Dune (82 page)
“Men, finding no answers to the sunnan [the ten thousand religious questions
from the Shari-?ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be
enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men
have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness
of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”
In their conclusion, though, the Commentaries set a harsh tone that very
likely foretold their fate.
“Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of
hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys
pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must
see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The
proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it
awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve
always known.”
There was an odd sense of calm as the presses and shigawire imprinters
rolled and the O.C. Bible spread out through the worlds. Some interpreted this
as a sign from God, an omen of unity.
But even the C.E.T. delegates betrayed the fiction of that calm as they
returned to their respective congregations. Eighteen of them were lynched within
two months. Fifty-?three recanted within the year.
The O.C. Bible was denounced as a work produced by “the hubris of reason.”
It was said that its pages were filled with a seductive interest in logic.
Revisions that catered to popular bigotry began appearing. These revisions
leaned on accepted symbolisms (Cross, Crescent, Feather Rattle, the Twelve
Saints, the thin Buddha, and the like) and it soon became apparent that the
ancient superstitions and beliefs had not been absorbed by the new ecumenism.
Halloway’s label for C.E.T.’s seven-?year effort — “Galactophasic
Determinism” — was snapped up by eager billions who interpreted the initials
G.D. as “God-?Damned.”
C.E.T. Chairman Toure Bomoko, an Ulema of the Zensunnis and one of the
fourteen delegates who never recanted (“The Fourteen Sages” of popular history),
appeared to admit finally the C.E.T. had erred.
“We shouldn’t have tried to create new symbols,” he said. “We should’ve
realized we weren’t supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief,
that we weren’t supposed to stir up curiosity about God. We are daily confronted
by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions
to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and oppressive. What is this
shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions
endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa
of all attainable knowledge.”
The bitter double edge in this “admission” did not escape Bomoko’s critics
and he was forced soon afterward to flee into exile, his life dependent upon the
Guild’s pledge of secrecy. He reportedly died on Tupile, honored and beloved,
his last words: “Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to
themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into
an assemblage of the self-?satisfied.”
It is pleasant to think that Bomoko understood the prophecy in his words:
“Institutions endure.” Ninety generations later, the O.C. Bible and the
Commentaries permeated the religious universe.
When Paul-?Muad’Dib stood with his right hand on the rock shrine enclosing
his father’s skull (the right hand of the blessed, not the left hand of the
damned) he quoted word for word from “Bomoko’s Legacy” –
“You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its
works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each
man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.”
The Fremen said of Muad’Dib that he was like Abu Zide whose frigate defied
the Guild and rode one day ‘there’ and back. ‘There’ used in this way translates
directly from the Fremen mythology as the land of the ruh-?spirit, the alam al-
mithal where all limitations are removed.
The parallel between this and the Kwisatz Haderach is readily seen. The
Kwisatz Haderach that the Sisterhood sought through its breeding program was
interpreted as “The shortening of the way” or “The one who can be two places
simultaneously.”
But both of these interpretations can be shown to stem directly from the
Commentaries: “When law and religious duty are one, your selfdom encloses the
universe.”
Of himself, Muad’Dib said: “I am a net in the sea of time, free to sweep
future and past. I am a moving membrane from whom no possibility can escape.”
These thoughts are all one and the same and they harken to 22 Kalima in the
O.C. Bible where it says: “Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing
and has powers of reality.”
It is when we get into Muad’Dib’s own commentaries in “The Pillars of the
Universe” as interpreted by his holy men, the Qizara Tafwid, that we see his
real debt to C.E.T. and Fremen-?Zensunni.
Muad’Dib: “Law and duty are one; so be it. But remember these limitations —
Thus are you never fully self-?conscious. Thus do you remain immersed in the
communal tau. Thus are you always less than an individual.”
O.C. Bible: Identical wording. (61 Revelations.)
Muad’Dib: “Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us
from the terrors of an uncertain future.”
C.E.T. Commentaries: Identical wording. (The Azhar Book traces this
statement to the first century religious writer, Neshou; through a paraphrase.)
Muad’Dib: “If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane
person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and
preventing that trouble. ”
O.C. Bible: “Any sin can be ascribed, at least in part, to a natural bad
tendency that is an extenuating circumstance acceptable to God.” (The Azhar Book
traces this to the ancient Semitic Tawra.)
Muad’Dib: “Reach forth thy hand and eat what God has provided thee; and when
thou are replenished, praise the Lord.”
O.C. Bible: a paraphrase with identical meaning. (The Azhar Book traces this
in slightly different form to First Islam.)
Muad’Dib: “Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.”
Fremen Kitab al-?Ibar: “The weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing. Did
not God give us the burning sun (Al-?Lat)? Did not God give us the Mothers of
Moisture (Reverend Mothers)? Did not God give us Shaitan (Iblis, Satan)? From
Shaitan did we not get the hurtfulness of speed?”
(This is the source of the Fremen saying: “Speed comes from Shaitan.”
Consider: for every one hundred calories of heat generated by exercise [speed]
the body evaporates about six ounces of perspiration. The Fremen word for
perspiration is bakka or tears and, in one pronunciation, translates: “The life
essence that Shaitan squeezes from your soul.”)
