CHAPTER XIX 
FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, AND MEDICINE 
ALTHOUGH the salutary warning—Terminat hora diem: terminet 
auctor opus—forbids us prolonging the Greek-Roman section, 
already disproportionate in space, yet the part played by fish 
(A) in myths, (B) in symbols or emblems, Pagan or Christian, 
(C) in medicine, and (D) in diet necessarily demands some notice. 
And as our authorities are, in the main, writers in Greek 
and Latin, this section seems the appropriate place for what 
must, although the literature on the subject is superabundant, 
be summary and restricted comment. 
By the Solar Mythologists, the fish (no creature, however 
small, escapes the mesh of their net) has been made to take a 
prominent 7éle. The fair-haired and silvery moon in the ocean 
of light is simply the little gold-fish ; the little silver-fish which 
announces the rainy season is merely the deluge. The gold- 
fish and the luminous pike, like the moon, seem to expand and 
contract, and in this form, as expanding or contracting, 
the god Vishnu or Hari (perhaps meaning “‘ fair-haired’” or 
“golden ”’) refers now to the sun, now to the moon, Vishnu 
being held to have taken the form of the gold-fish. 
“The epic exploits of fishes,’ to borrow de Gubernatis’s 
term, would include the myths of Adrika, the fish nymph who 
became the mother of Matsyas, the king of fishes; of the 
Puranic fishes, symbolical and natural; of the fishes of the 
Eddas, with the scaly transformations of Loki, and hundreds 
of similar legends.! 
1 A. de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), II. 329 ff. The 
latest luminary among the Solar Mythologists is L. Frobenius, Sonnenkultus, 
whose lengthy chapter in vol. I. on the world-wide Fish-Myth and its solar 
significance may be consulted by the leisurely. 
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