Ichthys as Self

The early Christian fish is, in Aion, a symbol of the self before the Self had a psychological name. “Above all it is the connections with the age of the Fishes which are attested by the fish symbolism, either contemporaneously with the gospels themselves (‘fishers of men,’ fishermen as the first disciples, miracle of loaves and fishes), or immediately afterwards in the post-apostolic era. The symbolism shows Christ and those who believe in him as fishes, fish as the food eaten at the Agape” (Jung 1951, §147). The symbol’s activation in the first centuries does not, Jung argues, derive from the written tradition — it arises from a “second source,” which is astrological: the precession of the equinoxes into the sign of Pisces at the opening of the Christian aeon (Jung 1951, §128).

The fish carries the Self because the Self, like the fish, arrives from below — from the unconscious waters, from the maternal deep, from a realm the conscious mind does not yet contain. Jung draws the symbolic line from Christian fish through alchemical fish to the lapis-philosophorum: “the alchemical fish symbolism leads direct to the lapis, the salvator, servator, and deus terrenus; that is, psychologically, to the self. We now have a new symbol in place of the fish: a psychological concept of human wholeness. In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God” (Jung 1951, §286). The ichthys-as-self is thus the Piscean aeon’s first image of totality, and the hinge on which the Gnostic-alchemical transmission preserved that totality when the official Church could not.

Relationships

• jung-aion
• self
• christ-as-archetype
• lapis-philosophorum
• piscean-aeon

Primary sources

• jung-aion (Jung 1951, §128, §147, §174, §286)