Muad’Dib’s arrival is called “religiously timely” by Koneywell, but timing
had little to do with it. As Muad’Dib himself said: “I am here; so . . . ”
It is, however, vital to an understanding of Muad’Dib’s religious impact
that you never lose sight of one fact: the Fremen were a desert people whose
entire ancestry was accustomed to hostile landscapes. Mysticism isn’t difficult
when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility. “You are there — so
. . . ”
With such a tradition, suffering is accepted — perhaps as unconscious
punishment, but accepted. And it’s well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost
complete freedom from guilt feelings. This isn’t necessarily because their law
and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It’s likely closer to
the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday
existence required brutal judgments (often deadly) which in a softer land would
burden men with unbearable guilt.
This is likely one of the roots of Fremen emphasis on superstition
(disregarding the Missionaria Protectiva’s ministrations). What matter that
whistling sands are an omen? What matter that you must make the sign of the fist
when first you see First Moon? A man’s flesh is his own and his water belongs to
the tribe — and the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to
experience. Omens help you remember this. And because you are here, because you
have the religion, victory cannot evade you in the end.
As the Bene Gesserit taught for centuries, long before they ran afoul of the
Fremen:
“When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by
a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.”
= = = = = =
Appendix III: Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes
Here follows an excerpt from the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request
of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis Affair. The candor of this
report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary.
Because the Bene Gesserit operated for centuries behind the blind of a semi-
mystic school while carrying on their selective breeding program among humans,
we tend to award them with more status than they appear to deserve. Analysis of
their “trial of fact” on the Arrakis Affair betrays the school’s profound
ignorance of its own role.
It may be argued that the Bene Gesserit could examine only such facts as
were available to them and had no direct access to the person of the Prophet
Muad’Dib. But the school had surmounted greater obstacles and its error here
goes deeper.
The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they
labeled “Kwisatz Haderach,” a term signifying “one who can be many places at
once.” In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers
permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.
They were breeding for a super-?Mentat, a human computer with some of the
prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts
carefully:
Muad’Dib, born Paul Atreides, was the son of the Duke Leto, a man whose
bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. The
Prophet’s mother, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir
Harkonnen and carried gene-?markers whose supreme importance to the breeding
program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred
and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project.
The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was
to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-?Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron
Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union.
Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the
concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son.
This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a
wild variable had entered their scheme. But there were other far more important
indications that they virtually ignored:
1. As a youth, Paul Atreides showed ability to predict the future. He was
known to have had prescient visions that were accurate, penetrating, and defied
four-?dimensional explanation.
2. The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Bene Gesserit Proctor who tested
Paul’s humanity when he was fifteen, deposes that he surmounted more agony in
the test than any other human of record. Yet she failed to make special note of
this in her report!
3. When Family Atreides moved to the planet Arrakis, the Fremen population
there hailed the young Paul as a prophet, “the voice from the outer world.” The
Bene Gesserit were well aware that the rigors of such a planet as Arrakis with
its totality of desert landscape, its absolute lack of open water, its emphasis
on the most primitive necessities for survival, inevitably produces a high
proportion of sensitives. Yet this Fremen reaction and the obvious element of
the Arrakeen diet high in spice were glossed over by Bene Gesserit observers.
4. When the Harkonnens and the soldier-?fanatics of the Padishah Emperor
reoccupied Arrakis, killing Paul’s father and most of the Atreides troops, Paul
and his mother disappeared. But almost immediately there were reports of a new
religious leader among the Fremen, a man called Muad’Dib, who again was hailed
as “the voice from the outer world.” The reports stated clearly that he was
accompanied by a new Reverend Mother of the Sayyadina Rite “who is the woman who
bore him.” Records available to the Bene Gesserit stated in plain terms that the
Fremen legends of the Prophet contained these words: “He shall be born of a Bene
Gesserit witch.”
(It may be argued here that the Bene Gesserit sent their Missionaria
Protectiva onto Arrakis centuries earlier to implant something like this legend
as safeguard should any members of the school be trapped there and require
sanctuary, and that this legend of “the voice from the outer world” was properly
to be ignored because it appeared to be the standard Bene Gesserit ruse. But
this would be true only if you granted that the Bene Gesserit were correct in
ignoring the other clues about Paul-?Muad’Dib.)
5. When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to
the Bene Gesserit. The Guild hinted that its navigators, who use the spice drug
of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary for guiding spaceships
through the void, were “bothered about the future” or saw “problems on the
horizon.” This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless
delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye.
This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order
dimensions!
(A few of the Bene Gesserit had long been aware that the Guild could not
interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild navigators already
were dealing in their own inept way with higher order dimensions, at least to
the point where they recognized that the slightest misstep they made on Arrakis
could be catastrophic. It was a known fact that Guild navigators could predict
no way to take control of the spice without producing just such a nexus. The
obvious conclusion was that someone of higher order powers was taking control of
the spice source, yet the Bene Gesserit missed this point entirely!)
