The Taghairm: Scotland's Forbidden Cat Summoning Ceremony

The Taghairm was a banned Highland ritual to summon Big Ears, a demonic Cait Sìth who would grant wishes in exchange for a dark sacrifice.

By Cait Sìth Foundation 1 April 2026

The Taghairm was a banned Highland ritual to summon Big Ears, a demonic Cait Sìth who would grant wishes in exchange for a dark sacrifice.

The Ritual and Its Origins

Of all the rituals associated with the Cait Sìth in Scottish Highland tradition, none is as disturbing or as extensively documented as the Taghairm. This was a ceremony of deliberate cruelty, designed to summon a great demonic cat known as Big Ears – in Gaelic, Cluasan Mòra – who was compelled to appear and grant the practitioners whatever they desired. The ritual was banned by the Church, condemned by successive generations of Highland clergy, and yet its details survive in remarkable specificity across multiple independent sources, suggesting that it was not merely a legend but a practice that was, at some point, actually performed.

The Taghairm occupies an uncomfortable position in the study of Scottish folklore. It is not a charming fireside tale. It is not a story that lends itself to romantic reimagining. It is a record of what people believed they could achieve through extreme measures, and what that belief reveals about the relationship between Highland communities and the supernatural world they inhabited.

The Ceremony Described

The word “Taghairm” (sometimes rendered “Taghairm”) derives from Gaelic and broadly translates to a form of divination or spirit-summoning. However, the specific ceremony associated with the Cait Sìth was distinct from other forms of Highland second sight. The most detailed accounts describe a ritual that unfolded over four days and four nights, conducted in a remote and isolated location – typically an abandoned barn or a ruined building far from any settlement.

A witch bottle recovered from a Highland site — one of the protective charms deployed against the dark forces invoked by the Taghairm

The central act of the Taghairm involved the roasting of live cats on a spit over an open fire. The practitioners were required to maintain the process without interruption, turning the spit continuously while ignoring the sounds that the dying animals produced. According to the tradition, as the ceremony progressed, other cats would begin to appear – first a few, then dozens, then hundreds – drawn by some supernatural compulsion to the site of the ritual. These spectral cats would surround the practitioners, howling and threatening, attempting to break their resolve.

If the practitioners held firm through the full duration, the cats would eventually part to reveal the arrival of Big Ears himself: a Cait Sìth of enormous size, far larger than any natural cat, whose appearance signalled that the ritual had succeeded. Big Ears was then compelled to grant the practitioners’ wishes, which according to the surviving accounts typically involved wealth, power, or the gift of prophecy.

Historical Accounts

The most frequently cited account of the Taghairm appears in a description attributed to events on the Isle of Mull in the seventeenth century. According to this account, two men – Allan and Lachlain MacLean – conducted the ceremony over four days, during which they were besieged by demonic cats of increasing size and ferocity. The account describes the practitioners as nearly driven to madness by the ordeal but persisting until Big Ears appeared and granted their demands.

The Reverend Lachlan Shaw, writing in the eighteenth century, referenced the Taghairm as a known practice among certain Highland families, though he was careful to frame his account within a Christian moral framework that condemned the ritual as satanic. Other clerical sources from the same period corroborate the basic outline of the ceremony while differing on specific details – the required duration, the number of animals involved, and the precise nature of Big Ears’ appearance.

What is notable about these accounts is their consistency. The core elements remain stable across sources: the prolonged duration, the use of fire, the escalating supernatural response, and the eventual appearance of a singular, dominant cat entity. This consistency does not prove that the ceremony was widely practised, but it does suggest a coherent and well-established oral tradition surrounding the ritual.

Big Ears: The Cluasan Mòra

The entity summoned by the Taghairm – Big Ears, or Cluasan Mòra – occupies a distinct position within the Cait Sìth mythology. While the ordinary Cait Sìth of Highland tradition is a solitary figure, associated with funerary customs and soul-theft, Big Ears is something more: a lord or king among the fairy cats, a figure of supreme authority within the supernatural feline hierarchy. The name itself suggests an entity defined by its capacity to hear and know – large ears being associated in folklore with heightened perception and the ability to eavesdrop on secrets.

