class="poem">‘When Heaven grew weak and a successful fight,
The giants raised and gods were saved by flight,
From snaky Typhon’s arms, a fish’s shape
Saved Venus and secured her from a rape.
Euphrates hid her, and from thence his streams
Owe all obedience to the fish’s beams.’

“Or because a fish carried from the Euphrates an egg of wonderful size, which a dove kept warm, and hatched the Syrian goddess; hence it was that they abstained from the eating of fish. They feared that if they ate those animals the vengeance of the goddess would be aroused: that the limbs of their body would swell; that they would be covered by ulcers, and consumed by wasting disease. Plutarch says of the Pythagoreans, that of sea creatures they especially abstained from eating the fish called mullet and urtic. They abstained from eating any kind of fish in order to instruct men and accustom themselves to acts of justice, for they say that fish neither do nor are capable of doing us harm. Others abstained from fish, the same author says, because man arose from a liquid substance, and therefore they worship fish as of the same production and breeding with themselves.

“Anaximander says that men were first produced in fish, and when they were grown up and able to help themselves were thrown out, and so lived upon the land. So he contends that fishes were our common parents.

“Xenophon, in his Anabasis, speaking of the river Chalos, says it was filled with large and gentle fish, which the Syrians worshipped as gods. Neither would they permit them to be injured.

“These stories about fish are by no means the growth of the more ancient ages, for about the time of the return of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, the Tyrians were in the habit of taking fish to Jerusalem for sale. In Nehemiah xiii., v. 16 the words are as follows: ‘There dwell men of Tyre also therein, which brought fish, and all manner of ware and sold on the sabbath, unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.’ At this time the Jews were not free from the profane rites of their neighbours, particularly such as had taken their wives from among the Philistines, who especially worshipped Dagon. To eat fish or to sell them on the public market-place was surely a great indignity to the god. There were certain fish sacred among other nations, as Pompilius among the Grecians, Anguilla among the Egyptians, and others among the Pythagoreans. In the same way as fish, so were also doves held in great honour out of favour to this god. It is, however, well known that doves were sacred to Venus, and she is Derceto.

“The temple of Dagon is called Beth-Dagon, which is pure Hebrew. (See I. Maccabeus x., 23.) ‘The horsemen also being scattered in the field, fled to Azotus and went into Beth-Dagon, their idol’s temple, for safety.’ Venus of the Ascalonites—that is Derceto—has the very same name with Herodotus, as Mylitta, Alitta, and the mother of the gods, and about the temple of the goddess of Hierapolis fish and doves were received as sacred, and in her honour, no less than where Derceto was worshipped.

“‘Paradise Lost’ has the following of this deity:—

‘Next came one
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, heads and hands lopped off
In his own temple on the grunsel edge,
Where he fell flat, and shamed his worshippers;
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish: yet had his temple high
Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,
And Accaron and Gaza’s frontier bounds.’[12]

“Phin.—The old Irish demi-god Pin or Fin seems to have been a form of Pineus, and, like him, was a son of Hermes, sharing, with the Budh or Da-Beoc, the exalted title of Bar-en-di, Son of the One God. It was Fin who conquered the dragon or put down serpent worship and established all the holy rites connected with Crones or Lingams, and, strangely enough, Phins or Feni, as Dr. P. W. Joyce calls them, showed like Eastern Boodhists, a great liking for both charms, which are but small phali, suitable for carrying or wearing on the person. They are exactly like the little Lingas worn on the arms, or secreted on the head or chest of Indian Sivaites. Irish history relates that Christian Feni diligently searched out and revered the teeth of St. Patrick.

“In the Brehon Laws of the Senchus Mor, the Feni or Fiannas, or champions, are described as a real historical people and the lawgivers of Irene. What Arthur and his knights were to Brythonick, British, or ‘Little Briton’ Kelts, Fin and his Fenians were in the two Skotias or among the Skoti.

“Before the Pagan Phin was converted, he is described as presiding over the Tara assembly ‘as a Druid in strangely flowered garments’ (note the likeness to Indra and Herakles), and with a double-pointed head-dress, and bearing in his hand a book, like Brahma, Matthew, Vishnoo, and the fishy deities of Assyria, and of the Clonfest Cathedral, County Galway, pictures of which are given by Keane.

“The two-headed mitre of fishy form, the upright rod, spotted or chequered garment, and basket in hand, distinctly mark the Eastern idea of a great Phalik chief, whilst in the mermaid with open book and jaunty arm akimbo, who allows not even the waters to obscure her sexual capacities, we see the Irish idea of Atargatis or Derketis, or ‘Divine Ketis,’ that form of Venus which Juno assumed at Kupros, in the old Kelto-Pelasgian temple of Kupreuses. There, says Bryant, she was worshipped by the Pigalia, Pialia or Pials, that is, the worshippers of the Oracle or Pi, who may be called the Pi-i, Phin-i, Pi-ni or Pini, a word which is possibly the base of the Latin and French terms for the Phallus, and which is otherwise of unknown but significant derivation. Macrobius calls Der-Ketis ‘the mother of the gods,’ and Syrians, ‘the receptacle of the gods,’ that is, an Erk or Ark, which the fish represented. If we were fully cognisant of the origin of Der-Ketis, it might turn out to be, like the Indian names, a dual or Linga-in Yoni. Thus Brahma, sitting on the lotus, is called Brahma-Yoni, and if Der be the Jovine tree or Oak, Der-Ketis would be simply the bi-sexual name of a supreme god. The mythical Semiramis was a daughter of Der-ketis, who was changed into a dove, and her mother into a fish, showing the close intertwining of all these figures by phallists.”[13]

“Christians were very partial to the fish, but indeed, may be said to have carried on freely all the ancient ideas, as which faith has not after its first attempt at purification? On Christian tombs especially do fish abound, commonly crossed, which reminds us that crossed serpents denote their act of intercourse, and in this symbolism the fish would be very natural and usual, because denoting new life in death. Derceto, the half-fish and half-woman of the temple of the Dea Syria at Hira, was, says Lucian, the perfection of woman; she was the mystic Oanes, Athor, and Venus, whom Egyptians have handed down to us embalmed.

“So the Fathers of the Church have called their flocks Pisciculi, and their high-priest a fisherman; and have given to all cardinals and bishops the fish-head of Dagon.

“The fish is universally worshipped in all lands as the most fecundative of all creatures; and where most valued, the superstitious have offered it in