(Dagon from Oedipus Aegyptiacus by Athanasius Kircher, 1652)

Dagon was the god of the Philistines mentioned in the Old Testament in connection with the Ark of the Covenant. The Philistines placed the captured Ark in a temple of Dagon in Ashdod, before the statue of Dagon. The next morning they found the statue lying on its face on the temple floor. They set it upright again, but the morning after the statue was again lying face down on the floor, this time with its head and hands broken off. The Hebrews regarded this as a sign of the Ark's power (see First Samuel 5:1-7). Dagon was a Semitic god adopted by the Philistines after their invasion of Canaan. Dagon (or Dagan) was worshipped in Mesopotamia at Ur in 2500 BC. His cult was popular among the Assyrians. He probably began his existence as a god of vegetation and evolved into a storm god.

The Hebrew name Dagon means "Great Fish." The god was variously described as a fish god, an idol with the head and hands of a man and the tail of a fish, and as half-woman and half-fish. The woodcut from Kircher, shown above, adopts the latter representation. An identification or association was sometimes made between Dagon and the goddess Atargatis (or Atergata), who had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish. Atargatis was worshipped in Carnaim, a town in Bashan (see the apocryphal text Second Maccabees 12:26). The fishtail on the goddess was said to represent her journey through the Underworld.

Readers familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft will recognize Dagon as the patron deity of the cursed town of Innsmouth, the semi-human inhabitants of which worshipped this deity in a secret society titled the Esoteric Order of Dagon (see Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth). This use of the god by Lovecraft makes Dagon one of the gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has attained a certain respectability among some practitioners of ritual magic.

(Dagon as a bearded male with human arms and hands, and the lower body of a fish)