Frequent occurrence of the Fish Symbol—Fish Heraldry—Earliest Devices—Fish Devices in churches and other public buildings—The Catacombs—Ichthus—Fish Devices in Glastonbury Abbey, &c.—The Book Fish—Glasgow Fish Arms—The Fish and Ring Story of Scotland—Solomon and the Fish and Ring—The Hermit’s Fish Pond of St. Neot’s—The Sacred Perch—The Dolphin—Neptune.

Few, if any, symbols are of such frequent occurrence among the relics of bygone ages as that of the fish. Whether we look upon the monuments of Babylon and Nineveh, upon the walls of the Roman Catacombs where the early Christians sought a refuge from the fury of their Pagan persecutors, or amongst the heraldic devices adopted by our ancestors as coats of arms in comparatively modern times, the fish is ever prominent. With regard to the latter, it is certainly remarkable to what an extent it prevails, and several writers on Heraldry (particularly Moule) have given us very full accounts and graphic illustrations of its use. Nor is it one kind of fish only we find thus employed, which might perhaps be associated with some special myth or tradition—the dolphin, the herring, the salmon, the trout, the pike, the barbel, the roach, the sole, the turbot, the flounder, the haddock, the cod, the hake, the ling, the whiting, the mullet, the grayling and others have all been pressed into the same service, and even the different modes of taking fish by the spear, the net, or the hook, are found in the armorial ensigns of the lords of manors deriving revenue from the produce of the fishery. “The boats,” says Moule, “employed in the same service, which were at the command of the sovereign in time of war, and formed the original navy of Britain, distinguish the ensigns of the maritime lords, and the corporate bodies to whom the jurisdiction of the ports was entrusted.”It is not unlikely that the vast numbers of fishes and their great variety may have had much to do with their employment in this connection; some years ago the British Museum contained fifteen hundred different species, while the museum in Paris—one unusually rich in specimens of this part of the animal kingdom—possessed as many as five thousand, a number which has steadily gone on increasing. “As the symbol of a name, almost all fish have been used in Heraldry; and in many instances fish have been assumed in arms in reference to the produce of the estate, giving to the quaint device a twofold interest. They are borne upright and extended, and when feeding are termed devouring; AllumÉ, when their eyes are bright, and ParnÉ when their mouths are open.”[1]

“The earliest known device of fish, the zodiacal sign, is emblematical of the fishery of the Nile, commencing in the month of February, about the time when the sun enters Pisces, which is the best season for fishing, according to Pliny. Modern travellers relate that the walls of the temple of Denderah are literally covered with magnificent sculpture and painting. The figures representing the Zodiac are on the ceiling of the portico, and are engraved in the great work on Egypt published by order of the French Government. The signs of the Zodiac were frequently sculptured on the exterior of ancient churches, presenting a sort of rural calendar for the labours of the field each month in the year, which was of practical use.

‘When in the Zodiac the fish wheel round,
They loose the floods and irrigate the ground.’

“In his directions to the husbandman for the month of February, old Tusser says:

‘To the coast, man, ride, Lent stuff provide;’

with another couplet in encouragement of the fisherman,

‘The land doth will, the sea doth wish,
Spare sometimes flesh, and feed off fish.’

“The Zodiacal signs also appear as an ornament on antique vases, coins, pavements, &c., and are painted in bright colours on the inside of several mummy cases now in the British Museum. A manuscript in the Cottonian Library shows the sign Pisces having a connecting line from the tail of each fish.”[1]On many churches and other buildings both in England and on the continent the same device is found. The porch of the Virgin at Notre Dame at Paris has a number of compartments representing the zodiacal signs and the labours of the different months. The doorway of the church of St. Margaret, York, is similarly adorned, as is one of the porches of Merton College, Oxford. The western doorway of Iffley Church, said to be one of the most beautiful specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture in England, bears the sign of the fishes.

In Canterbury Cathedral also is a pavement of large stones, somewhat rudely inlaid, bearing figures of the zodiacal signs in circular compartments. The fishes are attached by a line passing from mouth to mouth.

