“On walls, as well as tombstones, we find the Fish, Phœnix, Anchor, Ship, Olive and Palm, all of which are sacred to the God of Fertility or the procreative energies. The fish, we are told, was adopted by those Christians because of the alphabetical rebus—the Greek word I. K. Th. U. S. containing the initial letters of the words forming this title in Greek, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour;’ but Ikthus was a holy name in Egypt and the East, long ere Greece had adopted her varied faiths, and long before the good Nazarene had preached his holy gospel in the wilds of Judea. The Hebrew for fish is Dg, Dag or De-ag, which some think may have sprung from the Sanscrit De-Dev, and Ag or Ab, and be allied to the solar Ak, and Aqua, water. Dagan was the fish-god (Alheim) of the Philistines, and spelling Dag backwards as was so common and natural, seeing some peoples read from right to left, and others from left to right, we get Gad, the good one, that is God or Goddess of Day, as in Isa. lxv. 11, where, in connection with Meni the moon, we read: ‘Ye are they that prepare a table for Gad, and that furnish the offering unto Meni;’ which Bagster’s Comprehensive Bible admits to be stars or such objects. Dag, says Calmet, signifies Preserver, and so Saviour, which has many ancient connections with fish and water, as we see in the case of Dagon. St. Augustine said of Christ: ‘He is the great Fish that lives in the midst of the waters;’ so no wonder that Ichthus, a fish, should become a holy term, and applied to Christ’s representative, who in token wears a Poitrine as his higher officers wear what is called a mitre or turban like a fish’s mouth. Christ, being a Hebrew, of course received the title Ikthus from his Greek followers, just as he got I.H.S.—the monogram of Bacchus—from those who forsook that god to follow Christianity. There is nothing sacred about such matters. Ich or Ik, or Ak == Ab, at once Our Father and water; and in India the fish is the god of the water, and so we have Dev-ab, from which may come Deg-an or Dagon. The Greeks, of course, used Thus or theus, and so Ik-theus or God-Ik; at any rate Christians have made Ik-thus a veritable God, and water its element a very holy thing. The most ancient Keltic tongues seem to identify the two, for water in Gaelic is Uisge, the water of life being Wisge (whiskey), and a fish Iasg, or in old Irish, Iska or Ischa, which is an Eastern term for Jesus. If V or F—the digamma is here admissible, then we arrive very near our own word Fish. Perhaps Vishnoo, Viçnu or Fishnoo, is responsible here, for he is the first who rises out of the water, and from a fish; and from his first incarnation to his last, he is always connected with both.”[3]
“Fish” says Moule, “have often been made the vehicle of religious instruction, and for this purpose all the fine arts have been put in requisition. Amongst many pictures by the first masters in which the finny tribe are introduced, that of Saint Anthony, of Padua, preaching to the fish, may be mentioned. This fine picture, by Salvator Rosa, is in the collection at Althorp House, in Northamptonshire; the sermon itself is given in Addison’s Travels in Italy.
“On the conventual seal of Glastonbury Abbey are represented the figures of Saint Dunstan between Saint Patrick and Saint Benignus; each has his emblem beneath his feet; the last has a party of fish: perhaps, adds the historian of the abbey, he also preached to them, as Saint Anthony did.
“A fish furnishing the University of Cambridge with a religious feast was the occasion of a tract, entitled ‘Vox Piscis; or, the Book-fish;’ containing three treatises which were found inside a cod fish in Cambridge market, on Midsummer Eve, 1676. This fish is said to have been taken in Lynn deeps, and after finding a book within it, the fish was carried by the bedel to the vice-chancellor; and coming as it did at the commencement, the very time when good learning and good cheer were most expected, it was quaintly remarked, that this sea guest had brought his book and his carcass to furnish both.
“In the arms of the city of Glasgow, and in those of the ancient see, a salmon with a ring in its mouth is said to record a miracle of St. Kentigern, the founder of the see and the first bishop of Glasgow. On the reverse of Bishop Wishart’s seal in the reign of Edward II., this supposed allusion to the legendary story of St. Kentigern appears for the first time.”
Some of the early bishops of Glasgow displayed the figure of a salmon, either on the sides of or below the shield of arms on their seals, a circumstance which may be accounted for, without reference to a miracle, as depicting the produce of the Clyde. The revenue of the church of Glasgow at the Reformation included one hundred and sixty-eight salmon arising from the franchise or fishing in that river.
James Cameron, Lord Privy Seal to King James I. of Scotland and bishop of Glasgow in 1462, bore on his episcopal seal the figure of St. Kentigern in a tabernacle, below which are his paternal arms, three bars, having a salmon with a ring in its mouth on either side of the shield, which is surmounted by the mitre. The ring is, perhaps, a type of the annular money, then current among the Britons.
“It is curious to note how the emblem of the same fish has continued to enter into the composition of the Glasgow arms and those of the ecclesiastical establishment.
“The diocese of Glasgow was erected into an archbishopric in 1491, with Galloway, Argyll and the Isles as suffragans. James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow and abbot of Dumfermline, the uncle of Cardinal Beaton, died primate of Scotland in 1539. Many munificent marks of his public spirit and piety long resisted time, and remained after the cathedral ceremonies had been deserted for the plain offices of the kirk of Scotland.
“On the walls of the Episcopal Palace or Castle of Glasgow were sculptured the arms of Beaton—azure, a fess between three mascles, or, quartered with Balfour, argent, on a chevron sable and otter’s head erased of the first, and below the shield, a salmon with a ring in its mouth, as represented on the seals of his predecessors.