"On walls, as well as tombstones, we find the Fish, Phœnix, 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]