In the Roman Catacombs the fish is frequently found amongst the countless inscriptions with which the walls are crowded. Maitland describes it as there found as a symbol expressive of the name of Christ, and remarkable as affording a combination of everything desirable in a tessera, or mystic sign. The Greek for fish, ?????, contains the initials of ??s???, ???st?? Te?? ???? S?t??: Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour; a sentence which had been adopted from the sibylline verses. Moreover the phonetic sign of this word, the actual fish, was an emblem whose meaning was entirely concealed from the uninitiated: an important point with those who were surrounded by foes ready to ridicule and blaspheme whatever of Christianity they could detect. Nor did the appropriateness of the symbol stop here. “The fish,” observed Tertullian, “seems a fit emblem of Him whose spiritual children are, like the offspring of fishes, born in the water of baptism.”[2]

“On walls, as well as tombstones, we find the Fish, Phoenix, Anchor, Ship, Olive and Palm, all of which are sacred to the God of Fertility or the procreative energies. The fish, we are told, was adopted by those Christians because of the alphabetical rebus—the Greek word I. K. Th. U. S. containing the initial letters of the words forming this title in Greek, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour;’ but Ikthus was a holy name in Egypt and the East, long ere Greece had adopted her varied faiths, and long before the good Nazarene had preached his holy gospel in the wilds of Judea. The Hebrew for fish is Dg, Dag or De-ag, which some think may have sprung from the Sanscrit De-Dev, and Ag or Ab, and be allied to the solar Ak, and Aqua, water. Dagan was the fish-god (Alheim) of the Philistines, and spelling Dag backwards as was so common and natural, seeing some peoples read from right to left, and others from left to right, we get Gad, the good one, that is God or Goddess of Day, as in Isa. lxv. 11, where, in connection with Meni the moon, we read: ‘Ye are they that prepare a table for Gad, and that furnish the offering unto Meni;’ which Bagster’s Comprehensive Bible admits to be stars or such objects. Dag, says Calmet, signifies Preserver, and so Saviour, which has many ancient connections with fish and water, as we see in the case of Dagon. St. Augustine said of Christ: ‘He is the great Fish that lives in the midst of the waters;’ so no wonder that Ichthus, a fish, should become a holy term, and applied to Christ’s representative, who in token wears a Poitrine as his higher officers wear what is called a mitre or turban like a fish’s mouth. Christ, being a Hebrew, of course received the title Ikthus from his Greek followers, just as he got I.H.S.—the monogram of Bacchus—from those who forsook that god to follow Christianity. There is nothing sacred about such matters. Ich or Ik, or Ak == Ab, at once Our Father and water; and in India the fish is the god of the water, and so we have Dev-ab, from which may come Deg-an or Dagon. The Greeks, of course, used Thus or theus, and so Ik-theus or God-Ik; at any rate Christians have made Ik-thus a veritable God, and water its element a very holy thing. The most ancient Keltic tongues seem to identify the two, for water in Gaelic is Uisge, the water of life being Wisge (whiskey), and a fish Iasg, or in old Irish, Iska or Ischa, which is an Eastern term for Jesus. If V or F—the digamma is here admissible, then we arrive very near our own word Fish. Perhaps Vishnoo, ViÇnu or Fishnoo, is responsible here, for he is the first who rises out of the water, and from a fish; and from his first incarnation to his last, he is always connected with both.”[3]

“Fish” says Moule, “have often been made the vehicle of religious instruction, and for this purpose all the fine arts have been put in requisition. Amongst many pictures by the first masters in which the finny tribe are introduced, that of Saint Anthony, of Padua, preaching to the fish, may be mentioned. This fine picture, by Salvator Rosa, is in the collection at Althorp House, in Northamptonshire; the sermon itself is given in Addison’s Travels in Italy.

“On the conventual seal of Glastonbury Abbey are represented the figures of Saint Dunstan between Saint Patrick and Saint Benignus; each has his emblem beneath his feet; the last has a party of fish: perhaps, adds the historian of the abbey, he also preached to them, as Saint Anthony did.

“A fish furnishing the University of Cambridge with a religious feast was the occasion of a tract, entitled ‘Vox Piscis; or, the Book-fish;’ containing three treatises which were found inside a cod fish in Cambridge market, on Midsummer Eve, 1676. This fish is said to have been taken in Lynn deeps, and after finding a book within it, the fish was carried by the bedel to the vice-chancellor; and coming as it did at the commencement, the very time when good learning and good cheer were most expected, it was quaintly remarked, that this sea guest had brought his book and his carcass to furnish both.

