History of Dagon

Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon”

Introduction

As everyone knows, Cthulhu sleeps the sleep of death in R’lyeh, undisturbed for millions of years. While not a Cthulhu-focused adventure per se, White Leviathan is deeply immersed in the lore of Great Cthulhu and his minions. What follows is a foundational blueprint for the campaign, describing the relationship between Cthulhu and Dagon, the role of Dagon in the evolution of Deep Ones and human beings, and the origin of the Green Flame.

The Rise of Dagon

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Like all great Mythos tales, our story begins with a dead god and an ancient book. According to the R’lyeh Text, after the war with the Elder Things, the decimation of the Star-spawn, and the destruction of R’lyeh, Cthulhu passed into the state famously described as dead and dreaming. While the theological details of this condition are troublingly vague, the text suggests that Cthulhu was still capable of acting through intermediaries. Known as Y’thogthim, or “spawned presences,” a more apt translation might be “archons.” Such beings were sculpted from terrestrial matter, but invested with individual splinters of Cthulhu’s “divine” essence. Several of these archons are mentioned throughout various Mythos tomes, their bizarre names linked to vanished periods of primeval history; from Ghatanothoa who triggered the Great Dying to Zoth-Ommog who presided over the breakup of Pangea. All of them failed their master, and Cthulhu remained in torpor, growing weaker with each passing epoch.

By the time the Chicxulub Asteroid put paid to the Cretaceous Period, Cthulhu had just enough power to spawn one final Y’thogtha. This being would serve as demiurge, molding new life from the post-apocalyptic clay, a sentient race destined to be the agents of Cthulhu’s release. The R’lyeh Text names this archon K’th-oan-esh-el, combining four ideograms from the Old Tongue: K’th (Abyss), Oan (Waves), Esh (Fish), and El (Sacred). The Cthaat Aquadingen, one of the medieval “Black Book Codices” made from the R’lyeh Text, renders this as “Cthoaanesel,” but offers his more contemporary name: Dagon.

The Children of Dagon
Unlike the Elder Things, Mi-Go, and Star-spawn, this new race would be native to earth. Part amphibian, part mammal, and part fish, they emerged from some nexus of terrestrial evolution as the last dinosaurs were flailing in the iridium gloom. Although the name they called themselves is unrecorded, their Deep One descendants know them as the K’th-thyalei, or “Dwellers in the Abyss,” an exonym repeated in the R’lyeh Text. The Cthaat Aquadingen calls them the “Ancestors.” They rose to prominence over 60 million years ago, establishing the earth’s first indigenous civilization across the oceans of the Paleocene. Whether K’th-oan-esh-el actually engendered their race or merely guided their development was a matter of doctrinal debate even among the K’th-thyalei, but they placed Cthulhu’s demiurge at the center of their worship, and considered K’th-oan-esh-el their true Creator.

The Green Flame
K’th-oan-esh-el was envisioned as a terrible, dragon-like creature dwelling in the Abyss; a monstrous hermaphrodite with three heads, four arms, and a fishlike tail of golden scales. Too dreadful to behold in person, the archon communicated through an avatar of viridian fire known as the Kha-n’zoth. A simple name with a complex meaning—Kha-n’zoth is best translated as “Incarnate Spark of Divine Spirit”—even then, this mysterious force was better known as the Green Flame. (From Izî-k’th-el, or “Abyssal Green Fire.”)

Feeding from the salt blood of the oceans and burning with the cold of interstellar space, the Green Flame had illuminated the Ancestors from the dawn of their civilization, teaching them forbidden knowledge, investing them with occult powers, and granting them lifespans that lasted millennia. Shepherding them across long eons of evolution, the Green Flame whispered their destiny in their ears, grooming them as the master race that would awaken the dead dreamer. It taught them the Old Tongue, the language of the Books of Dzyan and the R’lyeh Text. It directed them to the artifacts of the Star-spawn and convinced them of their divine inheritance. And finally, when the K’th-thyalei had grown powerful enough to assume stewardship of the planet, the Green Flame awarded them the arcane science of the Elder Things, who in the days before Great Cthulhu had sparked Life from the primordial clays.

