From Ritual to RomanceWeston, Jessie L. (Jessie Laidlay)
Religion
From Ritual to Romance
Weston, Jessie L. (Jessie Laidlay)
Grail -- Legends -- History and criticism; Romances -- History and criticism
Both in India and China the Fish is employed in funeral rites. In India
a crystal bowl with Fish handles was found in a reputed tomb of Buddha.
In China the symbol is found on stone slabs enclosing the coffin, on
bronze urns, vases, etc. Even as the Babylonians had the Fish, or
Fisher, god, Oannes who revealed to them the arts of Writing,
Agriculture, etc., and was, as Eisler puts it, ‘teacher and lord of all
wisdom,’ so the Chinese Fu-Hi, who is pictured with the mystic tablets
containing the mysteries of Heaven and Earth, is, with his consort and
retinue, represented as having a fish’s tail.[31]
The writer of the article in _The Open Court_ asserts that “the Fish
was sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men back from the
shadows of death to life.”[32] If this be really the case we can
understand the connection of the symbol first with Orpheus, later with
Christ, as Eisler remarks: “Orpheus is connected with nearly all the
mystery, and a great many of the ordinary chthonic, cults in Greece and
Italy. Christianity took its first tentative steps into the reluctant
world of Graeco-Roman Paganism under the benevolent patronage of
Orpheus.”[33]
There is thus little reason to doubt that, if we regard the Fish as a
Divine Life symbol, of immemorial antiquity, we shall not go very far
astray.
We may note here that there was a fish known to the Semites by the name
of Adonis, although as the title signifies ‘Lord,’ and is generic
rather than specific, too much stress cannot be laid upon it. It is
more interesting to know that in Babylonian cosmology Adapa the Wise,
the son of Ea, is represented as a Fisher.[34] In the ancient Sumerian
laments for Tammuz, previously referred to, that god is frequently
addressed as _Divine Lamgar, Lord of the Net_, the nearest equivalent I
have so far found to our ‘Fisher King.’[35] Whether the phrase is here
used in an actual or a symbolic sense the connection of idea is
sufficiently striking.
In the opinion of the most recent writers on the subject the Christian
Fish symbolism derives directly from the Jewish, the Jews, on their
side having borrowed freely from Syrian belief and practice.[36]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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