Lucas, Alex, and James revisit Dagon, Lovecraft's first eldritch horror, to discover how some monsters have origin stories stretching back to the beginning of time itself.

Read the transcript and get more from the show: https://scintilla.studio/monster-bonus-dagon/ 

Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio

Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

Meet my guests: https://twitter.com/Aclippinger 

Music by Audionautix: www.audionautix.com

Hi.

Wow.

Hello.

Hey Alex!

Welcome back.

have you listened to the episode?

Yeah.

What'd you think?

Good, it came out great.

I'm excited to have you back, because there is more that needs to

be said about Dagon and, I wanted to have you here to, work through it.

at the risk of going beyond the limits of our own expertise, let's get into it.

So when we did our episode, we talked about how Dagon is one of these

legacy monsters that's in Dungeons & Dragons that the company has tried

to make a bit more Dungeons and dragons in each subsequent iteration.

and I thought that was a really interesting point.

and it was well-made and I'm glad it's part of the conversation now,

so I was satisfied.

I was like, excellent.

Now people will hear this podcast about thinking more deeply about

your monsters and not forsaking the history that's behind them.

And then I put it on Reddit.

which is always a mistake.

Reddit pointed out to me my own shortcomings.

Actually before we get into that,

I've done some research.

And by that I mean furious Googling.

I want to trace Dagon's journey as we discovered it so far.

So, first came out.

In, 2006 Fiendish Codex 1, Hoards of the Abyss, that was published in June.

And then after that James Jacobs, who was an editor and writer for

Paizo started publishing a series of, articles in Dragon Magazine.

He called them the Demonomicon of Iggwilv and they were supposedly

excerpts from that book.

So we got Dagon in issue 349, that was November 2006 was when we

got Dagon in Dungeons & Dragons.

Cthulhu, the eponymous cosmic deity, appeared first in first edition.

I think I have the title of that book as well.

Was that Deities and Demigods?

It was!

Yeah, that's actually, I know that little bit of trivia, cause

I know that's a controversial thing that he was originally in that book.

And then in other editions of that book was removed because there were some,

I think some copyright clash maybe with, the people who make Chaosium.

They pushed back a little bit sometimes on big companies using Cthulhu and some

other stuff, since they're like the Call of Cthulhu people,

they're very protective.

that's how Lovecraft got into Dungeons and Dragons.

So we have, as Morrell is encyclopedia, we have fiendish codex.

We have the demon Omnicon , we have dailies and Demi gods and that's

the whole story back to Lovecraft.

It goes deeper.

Oh, no.

Dagon was not the first story that Lovecraft published there was one before

I think it was called the Alchemist.

but this one was the first one to really embrace the themes

that he became known for.

it's in the public domain, it being 1919.

So you can find the full text online.

Alex, I didn't read this story.

Before I published the episode.

if I had, there's a couple of things that I would have found.

In brief, this story is about a castaway who is lost in a storm and comes on this

Island in the middle of the Pacific.

that is impossible to find again, but on which is a huge, obelisk carved

with images of Protean men worshiping something, and then he sees it.

This is what he writes about the creature that he sees:

"With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing

slid into view above the dark waters, vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome,

it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith about

which it flung its gigantic scaly arms.

The, while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.

I think I went mad then."

That's a Friday night for me.

Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon who was a Cyclops, which is where I

think we got those, giant clawed arms that we saw in that portrayal of Dagon.

So already we've got like the same things you described - this undersea monolith,

these grotesque carvings, these arms, blurring the line between human and

fish creature, this vast size - and I thought, all right, we've got him.

That's where he came from.

Right.

It gets deeper.

It's like the Marianas Trench of origin stories.

It really is.

It really is.

one of the last lines in this story, and this is where I should have really

picked up on this, it says, "Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist and amused

him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legends of Dagon

the fish, God, this is the moment.

This is the thing that I missed.

I can't let this go because they can't introduce Dagon into this Pantheon

and say he's a D&D creature but also a Lovecraft creature, without recognizing

that Lovecraft has stolen this idea of a primeval fish God straight

from ancient Canaanite religions.

Now we have to talk about that.

I'm hoping to get someone who can speak a little bit more to Canaanite religion.

Obviously not a topic for a layman.

My name is, James Harrington.

did my undergrad, in the Torrey Honors College at Bayola University.

My major is history - European history.

Went on to do a master's degree in history at California state

university for 10 focusing on the ancient world and, the, colonial

world of Southeast Asia and China.

also, I guess you could add, I got Bible minor aside from that, I've

been a high school teacher for 12 years now, I work freelance.

that's kinda how I come by my chops.