“In the arms of the city of Glasgow, and in those of the ancient see, a salmon with a ring in its mouth is said to record a miracle of St. Kentigern, the founder of the see and the first bishop of Glasgow. On the reverse of Bishop Wishart’s seal in the reign of Edward II., this supposed allusion to the legendary story of St. Kentigern appears for the first time.”

Some of the early bishops of Glasgow displayed the figure of a salmon, either on the sides of or below the shield of arms on their seals, a circumstance which may be accounted for, without reference to a miracle, as depicting the produce of the Clyde. The revenue of the church of Glasgow at the Reformation included one hundred and sixty-eight salmon arising from the franchise or fishing in that river.

James Cameron, Lord Privy Seal to King James I. of Scotland and bishop of Glasgow in 1462, bore on his episcopal seal the figure of St. Kentigern in a tabernacle, below which are his paternal arms, three bars, having a salmon with a ring in its mouth on either side of the shield, which is surmounted by the mitre. The ring is, perhaps, a type of the annular money, then current among the Britons.

“It is curious to note how the emblem of the same fish has continued to enter into the composition of the Glasgow arms and those of the ecclesiastical establishment.

“The diocese of Glasgow was erected into an archbishopric in 1491, with Galloway, Argyll and the Isles as suffragans. James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow and abbot of Dumfermline, the uncle of Cardinal Beaton, died primate of Scotland in 1539. Many munificent marks of his public spirit and piety long resisted time, and remained after the cathedral ceremonies had been deserted for the plain offices of the kirk of Scotland.

“On the walls of the Episcopal Palace or Castle of Glasgow were sculptured the arms of Beaton—azure, a fess between three mascles, or, quartered with Balfour, argent, on a chevron sable and otter’s head erased of the first, and below the shield, a salmon with a ring in its mouth, as represented on the seals of his predecessors.

“Another Archbishop Beaton re-founded the Scotch College at Paris in 1603, where, as a monument to his memory, are his arms, surmounted by the episcopal hat, and beneath the shield the fish and ring, the emblem of the see of Glasgow. In more recent times Archbishop Cairncross, in 1684, bore the arms of the see impaled with his paternal coat.

“The arms of the city of Glasgow are those of the former see, argent, on a mount a tree with a bird on a branch to the dexter, and a bell pendent on the sinister side, the stem of a tree surmounted by a salmon in fess having in its mouth a gold ring.”[4]

Dr. Dibdin says, “The legend of the ‘Fish and the King,’ is extant in well nigh every chap-book in Scotland; old Spotswood is among the earliest historians who garnished up the dish from the Latin monastic legends, and Messrs. Smith, McLellan and Cleland, have not failed to quote his words. They report of St. Kentigern, that a lady of good place in the country having lost her ring as she crossed the river Clyde, and her husband waxing jealous, as if she had bestowed the same on one of her lovers, she did mean herself unto Kentigern, entreating his help for the safety of her honour; and that he, going to the river after he had used his devotion, willed one who was making to fish, to bring the first that he caught, which was done. In the mouth of this fish he found the ring, and sending it to the lady, she was thereby freed of her husband’s suspicion. The credit of this I believe upon the reporters; but however it be, the see and city of Glasgow do both of them bear in their arms a fish with a ring in its mouth even to this day.”[5]

Moule remarks that “the classical tale of Polycrates, related by Herodotus a thousand years before the time of St. Kentigern, is perhaps the earliest version of the fish and ring, which has often been repeated with variations. The ring, Herodotus says, was an emerald set in gold and beautifully engraved, the work of Theodorus the Samian; and this very ring, Pliny relates, was preserved in the Temple of Concord at Rome, to which it was given by the Emperor Augustus. The device of the fish is engraved in M. Claude Paradin’s “Hervical Devices” as an emblem of uninterrupted prosperity.”

