The Dune Encyclopedia

by Willis E McNelly

  We know of course, of the anarchy that followed his death, the Starvation and the Scattering that eventuated in our present civilization. But we do not know Him. The Rakis Finds, of course, have been immensely helpful in our quest for knowledge of his era. We had long since studied and restudied the invaluable, priceless Stolen Journals, but they pale to virtual insignificance beside the richness of the materials in the Dar-es-Balat diggings. So voluminous are they that several decades will elapse before even their cataloging is completed, to say nothing of their analysis.

  Of the God Emperor, several things are certain. His voluminous dictatel recordings are largely self-serving and completely lacking in objectivity. Consider his famous statement, one he reiterated again and again, before any audience: "Only fools prefer the past!" Yet has there been any person — if one may refer to Leto as a person — in the thousands of years of recorded history who was so totally dominated by the past as Leto himself? Did not his conversation continually concern the knowledge he had derived from his thousands of ancestral voices? Did he not refer, again and again, to legendary, perhaps mythic Terran figures such as Chaucer or Alexander? Have we forgotten the wisdom — for such it was, no matter our final assessment of Leto — contained in The Stolen Journals: "If you know all of your ancestors, you were a personal witness to the events which created the myths and religions of our past, Recognizing this, you must think of me as a mythmaker."

  What then did Leto mythologize? First of all, himself. He created more legends concerning his immutability, his omniscience, his omnipotence, indeed, his eternal nature, than anything else. Yet, in reality, it was the brute physical strength of the biologic adaptation of the sandworm that he had become that was the original source of his imperial power. He capitalized on that strength — and how many legends he created of his inhuman abilities! — to cement his position as emperor and to terrify entire populations. From that moment on, religious awe and blind superstition, combined with the longevity of the sandworm he was becoming, made his rule inevitable.

  An early Duncan Idaho, the consummate Atreidean supporter, rebelled against Leto's increasing authoritarianism and questioned Leto's abuse of that same loyalty. Idaho-11099 initiated the last, sad Sardaukar campaign against the emperor, a move that resulted in Idaho's death, the final destruction of the Imperial Legions, and the founding of the Fish Speakers. Historians, perhaps some of those incinerated by Leto on the pyre of their own works, have remarked on the almost tragic irony involved in this abortive campaign. To be sure, the very notion of any Duncan Idaho leading the hated Sardaukar in an ill-fated, yea, grandiose, campaign battle against an Atreides is the stuff of which a latterday Harq al-Harba could have made great tragedy. Yet we cannot simply dismiss that Idaho's action as a mere mental aberration and classify it in the same breath as the infamous Dr. Wellington Yueh's treason. Rather we should consider what colossal emotions were required to enable Idaho to overcome his ingrained, almost genetically inculcated, loyalty to any Atreides. And yet just as some revisionist historians have been able to explain even Yueh's triumph over his pyretic conscience by adducing the incalculable passion of his love for his beloved Wanna, so we should now examine Leto's treason — not Duncan-13724's — to the Atreidean way, his treason to his grandfather Leto I, the Red Duke, to his father Paul Muad'Dib, and to himself.

  Leto, then, was false to himself and to the ancient Atreides line and its sense of truth, honor, and devotion. It is imperative to remember that he was but an adolescent when he assumed both the throne and the sand-worm skin. He never had the opportunity to grow up, to mature. He had never enjoyed a normal life. He was forced to overcome temptation, test after test. Struggles for his very life were for him simple rites of passage even before he was a teenager. And as an early teen, he exhibited all of the outlandish, ridiculous activity we have associated with both adolescence and adolescents for centuries. In fact, one psychologist, Professor Istrafan Koye of the University of Ix, has maintained quite cogently in his monumental The Last of the God Emperors (subtitled There But For the Grace of God Goes God, 3 vol., Salusa Secundus: Karshak) that the key to Leto's character is quite simply that he was an adolescent for the entirety of his 3,500-year reign and that if one wants to understand "His Annelidity" (the phrase is Koye's) one must approach him as one might approach any other juvenile delinquent, with birch rod firmly in hand. How else can we understand Leto's repeated temper tantrums over the fact that his Duncans might disagree with him on even trivial matters or that his majordomos might dare to suggest that "His Ouroborosity" might occasionally have feet (or is the proper word "segments"?) of clay.

  Who but a classic "brat kid" could be so unaware of the discrepancy in his own life between appearance and reality, between shadow and substance? We know, for example, from his last dictatel messages recorded shortly before his demise, that he had developed a mad — some would call it "adolescent" — passion for the "incomparable" Hwi Noree. While he admitted that sexual union with her was impossible because his wormself had subsumed his human genitalia many centuries earlier, he nonetheless mooned over her like a teenage boy in heat. To be sure he had his ancestral memories of rampant sexuality to sustain him, he said again and again and again and again, until an Idaho or a Moneo, even a blindly adoring Nayla, might not wonder if he were protesting a bit too much. In fact Koye cogently argued that if memory of sexuality could sustain Leto, why did he not apply the same principle to food and refuse to eat. Surely if memories of ancestral licentiousness could satisfy his sexual need, so also memories of gluttonous banquets stretching back in time for thirty or more centuries should satisfy his physical self.

  Koye also was the first to articulate the incredible contradictions between Leto's famed Golden Path and the breeding program he had taken over from the Bene Gesserit. The two seem at opposite ends of the scale: you cannot plan to breed humanity into some higher type and at the same time give humanity the essential freedom which is supposedly at the heart of the Golden Path. Koye even argued, with some accuracy, that the Bene Gesserit were far more successful with their ages-long breeding program than Leto was with his. The Sisterhood, we now recognize, had twice nearly produced the Kwisatz Haderach: according to all indications Jehanne Butler's aborted baby, Sarah Butler, would have produced the Kwisatz Haderach, but, tragically, her death delayed his arrival until Paul Atreides, Leto's father, was born.

  How then can we explain the eccentricities, the foibles, the genuine accomplishments of the famous/infamous God Emperor? Because he was worm, he no longer seems human. Because he was human, we tend to forget he was worm. However, we must never forget that he was also, in the grand mythic sense of a long-abused word, King. He ruled over his desert kingdom for nearly four millennia, attempting to birth a civilization, a people, and a culture that did not need to fear itself.

  One persistent myth, perhaps dozens of centuries old, from legendary Terra, may help explain him. It is the myth of the Fisher King who ruled over a Waste Land, a land so desolate that crops did not grow, humans did not reproduce, and despair was endemic. Wounded in the genitals, the Fisher King's kingdom was sterile, with both ruler and subjects awaiting a Redeemer, a pure Knight who would heal the King and return fertility to the land.

  Leto Atreides II was that Fisher King. His Arrakeen desert made any historic or mythic Waste Land seem fertile by comparison. Yet his vision of Arrakis was inevitably limited, perhaps because of his youth, perhaps because of incarnate nature, perhaps because of his very perversity, perhaps because of his essential lack of humanity as evidenced by his lack of genital activity. If his vision for his home planet was limited, so was it also for the Imperium. Because he fancied himself as the Redeemer of his planet and the Imperium, he attempted to become the Knight of particular purity who would heal himself.

  He failed in one sense.

  He triumphed in another.

  He was the once and future King. His vision for his planet and his kingdom failed because, as Leto himself was more tha
n once forced to admit, he was not God in any ultimate sense.

  Yet he succeeded because he died, and Redeemers must die for their people. When he died, his limited vision of the Golden Path also died. Thus after the Starvation and the Scattering, we are now free — free from Leto, free from the Golden Path, and free from the threat of ourselves.

  Who knows what waits beyond the stars?

  W.M.

  ATREIDES, LETO II, as enigma.

  Leto would have taken extreme pleasure in the idea of future generations attempting to write encyclopedia articles concerning him. Certainly he held such writers in contempt during his lifetime, boasting to many that he had burned alive many a historian upon pyres made of their own works. No historian could dare to claim equal knowledge of the past with Leto, for, after all, Leto was directly responsible for over 3,500 years of the past. Moreover, given his claim that he had within him the memories of every single one of his ancestors, one could reasonably suggest that the words Leto and history are one and the same.

  Leto's contempt for history and historians supplies a clue to the nature of this ultimately unknowable man and god. Leto in The Stolen Journals wrote of history:

  You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to participate in history.

  Leto damned the one thing that he believed was essential to the freedom of his subjects. He usurped their right to create their own past by living in a free present. The worlds ran strictly according to the whims of the God Emperor, and he made clear to all thinking creatures that to live apart from him was unthinkable. Leto was God and, as God, all was created in his image. With such a view of the universe, he would not allow anyone to interpret the past or even to describe it. Only Leto knew the one and only path, the Golden Path, and his sole ownership of the path demanded that he possess all the maps as well. The past, or beginning of the Golden Path, had to remain in his hands because it was a key to what he intended for the future.

  Thus, Leto's attitude toward historians was a mixture of ironic jest and tyrannic policy. On the one hand, Leto knew that those who worshiped the past could understand so little of it that they were laughable in what they took for truth. On the other, he had no wish that anyone, even by accident, appear to so interpret the past that the key to the future be even briefly touched by another. As the above quotation indicates, his answer to the necessity of historical movement was to usurp all the roles. By becoming the historical dialectic, he became history itself, and, therefore, the future as well.

  What kind of a being would have such an ego that he would even dare conceive of such a plan? What kind of a being would have such power that he could actually carry that plan out? The answer is clear: only the true Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit male whose organic power could bridge space and time. Leto Atreides was the true God Emperor of Dune because he had been bred to the role.

  By calling Leto II the true Kwisatz Haderach, it should not be understood that the Bene Gesserit intended to create Leto or that they had a hand in guiding him to the path he took. While his grandmother, the Reverend Mother Lady Jessica Harkonnen, the concubine of Leto Atreides I, must have played some role in Leto's early life, she did so against the desires of the Sisterhood. To the Bene Gesserit, Leto and his twin sister, Ghanima, were both Abominations. Both were fully conscious in the womb of their mother, Chani Liet-Kynes, the Fremen concubine of Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, and both awoke to consciousness filled with the personalities and memories of all their ancestors. The Bene Gesserit would have preferred Leto dead and were responsible for a large number of the plots against his life during the more than 3,500 years he lived.

  However, Leto was not Abomination. Unlike Alia Atreides, accurately called Abomination, Leto learned to control all of the personalities living within him and to make use of them. As a boy he overthrew Alia and then created an empire that cast that of his father, Muad'Dib, into shadow.

  As incredible as any of these facts might appear even to those who have every reason to believe their truth, they pale when compared to the biological transformation that Leto allowed himself to undergo. Immediately before his overthrow of Alia, he took a child's game of the Fremen to the extreme. Fremen children once amused themselves by placing sandtrout on their hands and watching them mold themselves to the shape; they would then shake the trout off and admire the "gloves" thus formed. Leto, however, placed sandtrout over his entire body allowing open space only for his mouth and nose. The result was strength beyond imagining and a life that lasted inconceivable centuries. With the transformation of Arrakis, moreover, Leto became the last Shai-Hulud or, at least, the last potential Shai-Hulud.

  Consider then the combination that Leto represented: he contained within himself the complete history of the worlds, his father's memories and knowledge, and the strength of Shai-Hulud, the great sandworm of Arrakis. How it is possible to believe that Leto was anything but a god?

  And what a god Leto must have been, because within him was both Atreides and Harkonnen blood that had been reared in one of the last of the Fremen sietches of Arrakis. Indeed, many of the personalities that inhabited Leto's body were Fremen personalities received from his mother, Chani. Thus, it is worth raising once again an earlier question: What kind of being would possess such an ego that he would even dare to conceive of becoming all of history? One such being might be an Atreides who shared with his ancestors an unquenched blood-lust, even if individual Atreides were not as cruel or as violent as the general type. Leto's father was one of the gentler Atreides. He was never comfortable with the actions performed in his name. Some scholars have even suggested that it was this gentle aspect that determined Muad'Dib's course when he walked as a blind man into the Arrakeen desert. He was sick of his life as the leader of the Second Jihad. But Leto was not of the same nature as his father. He could take on the skin of the sandtrout, and history has ample records to prove that Leto did not shy away from the exercise of raw, bloody power.

  Another such being with ego strong enough might be a Harkonnen. While equally bloody as the Atreides, the Harkonnen also equally gloried in the use of power. It was the Harkonnen talent to gain and exercise power by diplomatic intrigue, with a frequent assassination thrown in. While Leto's great-grandfather, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is best known for the luxury he surrounded himself with and for his death at the hands of Alia Atreides, it must be remembered that he was also a diplomatic genius. He was able to manipulate a number of business ventures into a rapid restoration of his family's power after an earlier Harkonnen had seemingly destroyed the family by an act of cowardice. Given the constant power struggles during the rule of the Padishah Shaddam IV, such a feat is remarkable. And, once again, history reveals that Leto knew well how to apply the velvet glove of diplomacy where it was needed.

  A third being capable of such an ego might be a Fremen who was convinced that what was at stake was the tau of his sietch. Given what is known of Fremen culture and the Fedaykin, it is not difficult to see the singlemindedness in Leto as an expression of Fremen devotion to oneness. Leto not only invented the Golden Path, he believed in it as well. To him it was the one true way to preserve the worlds from vast, overwhelming destruction. A Fremen, faced with the potential destruction of the sietch, would act to preserve the t
au by any means within his grasp. Leto acted to preserve the tau of humanity, but the means within his grasp far exceeded those available to a mere Fremen.

  Finally, there is a fourth being capable of such an ego: Shai-Hulud, "The Old Man of the Desert," "Old Father Eternity," and "The Grandfather of the Desert." By Shai-Hulud, it is not meant here any of the sandworms of Arrakis or the stunted ones that now exist on Rakis. No, this is the Shai-Hulud that the Fremen used to personify the very elemental forces of the planet, those forces that were so great, so overpowering that they stood for all time. Shai-Hulud was, to the Fremen, the only true eternal force. So vast, so incredible ware the powers of Shai-Hulud that the Fremen believed it to be beyond reason. Shai-Hulud lived only for itself, uninterested in and incapable of understanding the petty creatures that shared its world. And clearly Leto was equally capable of such monumental indifference. Moneo Atreides, the last steward of the God Emperor, frequently saw Leto in such moods. He called them "the stirrings of the worm."

  Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, Shai-Hulud — any of these might be a being with ego powerful enough to dare become the history and future of the universe. But Leto was all four; he had to dare because it was an essential part of his nature. Leto had no choice. Because of what he was, he was destined to pick up where his father failed and become the true Kwisatz Haderach. And because he was destined to be the Kwisatz Haderach, he perforce must become the God Emperor, for they are one and the same.