ABSTRACT
Wednesday eventually vanished as a day of abstinence in most of Christianity and the list of forbidden foods was reduced to mammals and birds. The Catholic church’s giving up the traditional requirement to give up meat on Fridays had some severe economic repercussions: according to Frederick W. Bell, a former chief of economic research at the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, it most probably “had a negative influence on fish prices and therefore industry revenues create economic problems for many small communities along the coastal United States”. Three narratives of catching, cooking or releasing fishes suggest that the Pythagorean religious concept of transmigration, in which an immortal soul of a departed being transmigrates into another body including that of an animal and the related Hindu concept of reincarnation together with the Hindu virtues of non-harming (ahimsa) and compassion (karuna) produce more benign consequences for fishes than the biblical admonition to “have dominion over the fish of the sea”.
