The 1553 Text That Started the Nine Lives Myth

The idea that a cat possesses nine lives is so thoroughly embedded in English-language culture that it has achieved the status of a proverb – repeated without attribution, understood without explanation, and assumed to be of indeterminate antiquity. It appears in Shakespeare. It appears in nursery rhymes. It appears in the marketing copy of pet food manufacturers and the titles of action films. It is, in the common estimation, one of those sayings that has simply always existed, as though it had been uttered into being at the same moment as the English language itself.

It has not always existed. The first known expression of the nine lives concept in English prose can be traced to a specific text, by a specific author, published in a specific year: William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, composed circa 1553 and circulated in manuscript before its first printed edition in 1570. The text is a prose satire, the earliest English-language novel by some scholarly reckonings, and it contains a passage that links the nine lives motif directly to the tradition of the Cait Sìth (pronounced “caught shee”) – the great fairy cat of Highland oral tradition.

The Baldwin Text

Beware the Cat is structured as a series of nested narratives, told by a character named Master Doct Streamer to a gathering of companions during the Christmas season. The text’s tone oscillates between satirical comedy and genuine engagement with the folk beliefs it describes, making it a complex source for the folklorist – neither a straightforward record of popular belief nor a pure invention, but something between the two.

The relevant passage occurs in the account of a woman accused of witchcraft, who is described as having the ability to transform herself into the shape of a large black cat. The cat form she assumes is not arbitrary: it is described with physical characteristics that align with the Cait Sìth tradition as documented in Gaelic oral sources. The cat is large, it is black, and it operates with a purposeful intelligence that distinguishes it from an ordinary animal. In the course of the narrative, the cat sustains injuries that would kill an ordinary creature but survives them – leading to the assertion that cats, or at least cats of this particular supernatural order, possess nine lives.

The Foundation draws attention to the specificity of this association. Baldwin’s nine lives cat is not a generic feline. It is a witch-cat, a creature of transformation and supernatural resilience, described in terms that echo the Cait Sìth’s documented attributes. The nine lives motif, in its earliest English expression, is not a piece of natural history observation about the agility or hardiness of cats in general. It is a claim about a particular kind of cat – one with roots in the Gaelic fairy tradition.

The Gaelic Precedent

The concept that cats possess multiple lives, or that they are unusually resistant to death, has precedents in Gaelic tradition that predate Baldwin by centuries. The Cait Sìth, as a creature of the fairy realm, was understood to exist outside the normal parameters of mortal life and death. The Aos Sì (pronounced “ees shee”) – the fairy folk of whom the Cait Sìth was a member – were not immortal in the absolute sense, but they were understood to experience time and mortality differently from human beings. A creature of the Otherworld could be injured, could be driven away, could even be diminished, but its destruction was not a straightforward matter of physical violence.

The tradition of the nine lives as documented by the Foundation identifies several strands of Gaelic belief that may have contributed to the motif. The first is the general principle of fairy resilience: beings of the Otherworld do not die as mortals die. The second is the specific tradition, attested in communities across the central Highlands, that the Cait Sìth could be wounded but would return – that an injury inflicted upon the fairy cat in one encounter would not prevent its appearance in the next. The third is the numerological significance of nine in Celtic tradition, where it functions as a number of completion and power, appearing in the nine waves of Irish and Scottish cosmology, the nine hazels of the Well of Wisdom, and the nine grades of the bardic hierarchy.

The convergence of these elements – fairy resilience, the observed persistence of the Cait Sìth across encounters, and the symbolic potency of the number nine – provides a framework within which the nine lives motif can be understood not as an arbitrary invention but as a natural expression of existing Gaelic beliefs about the nature of the fairy cat.

From Specific to Universal

The transformation of the nine lives motif from a specific claim about a supernatural cat into a universal commonplace of feline mythology is a process that can be traced across several centuries of English-language usage.

Baldwin’s text, though satirical in intent, circulated among a readership that was familiar with the folk beliefs it referenced. The nine lives concept entered the literary record as a piece of received wisdom, cited by subsequent authors with decreasing specificity about its origins. By the time Shakespeare employed it – most notably in Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio challenges Tybalt, the “King of Cats,” with reference to his nine lives – the motif had been detached from its supernatural context and applied to cats in general. Tybalt’s nine lives are a metaphor for his combative persistence, not a literal claim about fairy resilience.

The proverb crystallised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appearing in collections of English sayings and becoming, by the nineteenth century, a standard piece of proverbial wisdom taught to children and deployed in casual conversation without any awareness of its origins. The broader mythology of the black cat absorbed the nine lives motif as one element among many, losing the specific connection to the Cait Sìth that Baldwin’s text had preserved.

This process of generalisation is a common pattern in the history of folklore. A specific belief, rooted in a specific tradition and attached to a specific figure, is transmitted beyond its community of origin, losing its context as it travels. The destination of this journey is the proverb, the truism, the thing that everybody knows without knowing why. The nine lives of the domestic cat are the Cait Sìth’s legacy, though the cat on the windowsill neither knows nor cares about the fairy tradition that bequeathed it an extra eight chances at existence.

Why Baldwin Matters

The significance of Beware the Cat for the study of the Cait Sìth tradition extends beyond its role as the first English-language attestation of the nine lives motif. Baldwin’s text is evidence that the Gaelic fairy cat tradition had penetrated English-language literary culture by the mid-sixteenth century – that the Cait Sìth, or at least a recognisable version of it, had crossed the linguistic and cultural boundary between Gaelic Scotland and the English-speaking world.

This crossing is significant because it provides a mechanism for the transmission of Cait Sìth-derived beliefs into the broader stream of English folklore. The witch-cat of Baldwin’s narrative is not identified by name as the Cait Sìth, but its attributes – its size, its blackness, its supernatural resilience, its association with a woman who commands transformation between human and feline form – map onto the Gaelic tradition with a precision that suggests direct or near-direct derivation.

The Foundation’s ongoing research into the textual history of the Cait Sìth tradition, to be published in full in Volume III of its archival series, examines the pathways by which Gaelic folk beliefs entered English-language print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Baldwin’s text is a critical node in this network – a point at which an oral tradition, transmitted in Gaelic across the Highland communities of Scotland, was captured in English prose and set upon the path that would eventually carry it to every corner of the English-speaking world.

The cat has nine lives. Everyone knows this. Almost no one knows that the statement originated in a description of a creature that walked the Highlands in the shape of a large black cat, a creature of the fairy realm, whose resilience was not a charming folk observation about feline agility but a serious claim about the nature of a being that existed on the boundary between the mortal world and the Otherworld. The nine lives motif is the Cait Sìth’s most successful export – a piece of Highland Gaelic tradition that has been so thoroughly absorbed into global culture that its origins have been rendered invisible.

---

Further Reading

• The Nine Lives Tradition – The Foundation’s complete account of the motif and its transmission
• The Legend of the Cait Sìth – The fairy cat tradition from which the nine lives concept emerged
• Black Cats in World Mythology – The broader cultural context of the beliefs that Baldwin recorded