But here, K’th-oan-esh-el made a grave mistake. When he gave the Ancestors this ancient power, he unwittingly opened the door to his own doom. At first, the K’th-thyalei used their science wisely. They fashioned all manner of living servants: obedient shoggoths, aquatic genii, landbound Behemoths. But as their mastery grew, so did their hubris. Inspired by the once-great Elder Things, the K’th-thyalei imagined themselves an advanced race and gazed with towering pride upon the wonders they had wrought.

As their ambition propelled them forward, the K’th-thyalei grew distant from the sunken god who dreamed their Creator into being. Increasingly, Cthulhu was seen as abstract and impossibly remote: an alien traveler from Aldebaran, dead and buried for over 100 million years. They began to question their so-called destiny. Were they simply tools, fated to be discarded once their purpose had been achieved? Was Great Cthulhu a tyrannical father, waiting to gobble his children once their authority threatened his own? Even K’th-oan-esh-el was no longer perceived as a benevolent intermediary, but a paternalistic gatekeeper barring the path to true greatness.

The Apostacy
Around 50 million BCE, the K’th-thyalei decided they had outgrown their earthbound cradle. Like the Elder Things of the Galactic Epoch, they would become an interstellar race, leaving Cthulhu to his terrestrial prison and roaming the stars with impunity. Realizing their meager brains and fragile bodies imposed limits on such lofty aspirations, they conceived a plan that would require thousands of years to come to fruition. Hijacking the powers of the demiurge, they’d place the reins of terrestrial evolution into their own hands. The earth would be compelled to beget new bodies, a race of Leviathans fusing the terrestrial and the stellar: mammal, saurian, and fish would combine with the star-spawned races of cephalopod and mollusk created during the advent of Cthulhu. Into these wondrous beings the Kth-thyalei would project their own consciousness, preserved and carried by the Green Flame. They’d become demigods; each Leviathan home to thousands of K’th-thyalei minds, a teeming hive of sentience encased in the flesh of earth and stars. Assuming their rightful place in the cosmos, they’d stream into galactic space, populating the abysses of countless worlds with their hybrid vigor.

The K’th-thyalei brooded over their apostasy for generations. They learned techniques to shield their thoughts from K’th-oan-esh-el, and carefully tested the limits of dreaming Cthulhu like cautious mice belling a sleeping cat. They sought the earth’s remaining Elder Things and isolated them in subterranean prisons. Treating these ancient scientists as base libraries of flesh, they extracted the secrets of interstellar travel. They learned about the Great White Vortex and the Black Vast Roil, and how to create a stable gateway to the stars. Finally, they declared themselves ready for the great leap forward.

The Fall of Dagon

Upon that fateful day, the K’th-thyalei cast their patricidal nets and trapped their Creator in a web of unappeasable power. Imprisoning him in the Abyss, their plan was to dissect K’th-oan-esh-el into the Seven Quiddities (Sekhim) demanded by their esoteric theology: the Divine Intellect (ub-Sha), the Divine Will (ub-Mha), the Divine Spirit (ub-Kha), the Engendering Sex (ub-Sath), the Incarnate Body (ub-Oth), the Secret Name (ub-Rhen), and the Immortal Soul (ub-El). After they committed this act of ineffable butchery and plundered his powers, they’d leave his remains locked in the Abyss forever. Or at least, until the dying sun flayed the planet to irrelevant atoms.

The Sundering
To protect themselves from K’th-oan-esh-el’s wrath, they first struck off his ub-Sha. They imprisoned his Divine Intellect in an artifact called the Aza-sha-el, or “Sacred Head.” Although this removed the god’s ability to act with sentience, K’th-oan-esh-el could still exercise vast amounts of instinctual power. To ensure his paralysis, next they severed his ub-Mha, binding his Divine Will in an artifact called the Aza-mha-el, or “Sacred Hands.” These two relics were isolated deep within a temple/prison/laboratory called K’th-khor, or “Sentinel of the Abyss.”

Now that their Creator was beheaded and declawed, the K’th-thyalei drained his Divine Spirit—the wellspring of the Kha-n’zoth, or Green Flame. Separated from K’th-oan-esh-el and shorn of intellect and will, the Green Flame represented raw magical energy, the perfect medium for the Ancestor’s selfish desires. They poured the Green Flame into forty-nine vessels known as the Aza-kha-elim. While this is properly translated as “Sacred Cages,” the Cthaat Aquadingen calls them “Azabhaels,” which means “Sacred Hearts.” They are described as ancient vessels secreted around the globe.

