Grimalkin and the Cait Sìth: Scotland's Witch Cats

Grimalkin, the archetypal witch's familiar from Macbeth, shares deep roots with the Cait Sìth transformation legend of Scottish Highland folklore.

By Cait Sìth Foundation 1 April 2026

Grimalkin, the archetypal witch's familiar from Macbeth, shares deep roots with the Cait Sìth transformation legend of Scottish Highland folklore.

Grimalkin and the Cait Sìth: Scotland’s Witch Cats

In Act I of Macbeth, the First Witch responds to the call of her familiar spirit with a single word: “I come, Graymalkin.” The moment passes quickly – a fragment of dialogue in a scene dense with supernatural menace – but the name it introduces has echoed through centuries of English literature, folklore, and popular culture. Grimalkin, the grey cat, the witch’s companion, the archetypal familiar. The name has become a byword for supernatural felines, used so frequently that its original specificity has been almost entirely eroded.

That original specificity is worth recovering, because Grimalkin did not emerge from nothing. The figure belongs to a tradition of witch-cat association that, in Scotland, is inseparable from the Cait Sìth. The fairy cat of the Highlands and the witch’s familiar of the Lowlands and the literary tradition are not identical, but they share roots deep enough to make the distinction between them, at certain points, very nearly impossible to maintain.

The Name and Its Origins

“Grimalkin” is generally understood as a compound of “grey” (or “grim”) and “malkin,” a diminutive of the name Matilda or Maud that had become, by the late medieval period, a generic term for a cat – and, by extension, for a woman of low social standing. The word carried connotations of age, femininity, and a certain sly cunning. A grimalkin was an old she-cat, and the term’s application to a witch’s familiar carried all of these associations forward: the cat was aged, female, clever, and closely bound to a woman who herself existed outside the normal structures of social respectability.

A witch's protective amulet recovered from a Scottish Lowland site — artefacts of the tradition that linked cats to witchcraft

The name appears in English usage from at least the sixteenth century, predating Shakespeare’s deployment of it in Macbeth (first performed around 1606). However, it was Shakespeare’s use that fixed the name in the cultural imagination, permanently associating “Graymalkin” with the figure of the witch and with the Scottish setting of the play. This Scottish context is significant, because the witchcraft beliefs that Shakespeare drew upon for Macbeth were heavily influenced by Scottish sources, including the writings of King James VI himself, whose 1597 treatise Daemonologie provided a detailed taxonomy of supernatural entities and their relationships with human practitioners.

The Witch’s Familiar in Scottish Tradition

The concept of the familiar – a supernatural entity that assisted a witch in magical workings – was central to the witch trial tradition in both England and Scotland. Familiars took many forms, including toads, hares, and dogs, but the cat was among the most common and most feared. Trial testimony from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries repeatedly describes accused witches confessing (often under duress) to consorting with cats that served as intermediaries between the human practitioner and the demonic powers she was believed to serve.

In Scottish trials specifically, the cat-familiar carried additional layers of meaning derived from the Gaelic tradition of the Cait Sìth. The fairy cat of Highland belief was not merely an animal with supernatural attributes; it was, in many accounts, a transformed witch. The tradition held that a witch could assume cat form eight times, but on the ninth transformation, the change became permanent, and the witch was trapped in feline form for the remainder of her existence. This permanently transformed witch-cat was understood to be the origin of the Cait Sìth itself.

This belief created a conceptual circuit in which the witch and the cat were not merely associated but potentially identical. The cat that sat by the fireside might be a familiar – a supernatural servant attending upon a witch – or it might be a witch in her own right, temporarily or permanently transformed. The impossibility of distinguishing between these possibilities with certainty was a source of genuine anxiety in communities where belief in witchcraft was widespread and where accusations could carry lethal consequences.

Shakespeare’s Scottish Sources

Macbeth was written during a period of intense interest in Scottish witchcraft at the English court. King James VI of Scotland had become King James I of England in 1603, and his well-documented preoccupation with witchcraft – he had personally participated in the North Berwick witch trials of 1590 – had created a cultural climate in which Scottish supernatural beliefs received unprecedented attention south of the border.

Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth are specifically Scottish witches, and the supernatural elements of the play draw deliberately from Scottish tradition. The Three Witches’ invocations, their meeting on the heath, their cauldron, and their familiars all reflect the particular character of Scottish witchcraft belief as it was understood in the early seventeenth century.

Graymalkin, the First Witch’s familiar, is a product of this context. The name signals not merely “a cat” but a specifically Scottish witch-cat, embedded within a tradition that connected domestic cats, fairy cats, and transformed witches in a web of supernatural association. Shakespeare’s audience, primed by James’s Daemonologie and the cultural conversation surrounding Scottish witchcraft, would have understood Graymalkin as something more than a simple pet name for a tabby.

