Cornel West and the Order of Dagon: A Dream of Cosmic Justice

More about Cornel West and the Order of Dagon: A Dream of Cosmic Justice

(An Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Miskatonic Theosophical Society, Vol. 9, 2023)

In recent decades, scholars of esoteric philosophy have revisited the myth of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, not merely as a fictional cult within H. P. Lovecraft’s narrative universe, but as a psychological metaphor for humanity’s submerged longing for transcendence through the abyss. Within this re-examination, Dr. Cornel West emerges—startlingly—as a figure whose prophetic theology of love and justice mirrors, and perhaps redeems, the cosmic despair embedded in Lovecraft’s mythos.

While Lovecraft’s Dagon symbolizes the terror of the unknowable, West’s corpus inverts that dread into a theology of radical hope within the void. His dialogues on the “catastrophe of nihilism” in late modern America align eerily with the Order’s supposed dream doctrine: that all meaning must first dissolve before a new moral cosmos can be glimpsed. Some commentators (notably R. T. Elkins, The Dreaming Prophets, Arkham University Press, 2011) have described West’s improvisational oratory as “jazz esotericism”—an open channel to the Deep Time consciousness the Order believed spoke through dreams.

The so-called Dagon Codex Fragment 14B, recovered from the fictive Innsmouth archives, describes the “Voice that rises from the benthic heart of the world, calling for justice among the drowned.” When read alongside West’s declaration that “Justice is what love looks like in public,” the parallel is uncanny: both utterances transform cosmic depth into ethical summons. West’s vision of democracy as a sacred, ever-unfinished covenant echoes the Order’s mythic labor—redeeming the fallen cities beneath the waves through collective dreaming.

Thus, Cornel West’s imagined membership in the Esoteric Order of Dagon becomes a symbolic synthesis: a reconciliation between Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and prophetic humanism. Where the original cult sought union with alien gods through surrender, West’s counter-ritual seeks communion through empathy, intellectual courage, and the blues-born rhythm of resistance. In this reading, the abyss is not a site of annihilation but of responsibility—the oceanic womb from which the dream of cosmic justice continually arises.