LEXICON - D

DAEMONOLORUM.

Book which may have been written around the year 200. It tells of an Egyptian sect that believed its gods could take on a human form. ("The Brood of Bubastis", Bloch; "The Dark Demon", Bloch (O); Keepers Compendium, Herber.)

DAGON.

Minor being that leads the deep ones and in turn serves Cthulhu. Dagon appears as a deep one of tremendous proportions, or more rarely as a cloud of mist. One description provides him with a single lidless eye in a bullet-shaped head and translucent skin. The deep ones and some coastal humans worship him alongside his mate, Mother Hydra. Dagon spends much of his time sleeping in a crevasse in the ocean floor beneath layers of muck. He comes forth to meet his human or deep one worshipers when they call out the proper rites. Legend has it that Dagon may come no further ashore than the low tide mark, though on at least one occasion he came further inland. Dagons cults have existed for millennia. Legend has it that the Phoenicians came to power through the influence of Dagon, and that the end of their supremacy came when they turned away from him to other gods. One of his modern-day cults, the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was raided by government agents in 1927 due to reports of strange disappearances and illegal activities in that town. Rites held in common with deep ones, as well as black pillars covered with mysterious characters, are norms for the cult. It has been claimed that Dagon is only an avatar of Cthulhu, a portion of that being which was not trapped beneath R'lyeh. Past encounters with the god, however, suggest that Dagon is merely an exceedingly large deep one, and that the names "Dagon" and "Hydra" may be titles given to the largest of their species. [Dagon or Dagan was originally a Semitic fertility god worshipped by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Canaanites, and Philistines. Samson knocked down a temple of Dagon upon his tormentors (Judges 16:23). Later, when the Ark of the Covenant was left in the temple of Dagon, the statue of that deity was mutilated (1 Samuel 5:2). While in the past it was thought that Dagon was a fish-god, this seems to have been a misinterpretation of his name, a word meaning "grain".] See Atlantis; deep ones; elemental theory; Esoteric Order of Dagon; Hydra; Invocations to Dagon; Lesser Old Ones; Oaths of Dagon; Pth'thya-L'yi; Ponape Scripture; Yhe. {Escape from Innsmouth, Ross; "Dagon", Lovecraft (O); "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", Lovecraft; "Dagon's Bell", Lumley; "The Return of the Deep Ones", Lumley; A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, Pelton; Necronomicon, Tyson.)