Threshold Church of R'lyeh Risen

Okely Fhatgnly!

[ from WTSAR by SRJ -- link in image and first comment ]

A Certain Sort of Men: Dagon & the Deep One Aesthetic

The R’lyehian is a transitional creature, a thing of the shoreline and the spaces between states of Being. She is human in body and to a lesser extent in mind, but she holds within herself so much void, so many honeycombed surfaces that define the hollow spaces, surfaces which the Black Gnosis may adhere itself to, that to speak of her as a hybrid thing is more than correct.

The R’lyehian lives and creates in multiple worlds simultaneously, and does so with relative ease. He transitions between them as well, constantly. For this reason, an examination of the esoteric aspects of the Deep Ones, who are in many ways a kind of evolutionary precursor to the R’lyehian, will be beneficial, and of course there can be no discussion of the Deep Ones, those archaic leapers-between-the-worlds, without a discussion of their lord and King of the Voltiguers, Father Dagon.

Dagon’s place in our pantheon here is a unique one, for unlike his fellows, his first appearance as a god on this planet predates his inclusion in Lovecraft’s Mythos: Dagon was, originally(*), a god of the Phoenicians, a being who rose from the depths of the sea to bring technology, the arts, agriculture and writing to the early Aegean and Mesopotamia. In this guise, and often under the name Oannes, he is depicted as a protean humanoid figure with prominent fishy accoutrements, which may be construed as either ceremonial garb or, in the more perplexing (to non-R’lyehian minds) representations, parts of his actual body.

Even in this early form, the lineaments of the Great Old One we know now are present, though blurred by primitive human understanding. Dagon here is amphibious, a being of many worlds, imparting knowledge and advanced technologies on ignorant surface-dwellers in return for worship and, one can only assume, something in the nature of sacrifice, though this is never explicitly stated.

Naturally, the mind jumps to the obvious sacrificial choices: blood and lives, the virginity of maidens, and so on. Though such offerings never really go out of style, as R’lyehians we must entertain the notion that Father Dagon (at least in this ancient incarnation) had something else in mind. Why gift air-breathing apes, barely out of their caves in the hills, with culture, arts, progress, thinking? There is nothing in this life that is not, somehow, contractual, and dealings with gods are certainly not exempt from this rule. What does the deity gain? is the question that must be asked.

Dagon is the King of the Voltigeurs, the Prime Leaper Between the Worlds. All things batrachian are under his gaze; his totem is the frog, who in one moment rests in utter stillness on lily pad or stone and in the next is gone from sight, leaving only ripples and after-images, so swift is its spring. What would such a being, itself progenitor to an entire race of like-yet-lesser beings, the Deep Ones, need of endowing humans with power and agency?

Clearly, Dagon is a god who, Prometheus-like, wants to get us up to speed. But to what end? The goal of such an action is always to bring to the younger species some form of parity with the gods. And parity with the gods can only be achieved through the shattering of the barriers between the mundane and the spiritual...