352 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



during Lent and on certain days of the week as a sort of 

 protest against gluttony and excess, and there is no ob- 

 jection to it among Protestant Churches excepting that 

 it must not be claimed as a merit or the equivalent of 

 •• good works." 



That fish were, even in the most ancient times, 

 allowed to be eaten on fast days is curious. It is sug- 

 gested by some students of this subject that the custom 

 came from Syria, and had to do with certain pagan 

 ceremonials and the worship of the fish-god Dagon. It 

 is supposed that some of these early Christians managed, 

 under the guise of a fast of the Church, to maintain 

 an ancient pagan custom and religious rite connected 

 with the Syrian fish-god. The Jews also eat fish on 

 Friday evening — though in both cases the origin of the 

 "fish-eating" was lost sight of in the early centuries of 

 the Christian era. On the other hand, it appears that 

 the worshippers of the fish-god (at any rate, at a remote 

 period) were forbidden to eat fish as being sacred ; hence 

 it seems possible that the permission of a fish diet to 

 Christians during days of fasting was given as a means 

 of encouraging those who retained pagan superstitions to 

 ignore and forget them. The supposition that the eating 

 of fish on certam days is a survival of a ceremonial ob- 

 servance connected with fish-worship is the more probable 

 explanation of the custom. 



The worship of fish or of a fish-god is one of the 

 outcomes of the old Nature-worship — the cult of Cybele 

 and Rhea, who in the Greek Islands became the great 

 mother Aphrodite born of the sea, and in Syria Ashtaroth I 

 (Astarte). She appears also as Atargatis, the Syrian 

 fish-goddess born from a fish's egg, and worshipped at 

 Hierapolis ; her worshippers must not eat fish. Dagon, 



1': 



