fishes
The fish occupies a remarkably dense symbolic position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a marker of the unconscious, an emblem of the Self and its redemptive potential, a zodiacal and astrological coordinate, and an index of the ambivalence intrinsic to all archetypal images. Jung’s extended treatment in *Aion* stands as the corpus’s most sustained engagement: there the fish is traced through its Hebrew, Hellenistic, Gnostic, Christian, and alchemical registers, revealing it as a symbol that condenses the coincidentia oppositorum — at once sacred and abominable, eucharistic and devouring, soulish and instinctual. The Ichthys-Christ identification is shown to be inseparable from the precession of the equinoxes into Pisces, grounding soteriology in cosmic time. Von Franz, Edinger, and Neumann extend this ambivalence into fairy tale, clinical dream material, and Egyptian cult respectively, while Greene and Sasportas relocate it within the Neptune–Pisces complex of astrological psychology. Burkert supplies the ethnographic and sacrificial substrate: the sacred fish as simultaneously tabooed and ritually consumed. Across these voices a productive tension persists between the fish as contents of the unconscious (Jung’s ‘one of its contents’, distinct from the serpent as unconscious itself) and the fish as symbol of wholeness, redemption, and the Self’s paradoxical self-disclosure through the instinctual realm.
the symbolism shows Christ and those who believe in him as fishes, fish as the food eaten at the Agape, baptism as immersion in a fish-pond… Christ was regarded as the new aeon… born as the first fish of the Pisces era
Jung argues that early Christian fish symbolism is inseparable from astrological-aeon thinking, with Christ’s appearance marking the inauguration of the Piscean age.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean and an emblem of hatred on the one hand, but on the other it is an object of veneration. It even seems to have been regarded as a symbol for the soul.
Jung establishes the fish’s constitutive ambivalence — simultaneously polluting and sacred, instinctual and soulish — as the key to understanding its persistent symbolic power across cultures.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
As a rule the snake personifies the unconscious, whereas the fish usually represents one of its contents… the snake representing a more primitive and more instinctual state than the fish, which in history as well was endowed with higher authority than the snake.
Jung articulates a developmental hierarchy distinguishing the fish from the serpent: the fish represents a more differentiated, symbolically elevated content of the unconscious than the more primitive snake.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
the two fishes going in opposite directions, or the co-operation of birds and fishes, are an instructive illustration of this. The arcane substance… All this theriomorphism is simply a visualization of the unconscious self manifesting itself through ‘animal’ impulses.
Jung reads the alchemical zodiacal fishes moving in opposite directions as a theriomorphic image of the paradoxical wholeness of the Self, irreducible to rational resolution.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
Fishes have a wide distribution as sepulchral symbols… Devout Israelites who live ‘in the water of the doctrine’ are likened to fishes… The fish also has a Messianic significance. According to the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch, Leviathan shall rise from the sea with the advent of the Messiah.
Jung documents the fish’s messianic and funerary significance across Jewish and early Christian contexts, grounding the ichthys symbol in a broader eschatological symbolism.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
in fish symbolism every conceivable form of devouring concupiscentia is attributed to fishes, which are said to be ‘ambitious, libidinous, voracious, avaricious, lascivious’… they owe these bad qualities most of all to their relationship with the mother- and love-goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Atargatis, or Aphrodite.
Jung traces the fish’s negative symbolic valence — its association with devouring appetite and earthly pleasure — to its mythological connection with the goddess of love and the zodiacal sign of Venus’s exaltation.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
The fish has a soteriological significance whether conceived in Christian or in Indian terms (as the fish of Manu and as an avatar of Vishnu)… From this region comes the fish symbol with its age-old numen.
Jung demonstrates the cross-cultural soteriological function of the fish through a clinical case in which the symbol condenses Christian, Hindu, and Tantric layers, rooting it in the earliest localizations of consciousness.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
The fish symbol has a double aspect. On the one hand it is a cold-blooded creature of the depths and thus represents unconscious instinctuality akin to the dragon. On the other hand it is a symbol for Christ. Thus it symbolizes both the redeemer and that which is to be redeemed.
