PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SYMBOLS 275 



Such seems to have been the trend, possibly from pursuing 

 a pohcy of compromise, more probably from following the 

 line of least resistance, of most religious changes or revivals. 

 But while the attributes of many of the Greek gods were, at 

 least in certain of their attributes, assimilated to Syrian and 

 Eastern divinities, and while the Roman pantheon made room 

 for various Egyptian new-comers, the Jew's conception of his 

 Deity remained practically unaffected and uninfected. 



A fish frequently figures on the tombs of the early Christians 

 in the catacombs at Rome : sometimes it bears on its back a 

 bowl with wine and wafers of bread. Many tombs contain 

 small fish of wood or ivory. Such fish served, we are told, as 

 emblems and acrostics, pointing out to his co-religionists the 

 burial place of a Christian without betraying the fact to the 

 persecutors. 



This explanation lacks confirmation, and carries little 

 conviction, for two (among other) reasons. First : critical 

 statistics show that fish as symbols in Christian art figured 

 frequently both before and after Constantine. Second : fish 

 as indicative of a burial place would by their very presence 

 quickly defeat the object aimed at. They would indicate, as 

 surely as pointers game, the secret grave, for the persecutors 

 of the Christians, as history shows, were not all exactly 

 fools. 



Some authors trace back not a few of the signs 1 and usages 

 adopted and perpetuated by the Christians to the worship of 

 Venus, of which, when in conjunction with a fish, the under- 

 lying idea was the adoration — nearly universal — of fecundity. 

 Two instances, which I give for what they are worth, must 

 suffice. 



As regards Lent, A. de Gubernatis contends that Aphrodite 

 or Venus, the goddess of Love 2, frequently represented the 

 Spring. Hence it is that in Lent, appointed by the Church to 

 be observed in Spring, and again on Friday (or the day of Freya) 



^ See C. Cahier, Caracteristiques des Saints dans V art populaire (Paris, 1867), 

 Vol. II. 691 £[., for illustrations of Saints accompanied by fishes. 



* Op. cit., II. 340. " The gemini pisces, the two fishes joined in one, were 

 sacred to her, and the joke of the poisson d'Avril ... is a jest of phaUical 

 origin, and has a scandalous significance." 