I'm working backwards from Dagon's publication history in

Dungeons and dragons, which is a yeah.

Do you play.

yeah, he used to, just having any way to play

a game with in a while, but yep.

TSR, I can remember being at camp and we all play Dungeons and dragons

and, I've had some fun playing in all their different worlds.

Lovecraft's first story about day gone all day gone.

was written in 1917.

And saw printed in 1919.

So you have to remember, he's only a generation away from a lot

of the great Indiana-Jones-type archeologists of the 19 hundreds.

heinrich Fleeman had , just discovered Troy in the late 18 hundreds.

Arthur Evans was doing his work on Crete.

the whole era of Greece bronze age, it was all supposed to be fictional until

Arthur Schliemann went around with a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey and

just dug where they were supposed.

Those places were supposed to be , the golden age of biblical archeology was

going on when Lovecraft was in his thirties and forties and even later,

so if you can imagine all that swirling round, that's one of the reasons he

could leap on a figure like D agon and bring it out of the pages of the Bible.

And out of, obscure temple inscriptions, this is something

about the way ancient religion works.

we way to systematize this thing the big thing is we're used

to pantheons of gods, right?

We know that the Greeks have 12: Zeus, there's Hera,

there's Apollo, there's Artemis.

They all have these, these teammates is the Greek word for it.

These honors, these, boundaries that, uh, writers like Homer

and Hessiod set for them.

Artemis is the goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Dungeons & Dragons would use the word "domains" for the same idea.

yeah.

And that's a good translation of, of TMA.

what would have been the team us, or the domain , of Dagon at the time?

Now here's where it gets tricky.

So as Sumerians, remember that there are just a whole bunch of city States.

and they're a successive culture.

You've got the Babylonian empire, you've got the Assyrian empire.

these emperors are destroyed and rebuilt in the Neo-Babylonian Empire,

and they're never connoisseur.

we can't really say a lot about, they gone, , dig on maybe Lord fish for a buck.

Have you seen those pictures?

Like children's Bibles with the Ark of the covenant and all that so we don't know

if Dagon is Lord fish or a butter or not.

to one of these cultures, you may event others, not, and it's really frustrating

because you know, we want an archetype.

One of the reasons we use the classical model, of a Pantheon of

gods each have distinct domains, we really like that sense of order

and archetypes, we like that.

It's nice and orderly.

those were what you do when you don't believe in the gods anymore.

Polytheistic culture has many different ways of interacting

with the divine or the spiritual.

Only one of those is going to be written down in the formal mythologies.

And that may tell you absolutely nothing about what people

actually believe about the gods.

It may tell you a lot about their ideals.

It may tell you a lot about.

State religion.

And that's the point.

Lovecraft could pick up a god like Dagon who hasn't gone through the

machine of literature - this is where Gregory Nosh comes in the gods of Epic.

The gods of literature should not be confused with the gods

of everyday worship, just because they have the same name.

they're different functions in society.

so then it would be fair to say that, he chose Dagon in

order to maximize his ability to embody the fear of the unknown.

Yes, and remember, can you see the racism behind that?

Remember that this is a Semitic deity.

So it doesn't come from Western culture.

it has, terror to it.

That for the racists of that time period, is associated with

racial stereotypes about Semites being spiritual versus rational,

emotional rather than analytical.

decadent, money-loving instead of self controlled,

so if you see that underlying racist, Stangle there.

If you know how to read the code to there is another sinister element

from, to choose a Semitic deity, so to Rorschach, but whatever he wants on day

gone, because he's not as formalized, but he can also insinuate a lot in the

racist, colonialist culture of his day.

so by making dig on not just a monster, but a God of

monsters, he's declaring it.

And all things that he associates with it to be other and outside

and to be feared or rejected.

Yep.

I remember that.

this was a time, especially in 1919, you have to remember that Woodrow Wilson,

who was president, then he had actually segregated the federal government.

Prior to Woodrow Wilson, the federal government was racially integrated.

Woodrow Wilson being a southerner and ardent, ardent, ardent, believer

in racial science and eugenics as a progressive, um, I mean, that's why he

he's known his, name's no longer on the, the Woodrow Wilson Institute of public

policy at Princeton and the guy was sick.

he came in and segregated these, the civil service and had everything

separate for whites and for blacks.

again, the fear being that, people who were not like you might have diseases that

you could get and it would wipe you out.

yeah, this is why you were, you had a swimming pool for coloreds

and yet the swimming pool for whites, they would've said,

for guys like us, you know, this is just staggering.

