenly the entire assembly is watching.
What does he tell people the following morning?
Probably not:
I observed a temporary aggregation of free-ranging Felis catus displaying probable affiliative social behavior.
Hell no.
He tells them:
The cats were holding council.
Then someone else remembers hearing that witches become cats.
Someone else remembers that old Margaret's black tom disappeared that same night.
Someone else says his grandfather once encountered cats dancing in the ruins.
Another generation passes.
Now the cats have a king.
Another generation.
Now they bury their dead.
And eventually the human being encountering the cats isn't witnessing animal behavior anymore.
He has accidentally crossed the border into another civilization.
That is how folklore grows.
Not necessarily from stupidity.
Not necessarily from lies.
Often from observation plus interpretation plus time.
And occasionally, I suspect, from something we still don't entirely understand.
THE PARLIAMENT OF CATS
This is why I like the expression Parliament of Cats as an umbrella term rather than pretending it represents one single ancient worldwide legend.
It doesn't.
What exists is more interesting.
Across cultures we find recurring feline themes:
The sacred cat.
The guardian cat.
The witch cat.
The fairy cat.
The demon cat.
The yōkai cat.
The jinn cat.
The royal cat.
And, particularly in European tradition, the extraordinary idea of cats gathering when humans aren't supposed to be watching.
Central Europe gives us the Cat Convention.
Britain gives us the King of the Cats.
Scotland gives us the fairy cat.
Japan gives us cats that cross the boundary into supernatural personhood.
Egypt gives us the sacred feline guardian.
Other traditions place cats somewhere between blessing and spirit.
Different cultures disagree profoundly about what cats are.
Yet many seem to agree that they are somehow more than they appear to be.
And perhaps that is the real Parliament.
Not a literal governing body convening beneath the moon to debate mouse quotas.
Although I remain open to evidence.
The Parliament of Cats is the collective human suspicion that the domestic cat maintains a second identity beyond our observation.
THE MEOW-WOW
So I would like to add a term of my own to the vocabulary.
Meow-Wow
noun
An unusual social congregation of domestic, stray or feral cats in which several animals gather in close proximity and appear collectively oriented toward one another, producing the impression of an organized feline assembly.
The term deliberately makes no claim of paranormal activity.
A Meow-Wow can be entirely natural.
In fact, I suspect most of them are.
But the term describes the experience of encountering one.
Because there is something profoundly different between seeing ten cats in an alley and discovering ten cats sitting together in the predawn darkness apparently facing one another.
One is a group of cats.
The other makes you stop.
The distinction is experiential rather than necessarily zoological.
And I would encourage anyone who encounters one to observe before disturbing it.
How many cats are present?
What time is it?
Are they sitting, standing or lying down?
Are they facing inward?
Is there food present?
Are kittens present?
Are the animals vocalizing?
Are they grooming or rubbing against one another?
Does one animal occupy a conspicuous central position?
Do individual cats arrive separately?
Do they leave separately or disperse collectively?
What happens when they become aware of the human observer?
Those details matter.
Because somewhere between folklore and ethology lies an opportunity to document the real behavior behind the legend.
THE CATS ARE STILL MEETING
My experience on Arthur Street was probably an ordinary event.
Eight or ten cats belonging to a neighborhood social network had gathered during the quietest hours of the morning.
There is absolutely no need to invoke witches.
Fairies.
Jinn.
Bastet.
Bakeneko.
Or His Most Serene Feline Majesty, King Fluffington III.
But I find something almost more wonderful in the possibility that the experience was completely natural.
Because if it was, then somewhere in the predawn darkness tonight, while millions of people are asleep, other Meow-Wows are happening.
Behind apartment buildings.
Under porches.
In farmyards.
Beside old barns.
Among cemetery stones.
In alleys.
Around abandoned houses.
Perhaps even among castle ruins.
Cats are finding one another.
They are recognizing familiar animals.
Negotiating distance.
Resting beside preferred companions.
Exchanging scent.
Watching newcomers.
Maintaining relationships.
Doing whatever business constitutes the social life of a cat.
Most of it happens without us.
And occasionally some insomniac, night watchman, musician walking home from a dance—or some guy standing in a driveway off State Street in Boise at five o'clock in the morning—happens to see it.
For a few moments, the curtain moves.
We glimpse another society operating inside our own.
Science calls it feline social behavior.
Folklore called it a convention.
Old stories gave it kings, funerals, witches, and fairy magic.
I call it a Meow-Wow.
And should you ever stumble across one yourself, there is really only one piece of advice I can give you:
Be polite.
Observe from a respectful distance.
And whatever you do
don't interrupt the meeting.
-Kevin Wikse and "Mysterious A"
Taking Stock of What Stalks You.
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