(urth) Oannes

[Jordon Flato]

Wait though, isn't Oannes a god OF the dogon tribe of Mali, also (of the
Sirius mystery fame)

On Mar 17, 2012 7:04 AM, "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

On 3/17/2012 1:03 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>
> On 3/16/2012 8:13 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>
>> And ...
Apparently only by conflation with Oannes, because Dagon was originally a
grain-god. However, Dagon is part of the chain of identifications, which
includes Pan:

Dagon, Fish-god tradition

In the eleventh century, Jewish bible commentator Rashi writes of a
Biblical tradition that the name Dāgôn is related to Hebrew dāg/dâg 'fish'
and that Dagon was imagined in the shape of a fish: compare the Babylonian
fish-god Oannes. In the thirteenth century David Kimhi interpreted the odd
sentence in 1 Samuel 5.2–7 that "only Dagon was left to him" to mean "only
the form of a fish was left", adding: "It is said that Dagon, from his
navel down, had the form of a fish (whence his name, Dagon), and from his
navel up, the form of a man, as it is said, his two hands were cut off."
The Septuagint text of 1 Samuel 5.2–7 says that both the hands and the head
of the image of Dagon were broken off.[5]

H. Schmökel asserted in 1928[6] that Dagon was never originally a fish-god,
but once he became an important god of those maritime Canaanites, the
Phoenicians, the folk-etymological connection with dâg would have
ineluctably affected his iconography.[7]

The fish form may be considered as a phallic symbol as seen in the story of
the Egyptian grain god Osiris, whose penis was eaten by (conflated with)
fish in the Nile after he was attacked by the Typhonic beast Set. Likewise,
in the tale depicting the origin of the constellation Capricornus, the
Greek god of nature Pan became a fish from the waist down when he jumped
into the same river after being attacked by Typhon.

Various 19th century scholars, such as Julius Wellhausen and William
Robertson Smith, believed the tradition to have been validated from the
occasional occurrence of a merman motif found in Assyrian and Phoenician
art, including coins from Ashdod and Arvad.

John Milton uses the tradition in his Paradise Lost Book 1:

... Next came one
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high
Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,
And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds.


Adapa, As Oannes

Oannes (Ὡάννης, Hovhannes [Հովհաննես] in Armenian) was the name given by
the Babylonian writer Berossus in the 3rd century BCE to a mythical being
who taught mankind wisdom. Berossus describes Oannes as having the body of
a fish but underneath the figure of a man. He is described as dwelling in
the Persian Gulf, and rising out of the waters in the daytime and
furnishing mankind instruction in writing, the arts and the various
sciences.

The name "Oannes" was once conjectured to be derived from that of the
ancient Babylonian god Ea,[2] but it is now known that the name is the
Greek form of the Babylonian Uanna (or Uan) a name used for Adapa in texts
from the Library of Ashurbanipal.[3][4

So Dagon, Oannes, and Pan are all legitimately "mermen." Dagon links to the
biblical tradition and Pan to the Greek.




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