Dagon, the god who thought he had captured God: the Philistines took the Ark of the covenant in battle, carried it into the temple of their own god as a trophy, and woke the next morning to find Dagon face down on the floor. The morning after that, his head and his hands had broken off on the threshold, and only the stump of him was left. This is the full story of the Philistine god who caught the God of Israel, and what it cost him.

The Heretic Codex opens the texts the canon left in the margins. This one follows Dagon from the battle where the Ark was taken, through the two mornings in the temple at Ashdod, the plague that chased the Ark from city to city, and the cart test the Philistine priests built to be sure whose hand was on them, out through Samson pulling the temple down and Saul's head nailed up as a trophy, into the oldest question about him, whether Dagon was ever a fish-god at all or the great grain-god of the Euphrates and the father of Baal, and on into his afterlife as a demon in Milton's Hell and a drowned god in modern horror. Every beat is drawn from the real texts, named in the video and listed in full below.

Chapters:

0:00 The Morning They Found Him

0:58 The God of the Coast

2:07 How the Ark Was Taken

3:35 Two Mornings

4:54 The Plague and the Cart

6:41 Samson and Saul

7:48 The Temple Burns

8:30 Fish or Grain

10:12 A Demon in Hell

11:19 The God Under the Waves

12:10 Captured or Defeated

Sources / further reading:

- 1 Samuel, chapter 4. - the Ark carried from Shiloh, Eli's sons, the defeat and the name Ichabod

- 1 Samuel, chapter 5. - the Ark in the house of Dagon, the idol fallen, the head and hands on the threshold, the swellings

- 1 Samuel, chapter 6. - the Ark sent home on a new cart drawn by two milk cows, the golden swellings and mice

- Judges, chapter 16, verses 23 to 30. - Samson in the temple of Dagon and the two pillars

- 1 Chronicles, chapter 10, verse 10. - the head of Saul fastened in the temple of Dagon

- 1 Maccabees, chapter 10. - the temple of Dagon on the coast burned to the ground

- The dag and dagan question. - fish-god or grain-god, the unsettled meaning of the name

- The Ugarit texts. - Baal named again and again as the son of Dagan

- John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1. - Dagon, sea monster, upward man and downward fish

- Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal. - Dagon filed among the demons of Hell

- H. P. Lovecraft, "Dagon" (1917) and the Esoteric Order of Dagon. - the drowned god of modern horror

Told as history and legend, drawn from the primary texts named above. The record as it was written, before it was condemned.

#Dagon #ArkOfTheCovenant #BiblicalMysteries #Occult #TheHereticCodex