Fishhead entities

This article contains mentions of drowning.

The Iwati culture believes that fish in schools are similar to their understanding of the many beings that exist inside a single body. The idea of fish working together to achieve common goals, especially protecting against predators, has a lot of appeal for naturally plural people.
Ordinarily, fish that school are not prepared for consumption, and any fish has its head removed quickly during the food preparation process to prevent suffering for the animal.
It has been said that there are side effects for people who dare eat fish with their heads still on.

In Literature

There are several folk stories about body families who decided to eat fish with their heads still on. The most common consequence of a character's actions is that a fish entity joins the body family when the fish's spirit is transferred from the fish's body into the body of the person who ate it.
The species of the spirit does not usually matter. Many body families consist of different species working together, but schooling fish are not adapted for living in the kinds of environments most Iwati people find themselves in: ones that require breathing air.
The fish entity can become confused and seek water immediately, which can include jumping into large bodies of water unprepared. The lack of gills can become a source of deep and intense physical dysphoria, causing depression, and can even result in some drowning themselves in their attempts to find relief. If someone were to have acquired a schooling fish entity in their body family, then their fish entity may desperately desire to be surrounded by other fish and may find touch starvation to be lethal.
The most popular story is a play about Hutlab (a name simply meaning "fish"), who ate three fish with their heads on and gained three fish entities in their body family. The fish overpowered the existing members of the body family and threw themselves into the water and refused to leave. Hutlab swam in the currents of the river until their dead body flowed out to the open ocean.

Related Ethnicities

• Iwati

Related Locations

• Iwatik

Related Organizations

• Fish Spiritualism