Edinger crystallizes the fish’s double aspect in clinical dream analysis, showing how it simultaneously figures unconscious instinctuality and redemptive potential within a single symbol.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting
On the second trip the moon is shining and a prickly fish lies on the altar… The fish is famous as a Christian symbol; the apostles were called ‘fishers of men,’ and Christ himself (ichthys) is symbolized by the fish.
Von Franz situates the fish on a fairy-tale altar as an emblem of the feminine principle’s receptive encounter with the unconscious, linking it to both pre-Socratic anthropology and Christian ichthyology.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
We can see from the example of Leviathan how the great ‘fish’ gradually split into its opposite, after having itself been the opposite of the highest God and hence his shadow, the embodiment of his evil side.
Jung traces the splitting of the Leviathan-fish into paired monsters as a mythological process by which God’s inner conflict is externalized, illuminating the shadow dynamics operative within the fish symbol.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
The little fish is her son, Ichthys, which in Greek simply means ‘fish.’ He is a puer figure — young, beautiful, and doomed to early death and subsequent resurrection. His mother simply swallows him, and then he is born again from her mouth.
Greene interprets the Ichthys myth through the puer-Great Mother dyad, showing how the fish-son’s cyclical devouring and rebirth enacts the Neptune complex’s boundless, undifferentiated maternal field.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
Since she was carried ashore by a fish, all fish are sacred to her: the Syrians may not eat them… every day the priests of Atargatis bring to the goddess real fish and set it before her on a table, nicely cooked… and then the priests of the goddess consume the fish themselves.
Burkert documents the ritual ambiguity of the sacred fish in Syrian cult: the tabu against eating fish and the priestly act of consuming them are two faces of the same sacrificial logic.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
The word for ‘abomination’ was a fish sign… the oxyrhynchus fish was both abhorred and venerated. It was supposed to have eaten the phallus of Osiris… The piscine form of Osiris in Abydos confirms that the basic meaning of the maternal element is the fish-containing sea.
Neumann grounds the fish symbol’s ambivalence in Egyptian cult, where the same species is simultaneously the emblem of ritual impurity and a form of Osiris, confirming the fish’s relation to the primordial maternal abyss.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
the man sat by the water and threw out his net and caught a golden fish. As he looked at it in amazement, the fish began to talk and said, ‘Listen, fisherman, if you will throw me back into the water I will turn your hut into a beautiful castle.’
Von Franz presents the golden fish of fairy tale as a figure of the transformative Self arising from the unconscious, whose gift of abundance is contingent on the condition of secrecy — a classic motif of the numinous encounter.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
This round fish is certainly not a fish in the modern sense, but an invertebrate… presumably a scyphomedusa or jellyfish… Our text remarks that when the ‘round fish’ is warmed or cooked on a slow fire it ‘begins to shine.’
Jung’s analysis of the alchemical ‘round fish’ — identified as a radially symmetrical sea-creature whose heating produces luminescence — links the symbol to the Self’s capacity to generate consciousness from the depths of matter.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
He who eats the sacred fish is himself eaten by a sea monster — this is an inversion of what, in the recurrent cycle of ritual, is understood the other way around: because the old man sank into the sea, fish can be caught and eaten.
Burkert reveals the sacrificial logic underlying sacred fish cults: the alternating consumption of fish and consumption by the sea encodes a cyclical ritual structure in which death generates nourishment.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
Joshua is the son of Nun, which is a name for ‘fish,’ suggesting that Joshua had his origin in the depths of the waters, in the darkness of the shadow-world… They had ‘forgotten their fish,’ the humble source of nourishment.
Jung reads Joshua’s patronymic (‘son of fish’) as marking his origin in the shadow-world of unconscious depths, and the ‘forgotten fish’ as the lost connection to the numinous source.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
Then he saw another fish, the nasidjaga, and Trickster spoke to him, ‘Brother, you have always been here in these waters, perhaps you could tell me where the shore is, for I cannot find it.’
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, fish serve as denizens of the undifferentiated aquatic world who share the Trickster’s own disorientation, underscoring the symbolic link between fish and the boundless unconscious.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside