The Neomaimomdist Rabbirate
New Philadelphia Friends Yearly Meeting
The Ommanean Variationists (Reformed)
The Orange Protestant Army of True Believers
The Ortho-Catholic Circle of Sigma Draconis
The Orthodox Gregorian Chantry
Palislamic Fellowship
Panafrican Reformed Churches in Union
The Ramakrishna Gospel Mission to Biarek
The Ray Space Worshippers
The Roman Catholic Episcopal Church
The Sacerdotal Hermeticists of Beta Tegeuse
The Servants of Light, Olaf
Socratic Christian Dialoguists, IV Anbus
The Solarian Centrist Tradition
Space Baptist Mission, Poritrin
The Stellar Deist Watchmen of Ix
Sugislamic Congregationaiists of Tupali
The Sunni Orange Co-operative, Jaf’r
The Sunsufi Chapter of Kadrish
The Talimidic Zabur Followers, Salusa Secundus
The Tantric Rhythmists of Richese
Taoist Pilgrims in Space
The Tawrah Collegiate, Salusa Secundus
The Tendai Fundamentalist Church
Tenri Kyo Science in the Galaxy
Tenth-Day Adventist Church of Rapide
The Terran Orthodox Church of Novebruns Planet
The Thomasian Faith
The Unitarian Galactic Church
The United Church of Rossak
The United Moravian Assembly
The Universal Hindu Faith Headquarters, Hagal
The Universal Pantheist Religion
The Vatsyayana Evangelical Mission, Position III
The Visionaries of Los
Vivekrishnan Disciples
The Vudu Reformed Cult
The White Kirk of Maclean
The Zabulonian Mennonites
The Zen Baptist Union
The Zen Hekiganshu Faith of III Delta Pavonis
The Zenshintoist Imperial Church
Zensunni Catholic Amalgamation
The Zensunni Wanderers
Zoroastrian Dualists of Tupile
Further references: ORANGE CATHOLIC BIBLE M.T. (IN LIFE AND TEACHING OF PAUL MUAD'DIB); Anon., The Dune Gospels, Rakis Ref. Cat. 1-T2; Pyer Briizvair, A Variorum Edition of the Orange Catholic Bible Commentaries; Summa of Ancient Beliefs and Practice (Bolchef: Collegium Tarno).
ORANGE CATHOLIC BIBLE (IN LIFE AND TEACHING OF PAUL MUAD'DIB)
The youthful education of Muad'Dib, while he was yet Paul Atreides, during his first fifteen years on Caladan, was in many ways remarkably extensive, in others severely limited. He lacked playmates for obvious security reasons, and he never afterwards felt at ease with anyone of his own age except Chani. He was never exposed to the society of the Caladan peons, the pundi rice farmers, although he often expressed curiosity about their customs and may have learned something of their religious practices, which in many ways were surprisingly similar to those of the Arrakis Fremen. His father, the Red Duke Leto Atreides, was not, it is thought, greatly religious, maintaining the polite indifference of his class. His mother, Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit adept, trained her son in prana-musculature and bindu-nervature control, taught him the Litany against Fear and undoubtedly passed on to him some of the wisdom embodied in the Azhar Book. However, her interest in power, somewhat narrowly conceived, her driving ambition (little though she understood it), and her habitually rigid self-control, may have inhibited the natural expression of maternal love. From two of his companion-teachers, Gurney Halleck and Dr. Wellington Yueh, the young Paul imbibed much of the language and spirit of the Orange Catholic Bible. Gurney Halleck, a troubadour as well as a warrior, had a quotation for any occasion ready on his lips. Dr. Yueh's black reputation in history should not obscure his value as a teacher and his personal kindliness; his was the softest influence on his pupil, a religious influence in the old Ortho-Catholic spirit. It was Yueh who presented to Paul the inspired gift of his personal copy of the O.C. Bible in a space traveler's edition, as they were about to depart from Caladan. Paul would later recall this "exposure to the O.C. Bible at a critical moment."
What was it in the gift of this little book, printed on filament paper, that stirred Paul's terrible purpose? It is recorded that he felt its importance for him almost at once. A curious accident occurred while Yueh was showing his pupil how to operate the book. Paul was meant to begin reading at Kaliraa 467, but he opened the work at the favorite passage of Yueh's Bene Gesserit wife, Wanna. This text (Blake Skul Vis. 99) suggests that we may all be deaf and blind to another world about us; Paul's imagination may have been stirred then and later by the thought that he might be the first man chosen to break through to such a wider perception.
