Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

WHY SOME SACRED P—TOTEMISM 329But Robinson, disagreeing with Robertson Smith and Frazerin their conception of Totemism, denies that these fish weretotems in any proper sense.Primitive man performs an actof positive sacrifice when he devotes to the religious tribal ideathe best fish of the waters, and thenceforth abstains fromeating them ; whereas the Egyptians shabbily denied themselvesonly the refuse. They made that sacred which theycould not eat. All the evidence tends to the suspicion thatthe gods were put off by the priests with the very worst of thefish. If a species were poisonous or belonged to a class that wasunwholesome, it was straightway declared sacred. 1Speaking from my own experience and purely on palatalgrounds, had Ibeen High Priest I should have banned nearlyall Nile fishes for their insipidity and muddiness. Tastes,of course, differ. The Lates is passable, but the Oxyrhynchusattracts no opsophagist devotees, which is probably the fault of" The Creator of all things good " in either the temperature ofhis water or the character of their food, since a cousin, 0.mormyrus, geographically not far removed, is ranked byepicures as delicious. 2The reason assigned by the priests to Plutarch for theabstention from and local veneration of the Oxyrhynchus,Phagrus, and Lepidotus possesses, whatever its truth, the charmof an antiquity reaching back to the dawn of goddom.After the slaying of Osiris by Typho, Isis made unweariedsearch for his body. But she could never recover his privatepart, for it had been flung into the Nile, and eaten by theLepidotus, the Phagrus, and the Oxyrhynchus ": fish which ofall others, for this reason, the Egyptians have in more especialavoidance. But Isis made its effigies, and so consecrated thephallos, for which the Egyptians to this day observe a festival." 3The same author vouches for the veneration of the Oxyrhynchus,as shown by the people of the city named after that fish ;" they will not touch any kind of fish that have been takenwith an angle, for they are afraid lest perhaps the hook may be^ op. cit., p. 37.^ The Mormyri, which number some loo species, are pecuHar to Africa,2 De Iside et Osiride, i8.