Big Ears shares certain characteristics with the figure at the centre of the King of the Cats tradition, though the two are not typically identified as the same entity. Where the King of the Cats is revealed through a funeral procession and a message delivered by chance, Big Ears is summoned through deliberate and violent ritual action. The distinction is significant: one appears unbidden within the natural order of fairy society, while the other is compelled to appear through human transgression.

The compulsive nature of Big Ears’ appearance is a critical element of the Taghairm tradition. The entity does not come willingly. It is forced into manifestation by the suffering inflicted upon its kind, and its granting of wishes is understood not as generosity but as the fulfilment of an obligation imposed by the ritual’s dark logic. This places the Taghairm in the same category as other compulsive summoning traditions found across European folklore, in which a supernatural being is bound to appear and serve when the correct – and typically terrible – conditions are met.

Why the Church Banned the Taghairm

The suppression of the Taghairm must be understood within the broader context of the Christianisation of the Scottish Highlands, a process that unfolded over centuries and involved the systematic reinterpretation of pre-Christian belief systems. The Taghairm was objectionable to the Church on multiple grounds.

First, it represented an explicit invocation of supernatural entities outside the Christian framework. The summoning of Big Ears was, in ecclesiastical terms, an act of demonic conjuration – a direct violation of biblical prohibitions against sorcery and divination. Second, the ritual involved the deliberate infliction of suffering, which was condemned as an offence against God’s creation regardless of its supernatural purpose. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Taghairm implied a transactional cosmology in which human beings could compel supernatural entities to serve them, a worldview fundamentally incompatible with Christian theology’s insistence on divine sovereignty.

The ban was enforced through a combination of clerical condemnation and community pressure. As Presbyterianism took hold in the Highlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, practices associated with the old fairy faith were increasingly driven underground. The Taghairm, with its overt and extreme character, was among the first to be targeted. By the nineteenth century, it survived primarily as a historical curiosity, referenced in antiquarian collections and folklore compilations but no longer practised – or at least no longer acknowledged.

The Taghairm in the Context of Cait Sìth Tradition

The Taghairm is inseparable from the broader Cait Sìth tradition, even as it represents that tradition’s darkest expression. The ordinary Cait Sìth of Highland folklore is a creature to be respected, avoided, and guarded against – particularly during the vulnerable hours of the funeral wake. The Taghairm inverts this relationship entirely. Rather than defending against the Cait Sìth, the practitioners of the Taghairm deliberately provoke the fairy cat world, forcing a confrontation that culminates in the appearance of its most powerful representative.

This inversion suggests a sophisticated understanding of the supernatural ecosystem within Highland belief. The Cait Sìth was not merely a creature to be feared; it was a creature that could be manipulated, provided one was willing to pay an appropriate price. The price, in this case, was extraordinarily high – not only in terms of the suffering inflicted but in the spiritual risk assumed by the practitioners, who were understood to have placed themselves in mortal and metaphysical danger.

The Taghairm also connects to the Samhain traditions that governed the relationship between the human and fairy worlds during the Celtic festival marking the boundary between the light and dark halves of the year. While the Taghairm was not exclusively a Samhain ritual, the logic of boundary-crossing and the deliberate engagement with otherworldly forces resonates with the broader framework of Samhain practice.

The Legacy of the Taghairm

The ceremony continues to surface in contemporary discussions of Scottish folklore, though it is often sensationalised or stripped of its cultural context. It appears in horror fiction, in tabletop gaming source material, and in popular accounts of Scottish witchcraft. These adaptations tend to emphasise the grotesque elements of the ritual while neglecting the belief system that gave it meaning.

The Taghairm was not random cruelty. It was a structured ritual embedded within a coherent cosmology – one in which the fairy world operated according to rules that could be learned, tested, and exploited. Understanding the Taghairm requires understanding that cosmology, and the Foundation’s work in documenting these traditions aims to provide that understanding without either romanticising or sensationalising the material.