As regards Lent, A. de Gubernatis contends that Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of Love[700], 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) we are enjoined to eat fish, of which, it must be remembered, Aphrodite was a patron goddess.
As regards Maunday Thursday, Robinson writes: “One of the annual Church disbursements up to the end of the sixteenth century was for herrings, ‘red and white.’ Let us hope that those who in pious observation of Christian ordinances thus charged themselves with phosphorus were not aware that they were simply perpetuating the worship of Venus.[701] Friday, again, is dies Veneris, and fish, her own symbol, is therefore appropriate for the day.”
Of the making and explaining of symbols in early and mediæval times there is no end. The monkish mind, perhaps owing to environment and fasting, found this a congenial and pleasant pursuit.
Among the books on this subject, Mundus Symbolicus, although, or perhaps because, published in 1681, attracts me most, not merely by its fulness of information and of quotation from classical, Patristic, and mediæval literature—it is a good competitor with Burton’s Anatomy for Collectanea—but also by the number and naïveté of its lemmata, or appropriate apophthegms, which appeal alike to one’s ignorance and one’s humour. Of 737 pages of the volume before me 43 concern themselves solely with fish, and provide delightful browsing.[702]
The object and practice of Picinelli, from whose Il Mondo Simbolico Erath makes the Latin translation, is to examine into the habits, real or alleged, of each fish, and deduce, as was the frequent custom of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from its delinquencies or virtues a moral lesson or lessons.
Thus the lemma, “Fallacis fructus amoris,” not inaptly summarises the amatory character of the Sargus, as indicated in my chapter on Tackle. Nor, again, is the author far astray with his lemma for the Monachus or Monk fish (a name derived from the hood on its head)—“Habitum non virtutem”—which recalls the mediæval jeer, “The cowl makyth not the Monk,” and Oscar Wilde’s description—half-echoing Browning—of the pike as “some mitred old bishop in partibus.” Of the Monk fish—also Bishop fish—a well intended representation can be found in the pages of the learned Gesner.
Under Salmo, when suffering from leeches or gill-maggots, the author provides us not only with the lemma, “Hæret ubique” and the appropriate, if not quite original, reflection of St. Bernard that conscience is like the leech which ceaseth not night nor day from making its presence felt, but also with a vivid description of a kelt dying—“donec toto corpore tabescat.”
Any connection between a salmon and a swallow (hirundo) for a moment seemed a new ichthyic revelation! The context, however, and not least St. Bernard’s pointing of the moral, led to the discovery of the misprint of hirundibus for hirundinibus (‘leeches’).
With one more passage I regretfully leave Picinelli, or rather Erath. The collocation of the rose and fish held in the hand of Cupid, which Alciatus “non sine mysterio instruxisset,” occasioned “the erudite” and anonymous epigram (p. 671) showing that Love resembles the rose and the fish. This apparent incongruity finds explanation thuswise: while each has prickly points, the first fades in a day and the second is incapable of being tamed—a comparison which, if unique, ignores the Egyptian and Roman powers of domestication.[703]
“Symbola adulantum cernis, Rosa, Piscis amorum,[704] Non sane unius Symbola certa mali. Nam Rosa verna suis non est sine sentibus, idem Piscis habet spinas intus et ipse suas. Pulchra Rosa est, verum illa brevi fit marcida, piscis Est ferus, esse aliqua nec cicur arte potest.”