Our country has a lot of work to do, but we've also made some changes,

since our parents generation or our grandparents generation.

And if we go back to our great grandparents generation,

which would be Lovecraft.

you can just see how toxic these things were and that's one of

the reasons to read Lovecraft.

He can help you through story, get your mind into the warped, sick headspace.

That was really just our, great grandparents generation.

I mean, coming from Connecticut, I still know more ethnic slurs for different

kinds of white people than to admit.

we used to trade them like baseball cards when I was growing up.

Um, so if you look at love craft, you really remember where this

is coming from, and that maybe I could tell a half fat at it.

to my mom.

It wasn't funny.

I mean, she got made fun of at school for being Quebecois.

Dagon shows up in at least three places in the Bible.

One is in judges 1623.

We're told that he's a God of the Philistines were constantly at war with

the Israelites in the old Testament.

he is in first Samuel five , Which is a fantastic story where the Philistines

captured the Ark of the covenant, which is meant to be you always presence

among his people, the Israelites, and they treat it with a lot of respect

by bringing it to the temple of Dagon.

And then their image of Dagon is found face down with its

hands broken off in the morning.

honestly, it's, it's great comedy by biblical standards.

it's also in first Chronicles, 10.

there's a mention of a temple of Dagon in which the head of King Saul was fastened.

So not only is Dagon, like a God of the Philistines, he's kind

of the god of the Philistines.

He's, he's the one to which they give the, best things that they get from battle,

King Saul's head and the Ark of the covenant are

pretty, capital B capital D big deals.

Here's the other place where he's not mentioned specifically, but

archeologists tell us that there were temples of Dagon and the fish got

goddess Nanshe in the city of Nineveh, which was the Syrian capital a little,

a little bit later in the Bible.

Nineveh of course, is the city to which Jonah was sent as a prophet.

And on the way he is swallowed by a great fish.

Everybody knows that part of the story.

The thing that I missed that this taught me, which like, how did I miss this?

After his three days in the fish, he was spat up by that fish onto the

dry land within sight of the city, to which he was to be a prophet, a city

that worships a great fish, a prophet.

Now that has been carried by a great fish by the icon of their God, to their door.

You think people are going to listen to this guy.

I mean, I'm not going to go.

Maybe it's so far as to say, Jonah great old one warlock pact, but.

it's like, you don't get that from a Sunday morning flannel graph.

And with this, I thought, for sure, surely now I have found.

The bottom, like this is the great truth at the bottom of Dagon

Don't say that, don't say the line.

Are you gonna, you're about to say the line.

Aren't

it goes deeper.

on.

No.

I'm going to go to the very end of the Bible.

There's a scene in revelations 13 where, at the end of time.

In the prophet John's account of that, a beast rises up out of the

sea to take dominion over the earth,

this is where we start to realize why.

The Canaanites and the Israelites may have been so diametrically opposed

because the sea in this instance represents the separation between the

Hebrew God and Shalom and the abyss and all that is not part of Shalom.

Am I way off.

No, that's totally true.

And Semitic, religion, especially as it's used as a metaphor in Genesis

and later in the Hebrew Bible, all the way through revelation, the sea

is, a symbol of chaos and you're going to see, you know, like TMR being the

great abyss in some of the Semitic,

Well, hold on.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

TMI from D and D you have the dragon

and that's the word?

yeah, this is huge and submit it culture, that the sea is driven

back by one of the gods, take your pick, who slays the great dragon Tiamat or Rahab

or a Leviathan, and thus brings order.

so here, we've got like, surely this is, this is the basis.

Meaning we can find . It gets deeper.

cut that out.

Stop

if we go clear to the other end of that book in Genesis Genesis

one, the creation account given there is that, the earth was without

form and void and the spirit of God moved on the face of the deep.

The word for deep, there is also translated Abyss.

Nice.

Nice.

Nice.

Just, just hand it just now, just hand it to me with a little

bow, nice little bow on top.

And that I think is about as far down as we can possibly go

to the beginning of time itself.

my whole thing here is to, I consider it a conservation effort.

For people who only know Dagon or Tiamat from Dungeons & Dragons,

we're losing access to all of this rich meaning and context.

if we never look beneath that, and that's what I'm trying to

bring back with this project.

just like a, Hey wow.

There's like a whole second pizza under this pizza.

yeah.

Bonus pizza.

man.

That was wild.

That was, that was a journey.

Well, thanks for taking the time to go on that with me.

I appreciate it.