Salmon

The salmon, which returns from the sea to the very river of its birth to spawn, holds a special place in the mythology of the Celtic world. In Irish tradition the Salmon of Knowledge fed on the nine hazelnuts of wisdom that fell into a sacred well, taking into itself all the knowledge of the world; whoever ate the salmon would gain that wisdom. The young Fionn mac Cumhaill acquired it by accident, burning his thumb on the cooking fish and putting it to his mouth, so that ever after he had only to bite his thumb to know what he needed, the salmon standing, throughout Celtic lore, for the deepest wisdom and the oldest memory.

Science has since explained the natural fact behind the salmon's mythic homing: the biologist Arthur Hasler demonstrated in the 1950s and after that salmon imprint on the distinctive chemical signature of their home stream as juveniles and use that memory, detected through smell, to navigate back to the same river, and often the same stretch of gravel, to spawn years later, a genuine olfactory feat that gives literal grounding to the fish's old reputation for carrying the oldest and deepest memory. A species distinction sharpens the myth: the salmon of Irish and British tradition is the Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, which can survive spawning and return to the sea to breed again, unlike the Pacific salmon of the genus Oncorhynchus, which die after their single spawning run, so the fish that carried the deepest wisdom in Celtic lore was, biologically, also one capable of repeating the journey.

The salmon's dramatic life, its long journey home upstream against the current, its leap over falls, and its death after spawning, made it a natural emblem of perseverance, sacrifice and the renewal of life through death. Among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast the salmon is honoured as a giver of life whose annual return sustains whole communities, and the First Salmon rites, in which the first catch of the run is treated with ceremony and its bones returned to the water so that the salmon may come again, belong to those living traditions and are described here from the outside. Wisdom, endurance and the life that is given and renewed all gather to the fish that comes home to die and to begin again.

Pacific salmon runs have collapsed severely across much of their range in the past century, chiefly through dam construction blocking spawning migration, and several distinct populations are now listed under the US Endangered Species Act; the removal of the Elwha River dams in Washington state, completed in 2014 in the largest dam removal project in American history, allowed salmon to reach spawning grounds they had been blocked from for a century, a rare case of a major river being deliberately returned to something closer to its original state for the fish's sake.