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One of the most colorful of Lovecraft's
fictitious sects is the "Esoteric Order of Dagon", which plays a part
in "The Shadow over Inns-mouth". This "was undoubtedly a debased,
quasi-pagan thing imported from the East", a "local mystery cult"
which insured a good yield of fish to the seaport town year after year.
According to the cult's belief, "All in the band of the faithful . . .
[should] never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra and Father Dagon [whom] we
all [came] from [once]." In "The Shadow over Innamouth", this
Dagon is likely merely a pseudonym for Cthulhu, as the latter is invoked by
Zadok Alien immediately following his mention of "Father Dagon":
"lä! lä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl
fhtagn." This last is, of course, the liturgy of Cthulhu cultists in
"The Call of Cthulhu", and in "Shadow" it is said of
Innsmouth's Deep Ones that "they would rise again for the tribute Great
Cthulhu craved." Thus Cthulhu would seem to be the real object of worship
of the "Order of Dagon".
"Dagon" is merely a
conventionalized name (familiar from the Old Testament) masking the alien
worship of unknown Cthulhu. We can observe the same sort of thing in "The
Dreams in the Witch House", where what seems to be conventional
Satan-worship is actually the cult of Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. Finally, the
gigantic amphibian form glimpsed in the short tale "Dagon", is
identified with "the Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God." Since
this story is the prototype for "The Call of Cthulhu", this fishy
titan is CthuIhu's own prototype; thus here, too, "Dagon" is Cthulhu.
As most readers will know, writers
subsequent to Lovecraft have made Dagon into a demi-god subservient to Cthulhu,
and the father of the Deep Ones. We judge these developments to be gratuitous.
But so much for the post-history of Dagon; we wish to examine briefly the
prehistory of the "Philistine Fish-God". Who was the real Father
Dagon?
Dagon (or "Dagan") is a very
ancient god, being the chief divinity in the pantheon of Ebla in the third millennium
B.C. There he was venerated as "Lord of the gods", "Lord of
Canaan", and protector of cities. Fundamentally he seems to have been a
fertility god, as his name means either "cloud, rain" (Giovanni
Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla, p. 246) or "corn" (J. Gray,
"Dagon", The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. I, p.
756).
By the second millennium B.C., Dagon's
worship is attested across the Middle East, but he seems to have lost just a bit
of his divine dignity. By the middle of this millennium, his preeminence as a
fertility god has passed to Baal, and he shares with Baal a position subordinate
to El, now the head of the Canaanite pantheon.
During the first millenium B.C. Dagon
was worshipped most notably by the Philistines, as described in some famous
stories found in the Bible. The Book of Judges recounts Samson's destruction of
the temple of Dagon, and I Samuel shows the similarly destructive effects of the
Ark of the Covenant on Dagon's statue, again in a Philistine temple. Obviously,
biblical writers bore little love for the idolatrous worship of Dagon. Finally,
Jonathan of the heroic Maccabean brothers destroyed Dagon's temple in Ashdod in
147 B.C.
The attentive reader will have noticed
the absence of any mention of fish-like attributes from this sketch of Dagon.
Where did HPL get the "Fish-God" business? Tondrian and Villeneuve, in
their Devils and Demons, a Dictionary of Demonology, claim that Dagon was
imagined by the Philistines in the form of "a merman", but this
conception comes instead from late folklore and reflects "popular etymology
unsupported by any known facts" (Gray, p. 756). The earliest known
reference to Dagon as half-fish occurs in the works of David Kimchi (1200 A.D.),
and the more general association with a fish can be traced as far back as Jerome
(ca. 400 A. D.). But in comparative terms, this is not very far back. The great
Old Testament scholar Julius Wellhausen tried to find a reference to Dagon's
"fishiness" in I Samuel 5:4 ("only the trunk of [the statue of]
Dagon was left to him") by emending the Hebrew so that it read "only
his fishy part was left on him." But most modern Bible translations have
not followed him in this.
As we have seen, the fertility
connection is solidly rooted in both biblical and archaeological evidence, while
the fish association is not. Of course, the two are not necessarily
incompatible. As Jessie Weston has shown, the fish can in fact be a fertility
symbol, but in the case of Dagon, the connection is never made in our sources.
The upshot of all this is that Lovecraft is most likely mistaken in making Dagon
as a "Fish-God" a part of "Philistine legend".
Dagon ceased to be worshipped, save at
Innsmouth, but he did linger in garbled form in the Christian era in the
catalogues of medieval demonologists. There he was demoted to the chief baker or
cupbearer in Hell! Considering that thousands of years before, he had been
venerated as the ultimate god in Ebla, this is quite a drop! "How the
mighty are fallen!"
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