This discrepancy in translation elides an awful truth: the forty-nine “vessels” were actually imprisoned Elder Things! Known in the Old Tongue as a-Bhalei, their name literally means “no-hearts.” The K’th-thyalei planned to project their minds into these Elder Things, usurp their powers, and transform their bodies into a living gateway to the stars. (The Elder Things’ relationship to interstellar travel is discussed in “Background Part 4—Pocket Dreamworlds.”)

The next step in the terrible dismemberment was to seize control of the archon’s generative powers, his ub-Sath. But this was not a divine essence like intellect, will, and spirit; this power was inextricably linked to the material world. It required the god’s body to remain intact, locked in the Abyss where it could exert influence over the biosphere. While the Cthaat Aquadingen describes the process as an “unspeakable violation,” in truth it was considerably more clinical. In modern language, the K’th-thyalei reprogrammed the ub-Sath with their own accelerated evolutionary designs. It might take thousands of years, but the earth itself would engineer their Leviathan bodies.

The K’th-thyalei could have stopped here, content to study their dissected Creator and prepare the next stages of their rebellion. But one nagging doubt remained. As long as K’th-oan-esh-el retained his Secret Name and Immortal Soul, he was still a god. Rape and dismemberment were not enough. They had to commit deicide. Only that would ensure that K’th-oan-esh-el could never be restored, resurrected, or reborn. The K’th-thyalei needed to become godless.

And so, trembling on the precipice of greatness, they pronounced the Secret Name.

The Cataclysm
Why they did not succeed is unknown, but upon enacting the final, soul-killing ritual, the K’th-thyalei brought forth a disaster that forever marked the earth with their failure. In the space of a heartbeat, the energy unleashed by their ultimate act of hubris triggered a global catastrophe known as the Cataclysm. As described in the Ponape Scripture, “The sky cracked open and the sea rained up.” In a horrifying echo of the fall of R’lyeh, the proud cities of the K’th-thyalei toppled into ruin. Scattered across the primeval ocean, their magnificent culture shattered into irreparable fragments, K’th-thyalei civilization began its ineluctable decline. Devolving into a race of fish-like creatures, they slunk beneath the sunlight and unremembered their former glory.

The Cataclysm had broader consequences than the fall of the K’th-thyalei. It destroyed the ancient prisons that the Great Race of Yith had used to trap the flying polyps, forcing their minds to flee into earth’s future and precipitating the extermination of the cone-beings. It shook the Mountains of Madness and brought down the last great city of the long-dying Elder Things. And yet, the most profound effects of the catastrophe were delayed until the end of the Eocene Epoch; an extinction event known to contemporary science as the Grande Coupure.

Marked by a climactic shift that cooled the oceans and radically disrupted mammalian development, the Grande Coupure was the closing act of the K’th-thyalei tragedy. As the Ancestors devolved following the Cataclysm, their machines continued to fail. Some 35 million years ago, the last K’th-thyalei cities were annihilated by “comets” falling from the heavens. While the Cthaat Aquadingen declares this “divine wrath,” the R’lyeh Text suggests the fireballs were themselves of K’th-thyalei origin. In any event, the temple of K’th-kohr was struck by a maul of flaming rock. The containment protecting the Aza-sha-el and Aza-mha-el collapsed, and the degenerating K’th-thyalei lost control over the Abyss.

Like the punchline of a cosmic joke made at the Ancestors’ expense, this final abdication of power set their disrupted plan in motion. The imprisoned stump of K’th-oan-esh-el stirred to life, possessed by the blind instinct to reproduce and carry on: a dragon begetting monsters in the cold, fishbreeding deep. The tampered ub-Sath disseminated into the matrix of creation, millions of years late, sorely damaged, and lacking intelligent oversight. Spurred by an ancient program executed by broken demiurge, mammals began their steady rise to power, evolving towards the sentience now within their grasp.

The Sleep of Dagon

On a quiet morning some forty-two million years after the Cataclysm, one of the forty-nine imprisoned Elder Things was finally ground to paste by slow, tectonic forces. Its death released the bound fragment of Green Flame, which immediately diffused into the world. Ten thousand years later, a volcanic eruption atomized a second Aza-kha-el. A million years after that, a third was crumbled by invasive fungus. The fourth followed a century later, exposed by an earthquake and meticulously disassembled by industrious insects. Degenerate, cold, and corrupt, the wisps of homeless Kha-n’zoth gathered in strength with each passing eon. But what it needed were sapient minds; worshippers it could nurture and cultivate, guiding them to unearth and destroy the remaining vessels.

It took another few million years, but the Green Flame found what it was seeking in Africa. There, a new kind of primate was emerging, creatures bearing the genetic imprint of the Ancestors. Creatures who understood tools, who understood language, who understood war. Creatures who didn’t flee in panic when a pillar of cold fire twisted upward from the alkaline lakes and whispered their name. Creatures who could be forged into a new race.

The Grandchildren of Dagon
As the Aza-kha-elim were systematically demolished, the Green Flame grew in power, carrying humanity in its wake. There were false starts and dead ends, but humans continued evolving towards something more promising. They erected a temple to the Green Flame on the shores of Lake Makgadikgadi; eighty thousand years later, they mated with Deep Ones in the caves of Gibraltar and along the coastline of eastern China. This Asian cult eventually migrated to Lake Baikal, destroying three of the remaining seven vessels along the way. They managed to write the first version of the R’lyeh Text before their neighbors exterminated them, salting the earth above their broken bones and shattered skulls.

Sometime during the last Ice Age, the final Aza-kha-el was discovered by European hunters, roasted over a fire, and eaten. His Divine Spirit made whole, K’th-oan-esh-el rolled over in his sleep and began dreaming of Resurrection. But until the Aza-sha-el and Aza-mha-el were recovered and returned, he’d remain trapped in his sunken prison, the mirror image of his slumbering master. Not even a reflection—a miniature. For while Cthulhu had created K’th-oan-esh-el to enable his release, all that K’th-oan-esh-el had was the Green Flame, a mere ghost of his former powers, hollowed-out and piloted by instinct. The Green Flame could insinuate, but it could not command. And so the Sundered God would have to wait; wait for humanity to follow new visions.

Muttering in tongues of dead gods and lost civilizations, the Green Flame now haunted humanity’s dreams with fables of its master. From Africa to Mesopotamia, from Anatolia to the Aegean, from Crete to Canaan, shadows and echoes of the demiurge appeared in human religions. Names and depictions rose and fell with cultures, a confused Babel of gods, dragons, and sea-serpents: Ythogtha, Uloo-Khun, Na-Mha, Nummo, Nammu, Tiamat, Azhi Dahāka, Oannes, Nun and Naumet, Marnas, Olóòkun. But the most enduring of these names would be bestowed by the Philistines—Dagon, the “The Beloved Fish,” worshipped in Gaza, Azotus, and ancient Ascalon.

For a brief moment, there was hope for a glorious Resurrection. Humans possessed shorter life spans than the K’th-thyalei, but they developed with stunning speed, the offspring of a planet re-programmed for accelerated evolution. They would one day be as powerful as the Ancestors. Surely they could find the Aza-sha-el and Aza-mha-el and return them to the Abyss? But this accelerated pace was a double-edged sword. No sooner had one tribe “discovered” K’th-oan-esh-el than they were absorbed by another tribe, a proliferation of beliefs with little continuity.

And then something unforeseen happened. It started with the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, but soon spread to the Hebrews: the poison of monotheism. As this pernicious theology metastasized throughout the body politic, even belief in magic became suspect, a thing of evil. Like the Ancestors before them, humanity was unwilling to be subjugated to an alien god; but at least the K’th-thyalei never developed the concept of blasphemy. From the stubbornness of Judaism to the explosive zeal of Christianity and Islam, from the corrupting negation of Buddhism to the rigid philosophies of China, humanity inoculated itself against the Mythos. And the Age of Reason? Science was the worst religion of all, with its imperious mandates and Inquisitorial rejection of magic.

