Dune II The Context: Empire and Jihad

    'A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. [] To begin your study of the life of Muad'dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time; born in the 57th year of the reign of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.'

II The Context: Empire and Jihad

   Dune is a book that has to come to us from the future, possibly from a time hundreds, if not thousands, of years later than the events it describes. It is a history of sorts, an attempt, as it were, to fill in the gaps left in the religious texts and official histories, fragments of which introduce each chapter. An intimate history and perhaps a corrective, with very few grand scenes; most events occur in small private spaces such as a bedroom or a cave, or even inside a tent. In addition any number of these scenes occur at night or in the dark. Each scene usually contains a limited number of characters, to whose thought processes the reader has access.  The sort of scenes where the only witnesses are the protagonists themselves. (We witness no battles in space, or indeed experience space travel.) It all adds up to a world of secrecy, but more of that later. This constricted viewpoint makes for a paradox in a novel that is so concerned with such vast existential and metaphysical concerns and some critics have likened to an opera. It carries echoes of 'The Secret History' of Procopius.

    It might be interesting, then, to investigate which events are given a full literary treatment, which are given a passing mention and which are omitted, and why that is.  At times, reading this novel is like a journey through a darkened landscape with only flashes of illumination. We see through a glass darkly. 

     Although a 'campus novel' of the late 1960s - like, indeed, the Lord of the Rings - the work of Herbert does not, it seems from my limited vantage point, have that same sort of fan-base as Tolkein. It does not inspire that same devotion. And is there any wonder? Dune is not an easy book. As I have outlined above it is violent and harsh, depicting a society where all too often human life is cheap. And although the narrative can be said to follow an archetypal arc in the manner of Jung and Campbell there are, with one notable exception, no heroes.

The Empire

     To set the scene. It is some 20,000 years into the future. Mankind, (there are no alien species), has spread across the universe and is given a resemblance of unity in a vast Universal Empire - the 'Padishah Empire', a finely balanced construction of sometimes opposing forces. Although seemingly stable - after all it has lasted some 10,000 years - the Empire is a place of distrust, of simmering resentments, feuds. Motivation is often clouded, confused and cynical. Secrecy often prevails with plot weaving with plot. It feels as though even close personal relationships are marred by this general dis-ease.

    There are any number of technological devices in advance of our own: 'glowglobes', 'suspensors', 'cones of silence', 'stoneburners'. Some, in the later books, are quite extraordinary. However progress, beyond that narrow technological sense, is lacking: democracy is apparently universally absent; feudalism rules; there is a rigid social hierarchy (there may even be sumptuary laws) and there is slavery; and those planets that somehow have retained their highly advanced technical and computational base during the Butlerian Jihad, such as Ix and Richesse, are highly stratified technocratic societies resembling the 'World State' depicted in Huxley's 'Brave New World'. In many ways humanity as returned to a pre-modern state: there is, for instance, no mass media.

     What is more, the Known Universe is a domain of exiles, a people without a home; for the earth, previously itself the subject of a cataclysmic event (it was hit by an asteroid), has been lost in the depths of time. It has become a mythological place. Humanity has been permanently cast out of Eden. Everyone is a colonist.

The Jihad

     Mid point between then and now, in the years preceding the foundation of the Empire, there occurred a seismic cultural and technological event the effects of which are still being felt at the time of the novel: The Butlerian Jihad. That is the destruction of all thinking machines across the entire Known Universe; 'Thou shall not make a machine in the image of man,' pronounces the Orange Catholic Bible. Subsequently all political, scientific and cultural spheres have had to adjust to the new reality, forging new technologies and organisations such as the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit in order to cope. Humans are trained, and perhaps genetically manipulated, to replace computers. They are also subject to a covert breeding programme by one of these new organisations, or 'schools', the quasi-messianic Bene Gesserit. This shadowy, secretive sisterhood, which manages to infiltrate every corner of Imperial society, has spent millennia carefully pursuing the goal of the 'Kwisazt Haderach' (from the Hebrew 'Kefitzat Haderach'), a man who is capable of working with higher order dimensions, who has access to all the memories of both his male and female ancestors and most importantly has prescience - that is almost divine attributes. Think the next evolutionary stage for the humanity, but one which would give inordinate power to the Bene Gesserit enabling them through the semi-divine person of the Kwisatz to control all the pillars of the post-Jihad Imperial settlement.* This breeding plan has almost come to fruition. Only for, at this late stage, for all of it to go sideways, for the Bene Gesserit Jessica Atreides under instruction to bear the Duke, Leto I, a daughter gave birth, some fifteen years previous to opening of the novel a son, Paul. (Paul: from the Latin for 'small, 'humble'. Paul after all is described as short for his years.) Dune is the story of Paul's rise to ultimate secular and spiritual power in the Known Universe, Herbert drawing on the lives of both the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the British WWI Army officer Lawrence of Arabia amongst others. Echoes, for instance, of Alexander the Great (both the historical Macedonian king and the Alexander of the 'Alexander Romance', particularly as described in the 'Shahnameh' of Ferdowsi) and the Patriarch Moses. I've noticed several internet commentators picking up on the influence of a now little-known book 'The Sabres of Paradise', by the British author and traveller Lesley Branch (1904-2007). It is a fictionalized account of Imam Shamil, third Imam of the 'Caucasian Imamate' and his doomed attempt to resist Russian expansion into the Caucasus. Important thing, the title 'Imam' in this context and one I want to return to its implications in a later post. Anyway, Branch's book is the source of all sorts stuff in Dune. One final source, in an already heady mix, before I finish this post: in one interview Herbert said he had been influenced by the Arthurian legends - not an influence I readily picked up upon on first reading.

* 10.8.23 This morning I watched a video on Youtube made by Esoterica on the little known British artist and occultist Auston Osman Spare and his theory of magic. I really can't go into it here but there seemed a real parallel between what Spare was trying to do and the Bene Gesserit, particularly in regards to the accessing of ancestral memories. I think it's likely to be just coincidental, unless Spare's writings were available to Herbert through various New Age groups on the West Coast.