“If we turn to chapter xxxviii. of Mahomet’s Koran, we find the story of the fish and the ring in another form. The note upon the words—‘We placed on his throne a counterfeit body,’ says: ‘The most received exposition of this passage is taken from the following Talmudic fable: Solomon, having taken Sidon, and slain the king of that city, brought away his daughter Jerada, who became his favourite; and because she ceased not to lament her father’s loss, he ordered the devils to make an image of him for her consolation: which being done, and placed in her chamber, she and her maids worshipped it morning and evening, according to their custom. At length Solomon being informed of this idolatry, which was practised under his roof by his vizier, Asaf, he broke the image, and having chastised the woman went out into the desert, where he wept and made supplications to God; who did not think fit, however, to let his negligence pass without some correction. It was Solomon’s custom, while he washed himself, to entrust his signet, on which his kingdom depended, with a concubine of his named Amina: one day, therefore, when she had the ring in her custody, a devil named Sakhar came to her in the shape of Solomon, and received the ring from her; by virtue of which he became possessed of the kingdom, and sat on the throne in the shape which he had borrowed, making what alterations in the law he pleased. Solomon, in the mean time, being changed in his outward appearance and known to none of his subjects, was obliged to wander about and beg alms for his subsistence; till at length, after the space of forty days, which was the time the image had been worshipped in his house, the devil flew away and threw the signet into the sea; the signet was immediately swallowed by a fish, which being taken and given to Solomon, he found the ring in its belly, and having by this means recovered the kingdom, took Sakhar, and, tying a great stone to his neck, threw him into the lake of Tiberias.”

One of the windows of St. Neot’s Church, Cornwall, contains the history of that saint known as the pious sacristan of Glastonbury Abbey, “perhaps,” says Moule “the only instance of the legend of a local saint so represented, and one of the most splendid specimens of stained glass in the kingdom. The hermit’s fish-pond, now remaining in the valley near his cell, afforded materials for one of the legendary tales now represented in the window. In this pool there were three fishes, of which Neot had divine permission to take one every day, with an assurance that the supply should never be diminished. Being afflicted with a severe indisposition, his disciple Barius one day caught two fishes, and having boiled one and broiled the other, placed them before him: ‘What hast thou done?’ exclaimed Neot; ‘lo, the favour of God deserts us: go instantly and restore these fishes to the water.’ While Barius was absent Neot prostrated himself in earnest prayer, till he returned with the intelligence that the fishes were disporting in the pool. Barius again went and took only one fish, of which Neot had no sooner tasted than he was restored to perfect health.”[6]A species of perch, common in the Mediterranean, is of a brilliant scarlet colour, but with a very strong spinal fin, and, from the resemblance of this spine to a razor, it is named le barbier. This fish is held sacred among the divers for marine productions, and when caught by a hook, it is instantly relieved by the rest of the shoal cutting the line of the angler with their sharp spines.

“The dolphin, as a most peculiarly sacred fish, was called Philanthropist by the ancients, and said to delight in music. It saved the great bard Arion when he threw himself into the Mediterranean on his way to Corinth, which event is said to have happened in the seventh century B.C., or about the time the story of Jonah arose. The Greeks placed the dolphin in their Zodiac. Burckhardt says in his travels in Nubia, that no one is permitted to throw a lance at or injure a dolphin in the Red Sea; and the same rule is enforced among most of the Greek islands.

“Neptune, the male sea-god of Rome, was identical with Poseidon of Greece, and his temples and festivals were in the Campus Martius. Poseidon was a brother of Jupiter and Pluto, and a mighty representative god-man of the waters, and of what the sea symbolised; his was the teeming womb of fertility, and therefore woman. His hosts are dolphins and innumerable sea-nymphs and monsters. His chariots are yoked with horses, which he is said to have created and taught men to manage. His symbol is the phallic trident, or rather the Trisool, or ‘giver of life’ of Siva, which can cleave rocks, produce water, and shake heaven and earth. The Nephthus of Egypt was the goddess of the coasts of the Red Sea and the wife of the wicked serpent deity Typhon. The Dolphin as a highly emblematic fish often stands for Neptune himself, although it probably first rose in importance from a mere punning on the words delphis a dolphin, and delphus the womb, and occasionally the pudenda. Delphax was also a young pig which was occasionally offered to Juno; Delphi was goddess Earth: symbolic chasm, and Delphinius was her Apollo, and from dolphin springs the name Delphin or Dauphin, the eldest son of the King of France.”[7]