Dune III The Wyrd of the Atreides and the Planet Arrakis

 

'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.'

'We live on sufferance down here....Arrakis is our enemy.'

III The Wyrd of the Atreides & the Planet Arrakis

Camelot

     Nobility of purpose, then, is something largely lacking in the Dune Imperium, but it is to be found within the House of Atreides (from the Greek: 'The Sons of Atreus'), being embodied in the person of Duke Leto. There is mention of the 'Code of the Atreides', but - alas -  we only see the Ducal Household at a moment of dissolution.  These early chapters are all too peremptory, and I would have liked to have a bit more of that household and its whole cultural and political context. Perhaps that is a criticism that can be levelled at 'Dune' in general: Herbert is in a hurry to tell his story. We do however meet four members of the Ducal court and that is enough, one supposes, to establish something of the dynamic of court life of the Atreides and its (necessarily) military culture.  Of the four it is only necessary in this extended essay/post to make note of the charismatic paladin Duncan Idaho - 'Duncan the Moral', the swordmaster of the Ginaz. And I think that this is where the Arthurian element rests - and from there it is a quick and easy thing to do to make parallels between Leto and Arthur, Jessica and Guinevere, Duncan and Lancelot and the Mentat Thurfit Hawat and Merlin. Like Arthur, Leto is fated to be betrayed.

     As with The Lord of the Rings, the opening chapters of Dune are somehow out of rhythm, a little awkward. They don't quite convince. They are not quite 'other' enough. In addition I found the staccato rhythms of Herbert's prose style difficult to adjust to at times. The imaginative creation falters just a little at times and the court life of the Atreides is perhaps too much like Middle Class Suburban America of the early 1960s translated into space - I'm particularly thinking here of the dinner party scene on Arrakis. But then maybe that dinner party is an attempt to maintain standards in the face of overwhelming odds, rather like characters in a Conrad novel miles up-river dressing for dinner every night. There is, perhaps, also an attempt to draw a strong contrast between Paul's early comfortable life and his messianic destiny, which takes place not on the planet of his birth, Caladan, but on the implacably hostile desert planet Arrakis, colloquially known as 'Dune', the governance of which the Emperor, in collusion with House Harkonnen, has 'bestowed' upon the House of Atreides. It is, of course, a plot against the Atreides Duke, an offer that cannot be refused, but like an Heroic Age warrior chief and his war-band, such as you might find described in the epic poems 'Y Gododdin', or 'Beowulf', the Duke, his family & household, and his army go forth 'with solemn face to meet the darkness on the deep'.

There be dragons

     Crucial to the plot and Paul's political, cultural and religious revolution are the interaction between the politics of the Imperium and the ecology of Dune.  Arrakis is a frontier world, by which I don't mean that it stands at the very edge of the Imperium, but that humanity has a very limited and precarious position there; large areas of the planet are apparently uninhabited, barren and waterless.  It is a place of mystery, a place of secrets and immense dangers -  is often referred to as 'Hell' - where the majority of the population is huddled together in the mountainous terrain surrounding the N pole, while the southern hemisphere is a true Terra Incognita; which, for climatic and economic reasons is barely ever visited, let alone surveyed. An abandoned place. A Terra Nullius. Though things on Arrakis, and indeed everything in this book, are never quite what they seem.
      Arrakis however has one major (its only?) export: Spice aka Melange. A drug. It occurs naturally in the limitless dune seas of the northern hemisphere of the planet - 'an ocean in which no oar has dipped' - requiring little processing, though the harvesting is fraught with dangers - not only the implacably hostile environment, but the desert is home to the giant sandworm, which - rather like the monster in a B movie 'Creature Feature' - consumes everything in its path. The southern hemisphere appears is not so blessed, for spice mining does not occur there.
     Both the Spice, and its derivatives, are apparently consumed in vast quantities across the Known Universe, and it could be said to be the engine of the Imperial economy. All that said it appears not to have been consumed in the Ducal Court of Caladan.  Apart from turning the eyes of heavy users dark blue, Spice has geriatric properties, and there are other uses too, some ethnogenic, some purely utilitarian, that only become apparent as the novel progresses. The licence to harvest the spice is highly lucrative thing to possess, and House Atreides as a result would wax in wealth and power. But this, alas, is not to be.   

     Excluding the small groups of smugglers based on the planet, there are two settler communities on Arrakis 'village and seitch'; the smaller group 'the people of the garben, the sink and the pan' live in the far north of planet and are essentially there to service the spice mining industry. The larger group are a tribal society called the Fremen, the Freemen - that is they are outside the overarching Imperial class system. The relationship between both groups is complex, sometimes strained, sometimes intimate. There is some evidence that the Fremen have influenced the religious life of the northern communities. And there is inter-marriage, and some Fremen leave the desert and join the 'graben' like the 'Shadout Mapes', the housekeeper of the Ducal residence in Arrakeen who acts as a sort of contact between the Fremen of the desert - well, some of them at least - and the Atreides. And Dune, like the Lord of the Rings, only takes off when the main protagonists, Paul and Jessica fleeing into the dessert to escape their enemies, are fully immersed in a different, intense and spiritualised culture, that of the Fremen.

     It is never stated when the Fremen arrived on Arrakis, though with the establishment of the Imperial Botanical Testing Stations 'before the discovery of the Spice' there has been a human presence on the planet for at least ten thousand years, perhaps even from some time before the Butlerian Jihad. There is mention of a 'Botanical Testing Station period' in the history of the planet. The Dune Encyclopaedia (of disputed canonical status) gives the date of the Fremen arrival some seven millennia after the foundation of the Spacing Guild. When, by then, one presumes the 'people of the graben and sink' were firmly established. These secretive people see themselves as the descendants of an 'ancient' and persecuted religious sect.¹ 

 They are a people who unwilling to escape their bitter 'history' (I see that history as essentially mythological.) and are caught in a cycle of victimhood and revenge. "Never forget, never forgive." A people eternally sojourning in the wilderness, consuming - well, not manna, but that other divinely attributed nutriment, the Spice. Exiles among a universe of exiles. Waiting. 
     All that said the Fremen have a remarkable and complex material and spiritual culture (more of that in a later post). They have successfully colonised a uniquely hostile environment, but in doing so have had to adapt their social structures to survive. The result of this evolutionary change is a society that we would find harsh, perhaps even barbaric. It is structured to resemble, say, ancient Sparta or Republican Rome, where the individual is subsumed (and the ego, perhaps, destroyed) into the collective endeavour of a society organised along military lines, a society demanding, and receiving in turn, a high level of social conformity.²

  To give an example: a Fremen who has become blind is expelled from the community and thrust out into the desert to die; and from that it might be possible to surmise that the Fremen also practice exposure of infants.  A society that is distrustful of outsiders; 'offworld strangers' found in the deep desert are killed for their water. 'An entire culture trained to military order', as the Lady Jessica noted. The trade-off the for all this being survival of the individual in an environment that is objectively, quantifiably hostile, a place of complete existential threat.

     On the internet there is quite a debate about how Islamic/Arabic the Fremen are. In the case of the status of women it is definitely not. The Fremen faith is decidedly syncretistic, and what ever the faith was which they brought with them to Arrakis it has undergone substantial alteration at the hands of the harsh conditions of the planet and through contact with the Bene Gesserit. Neither do the Fremen speak Arabic, but a variant of Galach³, and the 'Hunting Language' Chakobsa. The exception to this being liturgical, and then, it could be argued, without any real understanding of the language (more of that later). Perhaps the use of Arabic among the Fremen is best thought as equivalent to the use of Latin in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At this point it is enough to note also that some of the Arabic terms used among the Fremen, such as 'Lisan al-gaib' have a particular relationship with Sufism and the Greater Iranian cultural area. 

     Neither are the Fremen, as is widely said on-line & in the msm, nomadic. Fremen live in settled, troglodytic communities called sietch - some of which, such as Sietch Tabr, are really small towns with thousands of inhabitants. The Tau of the tribe or the sietch is help maintained via the Tau Orgy, which cements the unity of the tribe/sietch and allows for the dissipation of potential disruptive energy.  Fremen pattern of settlement and land holding is structured around a reliable water supply, for Dune is not entirely desert: there are small polar ice caps and when the geology allows there are springs and oases. In geological basins that are (important point this) disconnected from the open desert plants grow. Plants, that is, that have been introduced from elsewhere, off-planet. Terranic plants (i.e. from the Earth) do particularly well. As becomes clear in the novel there is water on the planet but is mainly trapped in the underlying strata. Though it is never overtly stated the Fremen must practice some form of cultivation. Otherwise how could the isolated sietch communities possibly survive? Perhaps surprisingly these communities possess a skilled manufacturing base, producing those items, such as stillsuits and stilltents, that are essential to desert living. And they are not so alienated that they don't trade with the other inhabitants of Dune, or with the wider Imperium, but how, one is entitled to ask, do the Fremen source raw materials or machinery, and yet maintain their secrecy? The smugglers, I guess. I mention this because it strikes me as an example of a number of ambiguities if not contradictions in the plot, that I can't quite explain to my satisfaction.

  

A short discursion: Arrakis and the Golden Flower 

     In the decades prior to Paul's arrival on Arrakis, the Fremen embarked on a remarkable undertaking: the greening of large areas of the planet, a multi-generational task. This however was not the first time this was attempted. As I showed above some time before the 'discovery of the Spice' Terranic desert species were introduced into the ecology of Arrakis. This attempt was subsequently abandoned pushing the terraforming of the planet into the realm of 'indefinitely postponed parousia'. All this changed with appointment of Pardot Kynes as Imperial Ecologist, in doing so probably making some form of future conflict inevitable on Arrakis.

     The arrival of the Atreides merely realigned Fremen priorities, for Paul's adventus on the planet immediately opened the way to violent Jihad - that is a parousia achieved by conflict. Not that this utopian greening of the Arrakis was abandoned - it was too late for that, for the process had already been imprinted on the ritual and spiritual life of the Fremen. This is how it was explained years later by Farok, himself a former Jihadi, in 'Dune Messiah';

      'The Atreides came [....] the one we named Usul in our seitch, his private name among us. Our Maud'dib, our Mahdi! And when he called for the Jihad, I was one of those who asked: 'Why should I go to fight there? I have no relatives there.' But the other men went - young men, friends, companions of my childhood. When they returned, they spoke of wizardry, of the power of this Atreides saviour. He fought our enemy the Harkonnens. Liet-Kynes who promised us paradise upon our planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to change our world and the our universe, that he was the man to make the golden flower blossom in the night.'

     An interesting term that. Golden Flower. It is a Taoist term occurring in 'The Secret of the Golden Flower' the classic Neidan text. Neidan, I should explain here, is a Chinese form of meditation and inner alchemy that derives ultimately from Indian Tantric thought. For Jung the Golden Flower represented the state of being a fully integrated person. The promise of the Atreides is that by following him into Jihad the Fremen can, as individuals first, transcend their ancestral trauma, expanding their scope of cognition and reality. Herbert by using this vegetative analogy implies that Leit-Kynes offers the same thing but over a much longer time scale; one in pace with the societal changes in Fremen culture that the greening would entail. A process in which the Fremen would cease to be.

1 In the Appendices and Glossary they are referred to as the 'Zensunni Wanderers'. However in the narrative the term is never used either by the Fremen or others.  Some critics have suggested the Fremen use 'Misr' when referring to themselves. The evidence for that is ambiguous. The 'Terminology' at the back of the book says that the Fremen call themselves the 'Misr' meaning 'the people'.  However in the text it is used once - by the Reverend Mother Ramallo, who declares; 'We are the people of Misr.' i.e. a place. The term is the Arabic for 'Egypt' (deriving from the Semitic for 'border') and refers to their supposed origins.

2 As Paul himself noted (quoting from the Orange Catholic Bible):  'Law and duty are one; so be it.  But remember these limitations - Thus you are never fully conscious.  Thus do you remain immersed in the communal Tau.  Thus are you always less than an individual.'

3 One variant word is given in the novel; 'cielago' for 'bat'. It is derived from Spanish. Interestingly, as the Lady Jessica notes, '....this was the language of Ilm and Fiqh....' It opens up the possibility that the Ilm and Fiqh, which are either written or oral and form part of Fremen religious culture are written in an unnamed language.