Tobey Farts

The symbol is also related to Pythagoras, the 5th century BCE Greek mathematical philosopher and Hermetic mystic. Famous for his right-angled triangle theorem (a2+b2=c2), Pythagoras was also a fan of the sacred number 153. The number has all kinds of nutty properties, too many to be enumerated here, but one is that it’s a narcissistic number-that is, there are three digits; take each digit and since there are three overall, cube each digit (if there were two digits, square them, etc.); then add up the results of those cubes, and you get 153. So 1^3+5^3+3^3=153. That number is important to the vesica piscis.

Pythagoras taught that everything had a center, and a circle could be drawn around any center point. A single circle with a center was the monad, symbolic of the singularity, god, the number that gives rise to all other numbers. To get from a singularity to many (creation), the monad needed to be reflected-mirrored. When the monad is mirrored, it yields two circles sharing each other’s centers, a figure called a dyad. The monad and its twin represent polarities, so if the monad is spirit, its twin is matter. The almond-shaped center of the intersection is a kind of passage through which spirit and matter are unified. This is where the Jesus fish comes in. If you take just the outline of that almond-shaped intersection and a little of the bottom of the respective circles (up to where the center point would cut off the line), you get the famous fish shape.

The width-to-height ratio of the fish symbol is 265:153, and there’s the sacred number again. Take that ratio, 265 divided by 153, and you get a very near approximation of the square root of three, which Archimedes would use in developing his calculation of π. That becomes more important when we see Ms. Hawking’s pendulum.