The Grimalkin and the Cait Sìth: Points of Convergence

The Grimalkin of the literary and trial tradition and the Cait Sìth of the Highland folklore tradition converge at several critical points.

First, both are understood as being more than they appear. The Grimalkin is not merely a cat; it is a supernatural entity in cat form, serving a witch’s purposes. The Cait Sìth is not merely a large black cat; it is a fairy being, possibly a transformed witch, operating according to the logic of the otherworld. In both cases, the surface appearance of an ordinary animal conceals a deeper and more dangerous reality.

Second, both are associated with the transgression of natural boundaries. The Grimalkin crosses the boundary between the animal and the demonic, serving as a conduit between human practitioners and supernatural powers. The Cait Sìth crosses the boundary between the natural and fairy worlds, and in the transformation legend, it crosses the boundary between human and animal identity. These boundary-crossings are the defining characteristic of both figures.

Third, both are gendered. The Grimalkin is consistently female – the name itself carries feminine associations, and the familiar tradition overwhelmingly connected cats with female practitioners. The Cait Sìth, through the witch-transformation legend, is also implicitly female, as the witches who became fairy cats were predominantly understood to be women. This shared femininity connects both figures to the broader cultural history of the association between women, cats, and transgressive power.

Points of Divergence

The differences between the two traditions are equally significant. The Grimalkin is, fundamentally, a subordinate figure. It is a familiar – a servant, an assistant, an instrument of a human practitioner’s will. The witch commands the Grimalkin, and the Grimalkin obeys. This hierarchy is central to the trial tradition, in which the relationship between witch and familiar was understood as a pact, with the familiar providing services in exchange for sustenance (typically blood drawn from the witch’s body).

The Cait Sìth, by contrast, serves no human master. It is an autonomous entity, operating within the fairy world’s own hierarchy and pursuing its own purposes. When it appears at a funeral wake to steal a soul, it does so on its own initiative, not at the direction of a human practitioner. When it roams the Highlands on Samhain night, it acts according to the imperatives of the fairy realm, not those of any mortal. The Cait Sìth is not a servant. If anything, it is a sovereign – a being of power and agency that human communities could appease but never command.

This divergence reflects the different cultural contexts in which the two traditions developed. The familiar tradition emerged primarily from the witch trial culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a context in which supernatural entities were understood through the lens of Christian demonology and human culpability. The Cait Sìth tradition emerged from the older Gaelic fairy faith, in which supernatural entities existed independently of human action and were not reducible to instruments of good or evil.

The Witch Trials and the Cait Sìth

The Scottish witch trials produced testimony that occasionally brought the Grimalkin and Cait Sìth traditions into direct contact. Accused witches in Highland communities sometimes described their familiars in terms that echo the Cait Sìth – large cats, black cats, cats of unusual intelligence and behaviour. Whether these descriptions reflect genuine belief, coerced confession, or the interrogators’ own expectations is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate.

What is clear is that the boundary between the familiar tradition and the fairy cat tradition was permeable. In communities where both sets of beliefs were active, a single encounter with an unusual cat could be interpreted through either framework – as a witch’s familiar going about its mistress’s business, or as a Cait Sìth going about its own. The two traditions were not identical, but they occupied overlapping conceptual territory, and the individuals who encountered them did not always maintain clear distinctions between them.

The Grimalkin After Shakespeare

The Grimalkin archetype has had a long and varied afterlife. The name appears in eighteenth-century satirical poetry, in nineteenth-century folklore compilations, in twentieth-century fantasy literature, and in contemporary popular culture. Each iteration carries different emphases: the satirical Grimalkin is comic, the folkloric Grimalkin is sinister, the fantasy Grimalkin is powerful. What they share is the fundamental identity of cat-as-more-than-cat, the suspicion that the animal form conceals a deeper intelligence and a more-than-natural purpose.

The Cait Sìth tradition continues to inform and shadow these iterations, even when the connection is not explicitly acknowledged. Every literary witch’s cat that is smarter than it should be, every fictional feline that knows more than its owner, every black cat that crosses a path with apparent intention – all of these draw, however distantly, on the same well of belief that produced both the Grimalkin and the Cait Sìth.

The two figures are not the same. But they are related, and the relationship illuminates the deeper structures of belief that made the cat, among all domestic animals, the one most consistently associated with the supernatural in the British Isles. The Foundation’s work in documenting the Cait Sìth tradition necessarily engages with the Grimalkin as well, because the two cannot be fully understood apart from each other.