'Fishing from the earliest times' contains two well-documented chapters on fish
in the Graeco-Roman civilisation.
In the Mediterranean world, three influences, originally proceeding from three
distinct racial stocks, of which the first was non Aryan and the two others
Aryan, can be identified; The first, the most ancient, is made up of non-, pre-,
and potentially anti-Aryan layers, while the second consists of racial elements
which differentiated from the Aryan stock in pre-historic times, and which had
already degenerated to some extent before they reached the threshold of history
; the third, consisting of much purer elements which entered history in later
times, created Rome (Panorama razziale dell'Italia preromana). As to the more or
less direct ancestors of these two latter stocks, namely the Indo-Aryans, there
is no evidence whatsoever that they consumed fish, when archaeological findings
have revealed that the craft of fishing possesses a very ancient ancestry among
Asian or African peoples. Concerning Indo-European Nordic tribes - no research
has confirmed the vague references made by Cesar and Pliny to Germanic tribes
involved in fishing -, some scholars, out of desperation, are reduced to arguing
that it is impossible that a people lived for centuries on the shores of the
Baltic without itself taking to fishing.
What on earth does Tantrism, which "has archaic exogenous origins, and it
traces its roots to an autochthonous spirituality that is visibly analogous to
that of the protohistoric, pelasgic, and pre-Hellenic Mediterranean world" ('The
Yoga of Power, p.5), got to do with the issue ?
--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "Hyperborean" <hyperborean@...> wrote:
>
> Nothing is ever so simple.
> For Tantric practice, fish was one of the ritual items to consume. It
> was forbidden, hence the lack of references to fish eating.
> Also, the ancient Greeks considered fish to be a delicacy, as would be
> expected considering the wonderful fish available in the
> Mediterranean.As for Homer, this may provide a possible explanation:
> Homeric Heroes and Fish
> <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/CJ/12/5/Homeric_Heroes_a\
> nd_Fish*.html>
>
>
>
> --- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "Evola" <evola_as_he_is@>
> wrote:
> >
> > Each of these points, which have been discussed here more or less at
> length, except food's, and, more particularly, fish's, deserves further
> study. Keeping to this particular point, it is worth noting that cognate
> names for fishes are almost lacking in the Indo-Germanic languages. It
> seems that "it is only after their separation that the Indo-Germanic
> peoples seem to have turned their attention to fishing, and to have
> acquired a taste for fish as food. In the hymns of the Rigveda, fishing
> is still wholly unknown (cf. Zimmer, Altindisches Lehen, p. 26) ; and
> so, too, in the Homeric period it is only in times of extremity that
> fish is used by the heroes as food (Od. xii. 330 ; iv. 368)"
> (Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples, p. 118) So fish seems to
> have been unknown as food in the primeval Indo-European period. "As a
> rule fishing appears in close conjunction with the beginnings of
> navigation, indeed often is the starting-point of it. It must,
> therefore, be once more insisted upon that in the vocabulary of the
> original Indo-European language there is neither a collective term for
> the general notion of fish, nor an individual name for any particular
> kind of fish." (ibid., p. 354)
> >
> > The fact that, according to Bede, St Wilfrid taught Northumbrians
> stricken by famine "how to get food by fishing, for both the sea and the
> rivers abounded with fish but the people had no knowledge of fishing
> except for eels alone" seems to indicate that the ancient Britons did
> not consume much fish. In fact, it would seem they stuck mostly to eels
> (The history of the Anglo-Saxons from the earliest period to the Norman
> Conquest, Volume 2 , p. 198).
> >
> > No reference is made to proto-Germans nor to early Germans in W.
> rRdcliffe's 'Fishing from the earliest times'
> http://archive.org/details/fishingfromearli00radc
> >
>