In Scotland the clan Chattan, who gave their name to Caithness, called their Chieftain Mohr an Chat, the Great Wild Cat, probably owing to some physical peculiarity.
Cuchullaine, the "hound of Culain," is a totem name. There is a story of a witch who offered one of the family some cooked dog-flesh to eat, but he refused it as it was against the law that he should "eat his namesake's-flesh."
His name was originally Setanta, but his nickname was obtained in this way: One night when he followed Conchobar to the house of Culain, a smith, the gates were locked, and a ferocious dog lay in watch. The boy killed the hound, and when the smith lamented his loss, Setanta said, "I will be your cu (dog) until another is grown large enough to guard your house," whence he was called hound of Culain or Cuchullaine.
According to one account Cuchullaine has more affinity with a bird than with a dog. "Not only does Cuchullaine bear obvious in his name his origin as a cuckoo god but his birth, exploits, and death are those of a cuckoo."[154]
When he was going forth to his last fight he met three crones, daughters of the mist, who asked him to sup with them. Bent on his destruction, they were cooking a hound with poison and spells on spits of the rowan tree. He refused to partake of the dish because it was against the law, and they rebuked him, saying, "It is because the food is only a hound and so you despise it and us." His chivalry thus appealed to, Cuchullaine helped himself to a shoulder-blade out of the stew, and held it in his left hand while he was eating, putting it, when finished, under his left thigh. Then his left hand and thigh became stricken and he had no strength for the fight.
CHAPTER XXI
ANIMAL GHOSTS
For a ghost to take the form of an animal is not at all unusual, and it has been suggested that human ghosts when they appear in the guise of bulls, dogs, sheep, or other animals are accounted for by being "throw-backs of the spirit to a lower animal form."
Black dogs with glowing eyes like hot embers, phantom calves, white rabbits, etc., are sometimes thought in Lincolnshire to haunt the spots where murder or suicide has been committed. They are supposed to be either spectres of the dead in brute form or demons, and in Denmark there is a legend that pigs or goats, if buried alive in walls, turn to spectres.