After millions of years of cultivation, human civilization had blossomed overnight. And there was no room for the gardener in this brave new world. Soon the name Dagon itself became synonymous with defeat, the primordial tragedy of his dismemberment recast as a religious victory by the Hebrew God. It wasn’t the Ark of the Covenant that struck away head and hands to leave a fishy stump, but the metaphor was inescapable, as was the irony: by the time humans were powerful enough to serve Dagon, they had already moved past him.

The Deep Ones
Unfortunately for K’th-oan-esh-el, the direct descendants of the K’th-thyalei offered even less hope than humanity. Their Eocene greatness reduced to a dim racial memory, the Deep Ones view the K’th-thyalei as beings from legend, and confuse their sunken cities with the archaic relics of the Star-spawn. Even K’th-oan-esh-el has been woefully misremembered, the hermaphrodite demiurge reduced to a Deep One “sultan and consort,” described in the Cthaat Aquadingen as Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. An obvious conflation of wish fulfillment, fragments of the truth, and legends of Cthulhu, these mythical rulers are believed to dwell in sunken R’lyeh.

And God Made Great Whales
And so we come to the Leviathans. In the years following the Grande Coupure, the automated elements of the K’th-thyalei plan unfolded as designed. Lured into the deep by an unfathomable instinct, the Behemoths of the Eocene Epoch evolved into new forms, acquiring the attributes of the sought-after Leviathan. But as the great machines of the K’th-thyalei foundered against time, their plan dissolved like a blueprint in the rain. Without the guidance of the Ancestors, the prospective Leviathans evolved mindlessly, mutating into a panoply of species and losing their sense of agency and purpose. Only the ancestor of the sperm whale maintained any fealty to the plan; but even these magnificent creatures soon degenerated, growing paler until Physeter macrocephalus emerged some 25 million years ago.

Although the contemporary sperm whale is a far cry from the great Leviathan it was meant to be, echoes of the K’th-thyalei design still sound in its gene pool. First and foremost is the famous spermaceti oil itself, that pure, aromatic fluid found in the head of the whale, walled off in the “case” like a reservoir. The Leviathans were designed to serve as biological factories, producing a sacred elixir that summoned and empowered the Green Flame. Today, the spermaceti oil is all that remains, reduced to a simple chemical compound devoid of any power save illumination. Second, where once the flesh of the Leviathan was designed to carry eldritch hieroglyphics, a living alphabet of arcane science, the same forces of evolutionary erosion have produced a mottled skin of indecipherable nonsense legible only to charlatans and lunatics. Finally, one may wonder at the strange animosity between sperm whales and giant squid. Once intended as mates, the two creatures now savage each other like wild animals, idiot scions of dissipated bloodlines, locked in a passionate combat they can never understand.

But not all hope is lost. A handful of creatures have continued evolving according to design. They have stalled somewhere short of the mark, but are still more powerful than their stunted cousins. Found in waters surrounding the ruins of the Ancestors, these Black Leviathans patrol in blind, oblivious orbits, protecting these crumbling relics with ferocious tenacity. And the mightiest of these is the White Leviathan, millions of years old and the last of its kind. Known to the ancients as K’th-loth, Guardian of the Abyss, this creatures bears many other names, from Lothon to Mocha Dick. But like all ensouled beings, it too has a Secret Name, a Rhen that directs its actions and defines its true nature: the Aza-sha-el.

Summary

As mentioned in the Depth Marker, while this history may be a touch convoluted, the main takeaways required to run White Leviathan are easily summarized: Cthulhu created K’th-oan-esh-el as an agent for his release. Humans call this god Dagon. Dagon has control over terrestrial evolution. His avatar is the Green Flame. Dagon created a race called the K’th-thyalei to serve him—the “Ancestors” of the Deep Ones. They betrayed Dagon and imprisoned him, cutting away his “Head” and “Hands.” These are represented by relics known as the Aza-sha-el and Aza-mha-el. The sundering of this Demiurge triggered an apocalypse that destroyed the Ancestor’s civilization and gave rise to human beings. This primordial story has appeared again and again throughout human mythology. In an attempt to resurrect Dagon, the Green Flame has been seeking worshippers who can restore the Head and Hands to the Stump—the body of Dagon locked in the Abyss. And guarding that Abyss is the White Leviathan, the result of the Ancestor’s botched plan to evolve into a race of demigods.

White Leviathan > Keeper’s Information
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Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 23 March 2024
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
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