The Seba library treats Atargatis in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Burkert, Walter, Liz Greene).
They owe these bad qualities most of all to their relationship with the mother- and love-goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Atargatis, or Aphrodite. As the planet Venus, she has her ‘exaltatio’ in the zodiacal sign of the fishes.
Jung identifies Atargatis as one of the mother-and-love-goddesses whose numinous eroticism and voracity are the ultimate source of the fish’s opprobrious yet sacred symbolic qualities in the Pisces aeon.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
Every day the priests of Atargatis bring to the goddess real fish and set it before her on a table, nicely cooked, both boiled and roasted, and then the priests of the goddess consume the fish themselves.
Burkert uses the Atargatis fish-cult to demonstrate that sacred taboo and sacrificial consumption are structurally inseparable: fish are holy precisely because they are eaten in a communal ritual meal with the goddess.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
Whether queen Ku-Ba’u, the fishermen’s friend, has something to do with the goddess Kubaba, Kybebe — Kybele, is a matter for debate.
Burkert situates the Atargatis fish-offering tradition within a broader Near Eastern complex connecting sacred fish, temple ritual, and the Great Goddess under her multiple Syro-Anatolian names.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
The dismembered Christ is ritually eaten, his blood ritually drunk; in this sense he is the direct descendant of Attis, Tammuz and Adonis, and his early death on the cross of wood, the tree-symbol of the Mother, is a fated death.
Greene places the sacrificial redeemer-son mythology — the wider mythological environment in which Atargatis’s cult of the dying god operates — at the theological centre of Pisces symbolism, though she does not name Atargatis directly.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside