Of most interest to ancient historians is the controversial Book of the Voices. This collection of shigawire voice-pattern recordings was made by Ghanima as she let the Voices of her memory lives speak through her. Over 2,400 voices have been discriminated thus, far, some speaking in languages which may never be translated, for some Terran languages were apparently never incorporated into Galach. The Bene Gesserit itself has teams of specialists in ancient languages working on translations. Ghanima's project took her over two hundred years of patient work, and it seems to be her major contribution to Leto's library. That the voices are genuine is probable, such an extensive forgery being an almost prohibitive task. Positive comparisons of the Book of Voices patterns of Lady Jessica, Paul Muad'Dib, R.M. Gaius Helen Mohiam, and Lady Anuril with authentic shigawires of their voices appear to support the validity of the collection. Much of the work done so far on The Book. of Voices has been supervised by Anna Judehic with the help of anthropolinguist Maro Ghappato and psycho-mythologist Mees Pentamettare.
Also of interest to historians is The Welbeck Assessment, the annual Bene Gesserit overview of the state of the Imperium. The only form of this compendium previously available was The Welbeck Abridgement available in the Chronicles reference section. R.M. Moiam has opened the Welbeck room containing the volumes from Shaddam IV through Leto II for study.
Judehic and R.M. Treac were shown the Azhar Book Index and the Panoplia Propheticus Index, but they were not allowed access to the holdings. Since the Azhar Book is contained in three rooms and the Panoplia Propheticus fills two rooms, obviously the volumes in the Library's General Collection are merely selections from the original. The Azhar Book Index shows entries through the Holy Church, into present theology, indicating that rather than being a historical document, this is an open-ended collection. And though the Missionaria Protectiva was supposed to have ended long before the Atreides' time, the Panoplia Propheticus Index indicates that it too is an open-ended, current collection. Hadi Benotto, Director of the Dar-es-Balat Project, has requested that both collections be opened for research. Judehic noted the curiosity that the Tleilaxu Godbuk Index was with the other two indices — a strange association since the Bene Gesserit Library has this item included in its Xenocultural Collection. When questioned about this idiosyncrasy, R.M. Moiam refused comment.
Finally, in the Research Section is a Medical Index which lists intriguing entries such as The Medical Aspects of Melange Rejection; Cellular Activation and Regeneration; Cellular Restructuring: The Cases of Duncan Idaho and Hwi Noree; and Cellular Interchange: Leto II. Benotto has also requested that bio-medical engineers be allowed access to this material.
The Bene Gesserit Archivae holds the secrets of all of our pasts. If the order can be persuaded to open its resources to academic scholarship, our culture could benefit from its own past. We could more easily discriminate between what we now think of as myth and what is actually history.
J.A.C.
Further references: B.G. LIBRARY; B.G. HISTORY; Maro Ghappato, Miraculous Voices at Rakis (Diana: Synonym).
BENE GESSERIT CHAPTER HOUSE
The Bene Gesserit Chapter House on Wallach IX is all that remains of a once extensive network of twelve chapter houses, multiple branch sisterhouses, and a complete educational system. This network was governed by the Mother House on Wallach IX and functioned from centuries before the Butlerian Jihad until the reign of Leto II. General information found in the Chapter House Library, for example, The Founding Legends and specialized material from the Bene Gesserit Archives (transmitted through Reverend Mother Cassius Ida Treac, Director of Educational Analysis for the Archives), describes Bene Gesserit facilities on all of the House Major worlds and on some House Minor worlds. This empire-wide institution flourished until Leto confiscated the goods and property of all the chapter houses except the one on Wallach IX and then closed the Mother House itself.
The Founding Legends as well as the Papers of Incorporation indicates that the initial Bene Gesserit complex was located on Wallach IX. The planet itself originally was colonized by an early form of the Sisterhood connected in some obscure way with the agency responsible for the planet-seeding enterprise. Apparently the initial facilities housed no more than 12,000 people and accommodated a small space flight station, a record-holding facility, a thought-machine complex, training schools for mytho-expansionists (an early version of the Missionaria Protectiva?), cultural ecologists, environmental socioplanners, and anthropolinguists. The remnants of information from this period also indicate that men lived and worked on Wallach IX with the Sisters and lay women. Within three hundred years the order had become large and powerful enough to form branch chapter houses and schools on six worlds, Komos being one of them. Four thousand years before the Butlerian Jihad, Bene Gesserit administration needed new facilities: executive, legislative, judicial, and ambassadorial offices, meeting rooms, and residential apartments. Thus the original buildings on Wallach IX were given over to the Chapter House and school while a new city-like complex was developed as a Mother House. Some of the newly discovered underground facilities on Wallach IX may have been part of the Mother House complex. By the time of the Butlerian Jihad, the Sisterhood had established all of its outlying eleven chapter houses as well as most of its eight hundred school systems, only a few of which were openly attached to the order.
The most complete records available date from the founding of the Imperium. Unfortunately, even they seem to have suffered in the period of devastation wreaked on the Sisterhood by Leto II (best described in The Razing of the Houses, written by R.M. Brutus Phyllis Tiamat in 10575, B.G. Private Papers, Folio 2583765). R.M. Treac and the linguistic historian Ahna Judehic (Bene Gesserit, Hidden Rank) have made an annotated compilation of the Imperium era records saved from the twelve chapter houses, The Roots of Tomorrow, a free mixture of legend and historical data. This work, however, is the most complete summary available at present of the Bene Gesserit Archives source material. From The Roots of Tomorrow we can at least determine the locations of the original chapter houses, some of which still function, but as universities.
Apparently a chapter house contained administrative offices both for the Bene Gesserit chapter and for the school attached to it. In each chapter house, female off-spring of Sisterhood breeders, unaffiliated with Houses Major or Minor, were cared for from birth in a special Kinder House. Also attached to the chapter house was a primary school which educated both Bene Gesserit children and females from upper-class families. The attached schools of higher education offered secondary level instruction to both groups of females as well as university instruction to Bene Gesserit Sisters. From what can be deduced from the Ordines Matrium and from recent archaeological investigations, some of the chapter houses also supported special schools to train Bene Gesserit women in order-designated professions.
The chapter house on Wallach IX was designated as the center for theological and philosophical training, not only having the principal Missionaria Protectiva school but also having the principal dar al-hikman. University records and archaeological explorations also indicate that the University of Wallach is the descendant of the Bene Gesserit university which contained the main reference library. The recently uncovered remains of a separate complex of buildings combining hospital and nursery facilities are probably the original Kinder House units, perhaps the same ones spoken of by Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in her memoirs. The recent dig has also revealed a large subterranean room— a domed, circular ceremonial hall with carvings of the Horned Goddess and her retinue on the walls and inscriptions of karama from the Azhar Book set in a multicolored tile floor. Present theory denotes this as the Hall of Ritual spoken of in early Bene Gesserit legends. From what can be seen, the Wallach facilities were obviously extensive, befitting the center of a complicated organization. New archaeological work on what appears to be the Mother House complex will give us more precise information on the early Wallach IX facilities.
Apparently t
he Bene Gesserit school on Kaitain is all that remains of a chapter house dedicated to the education of House Major children. Records indicate that this chapter house also trained breeders designated for marriage within the aristocratic families. Enrollment records for Kaitain found in the Archives read like an Imperial family tree. R.M. Treac has translated fragments of these ancient documents, finding references to an earlier chapter house on Salusa Secundus, apparently open during the Fremen captivity on that planet. Some connection may exist between that chapter house and the women mentioned both in Aramsham's The Sardaukar Strike and Sardaukar Victorious. The Kaitain records date its chapter house origin to approximately the same time House Corrino moved its court to that planet. Perhaps archaeological work beginning on Kaitain will support the Archive material. The verification of a chapter house on Salusa Secundus will be more difficult since all requests to do archaeological surveys have been denied.
Discovery of a chapter house on Grumman, one devoted to martial arts training, has led specialists in the Ginaz/Moritani Feud history to speculate on the relationship of the Bene Gesserit to the early development of weaponry expertise in both Houses. Harq al-Harba in The History of Duke Leto, Part I, refers to the "weirding conspiracy" and to the "women whose swords bear two edges" as chief proponents of the Assassin Conspiracy. Until the discovery of the martial arts school and chapter house on Grumman, critics had accepted this reference as one of al-Harba's mythic allusions. Perhaps his information was taken from the copy of Geoffroi's At Center Stage: The Ill-Fated House Ginaz found in his private library, or it may have been that the Grumman chapter house was still remembered in his time.
Records are less complete on the chapter houses on Yorba, Chusuk, and Ciemahn Banqs, mentioned only in The General Chapter House Listings (Bene Gesserit Archives). The Listings show that Chusuk was the smallest of the three, perhaps because its primary concern was music and the arts, areas never very important in the Sisterhood curriculum. The Yorba chapter house appears to have thrived as the center for business administration education and for the accounting services which handled the revenue statements for all the chapter houses off Wallach IX. The Listings show that the MBA degree, Mother of Business Administration, was awarded for over four hundred years, with an average of five hundred recipients each academic year. Obviously business, economics, and accounting were given higher priorities by the order than were the arts. The Listing also gives some information on Ciemahn Banqs, but no indication of the specialty of this chapter house. The graduate school was called the School of Biological and Social Sciences, but all specific information about degree requirements and professional training remains censored, sealed in the Archives. There is, however, an indication that a part of the graduate library and entire files of research work were transferred to Ix before the Ciemahn Banqs chapter house was destroyed. The Ixian Institute will not make any of these records available to us. This lack of information is unfortunate because of the Ciemahn Banqs razing. We may never know why Leto's orders for this chapter house were particularly severe, the resulting destruction being so complete that even aeronautical landform surveys show no trace of the buildings' foundations.
The chapter houses on Ix, Paquita, and Bela Tegeuse are far less difficult to study since the present academic institutions on these planets are housed in the original chapter house buildings. For some unknown reason, when Leto ordered the physical destruction of the other chapter houses, he spared these, being satisfied to confiscate the property and disband the order on these planets. The school on Ix descends from the original Primary Research and Genetic Science Institute established there after the Great Revolt; however, until the recent studies began, this school had never been connected with the Bene Gesserit. Paquita's school, on the other hand, has always been known as a Bene Gesserit institution specializing in history and linguistics. Anthropoecologists are presently studying the well-preserved chapter house there to learn more about the physical structure of that complex. Finally, the Center for the Study of Ecological and Behavioral Sciences on Bela Tegeuse also retains some, of its original Bene Gesserit facilities. Though this planet's rugged environment and legendary connection with the Zensunni Wanderers have given it a place in our mythology, only recently have the Bene Gesserit actually been identified with its history. Mytho-historians are now debating the possibility of an early Zensunni encounter with the Sisterhood, before the one theorized in the Missionaria Protectiva investigations. Experts now speculate that the ancient interrelationship of the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen Motherhood might be genetic as well as theological.
The chapter house on Gamont apparently specialized in training breeders designated as concubines for the Houses Major and Minor. Residency records for the chapter house found in the Archives indicate the Bene Gesserit of all ranks frequently returned here for specialized training in new techniques and for refresher courses. Some of the Gamont training programs and manuals were in a sealed section of the Archives, indicating their value to the order. The accommodations listed for this chapter house differ from the norm in having an extensive series of cottages, a men's residency hall, entertainment centers, and health club facilities, indicating that Gamont might also have served as a Rest and Rehabilitation center for the order and that training there was probably more practical than theoretical.
Information concerning the last two chapter houses is limited. The Giedi Prime chapter house apparently was the center for classified Bene Gesserit activities, the files holding these records still being kept under heavy security and unavailable to us. Historians have traditionally ascribed the violent destruction of Sisterhood facilities and the brutality associated with it to Leto's deep hatred of the Harkonnens. Peripheral material found in the Bene Gesserit Legislative files, however, indicates that the main training of the Giedi Prime chapter house was espionage. On this planet, survey work has located and opened an extensive camouflaged and reinforced underground maze of what appears to be an entire school, living quarters and all. Some problems have arisen with local authorities, though, who claim the underground buildings are part of old Harkonnen fortifications and thus are protected from off-world researchers under the Giedi Prime Act for Historical Preservation of National Monuments. Litigation has begun, but all further research work has been halted. Of the final chapter house, supposedly located on Tleilax, very little beyond the records in the Listings is known. No school survives there, and the Bene Gesserit claims to have no current contacts on the planet. Interestingly enough, though, Tleilax is one of the few worlds to still have folk myths current among its population about "weirding women," "assassins," and "twisted mentats," leading linguistic mythologists to believe that the Bene Gesserit has been active there at some time in the planet's history. Local tales are told of witches and sorceresses who practice their skills in the villages, and other tales associate the Tleilaxu face dancers with "weirding women." When contacted about these tales, Bene Gesserit historians connect these myths with those seeded by the Missionaria Protectiva. Furthermore, Bene Gesserit Administrators on Wallach IX expressed surprise that such a notion would be considered, stating emphatically that no association between the Sisterhood and the Face Dancers has ever existed.
J.A.C.
Further references: B.G. HISTORY; R.M. Brutus Phyllis Tiamat, The Razing of the Houses, tr. Zhaiva Gan, B.G. Foundation Studies 8 (Diana: Tevis); R.M. Cassius Ida Treac and Ahna Judehic, The Roots of Tomorrow (Wallach: Soror).
BENE GESSERIT GOVERNANCE
The rules of governance of the Bene Gesserit are given in The Bene Gesserit Canons. Though the Bene Gesserit, during the empire, projected a public image of being a religious service order, the Canons detail an organizational structure more appropriate for an empire-wide corporation than for a mendicant order. From the Canons' ratification date (303 BG) it appears that the order underwent extreme structural reorganization following the Butlerian Jihad. Historical appendices to the Canons indicate that the order, prior to the Butlerian Jihad, w
as a loosely structured confederation of chapter houses. The Canons set forth a well-defined system of governance incorporating ancient republican political theory and a tripartite matriarchal directorate. The governing bodies, composed of regular members of the Sisterhood and Reverend Mothers, functioned efficiently until Leto II dissolved eleven of the twelve chapter houses in 10573.
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