The text Yueh asked him to begin reading, "From water does all life begin," also recurred to him later. Two things may be said here concerning Paul's "terrible purpose." First, and most obviously, he quoted the text when, after his duel with Jamis, he was troubled at having to accept the water from the Fremen's dead body; Paul may well have had some prescient intuition of this moment. Second, and more subtly, it may be that the text, in its association of the key terms Water and Life, combined subliminally with Wanna's text to suggest that in the one idea lay the means to the other. Later he would not be able to resist the challenge of the Water of Life (itself, albeit in a context different from that of the Fremen rite, an O.C. Bible symbol).
Yueh made a compact with Paul to keep his gift of the O.C. Bible a secret, because he naturally did not want anybody wondering why he should have chosen just this time to give away his most precious possession. Paul would recognize soon after his arrival at Arrakeen the sources of the quotations that ornamented Gurney Halleck's conversation, but he kept his knowledge to himself. Meanwhile, he doubtless turned over in his mind the histories of many a prophet and saint, apostle and martyr, recorded in the scriptures, and particularly he would have brooded deeply on the idea of the Messiah, by whose means all men are to be made one under God. Muad'Dib deeply longed to be a true Messiah. Instead, he became a Mahdi, a hero-emperor, and the instigator of the most destructive jihad ever unleashed upon the universe. From its beginnings, the O.C. Bible, like the Testaments before it, had suffered the same bitter paradox, the poisoning of what was intended by what was brought to pass.
Paul's first public quotation from the O.C. Bible, which he may have meant merely as a courteous remark to the Imperial Planetologist, Kynes, had an electrifying effect upon his Fremen auditors. The text was Ohashi LXV: 13, "The gift is the blessing of the giver." Its Zensunni origin perhaps accounted for its recognition among the Fremen, who were at once reminded of the words of their messianic legend: "They will greet you with Holy Words and your gifts will be a blessing." There is no reason to suppose that Paul had prior knowledge of the Lisan al-Gaib portent of his words, so that here, as so often elsewhere in his story, one has the sense of the individual being acted upon by a fatal and irresistible force rather than acting deliberately. (The O.C. Bible, in one of its Navachristian books, has a relevant text, Avatara 1181: "My tongue is merely the baliset, and you are the musician who plays on it. I am your glove puppet; yours are the fingers. I express only what you think in your mind.")
A curious yet profound text in the O.C. Bible which greatly influenced Paul is the sirat with its central image, "Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind." He rolled this quotation in his mind as he and his mother sped along a narrow cleft toward the Cave of the Ridges, completing one phase of their flight from the Arrakeen massacre. The sirat is a narrow bridge along which we travel through our journey of life. Although Paradise is our goal, we must not step off the sirat to reach it prematurely; neither must we allow ourselves to be snared by the tendrils of Hell. Death is behind to catch whoever stumbles. The text says, "On my right there are houris, a garden, portyguls laden with fruit and blossom, both at the same time; there is the sondagi and the akarso, wi
th people clothed in silk and gossamer drinking rachag at tables under the boughs; there it is always sihaya. On my left are the djinni in the burning sands of the bled; al-Lat bums there like blood; bakka pours from the bodies of those who run there, limping, driven by the ghafla; yet near me there are faces of attraction, eyes like opafire, distracting, dazzling..." and again: "I walk, the straight and narrow path between the Yang of light, the Yin of darkness; myself am Yang, myself am Yin; am both, yet neither, for I move between." There is another image often remembered from the sirat: "On the planet Mercury, whose face is ever to al-Lat, there is a ridge: it is the sirat. On one side all is heat and molten rock and the noise of steam and the bubbling of boiling sand; on the other side there is permafrost, ice, bitter cold, dark and silence broken only by the tinkle of the crystal stars. Only on the ridge is it safe to move, for a little while." "Relax," says the sirat, "relax, enjoy the view." On the sirat there are resting places. For Muad'Dib there was Chani.
As recorded in Princess Irulan's Muad'Dib: The Religious Issues, when Paul drank the Water of Life, "He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced. On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Fremen and their Muad'Dib, the sleeping giant Fremen poised for their wild crusade across the universe. Paul felt himself at the center, at the pivot where the whole structure turned, walking a thin wire of peace with a measure of happiness, Chani, at his side." Muad'Dib's relationship with Chani, like that of his father with Lady Jessica, was not one legally sanctioned, but he nevertheless regarded it as binding in the most ancient traditional sense. His words of reassurance to Chani when they first encountered the beautiful Princess Irulan, "That which binds us cannot be loosed," go right back to Epistles and, beyond them, to Genesis.
Muad'Dib's years among the Fremen sharpened his understanding of the cruel necessities of life, an understanding not much mitigated by the deeper understanding he gained of the Zensunni religion which in their tradition was more purely Sunnite (Islamic) than Zensunnite because of, rather than in spite of, their wanderings as a race. A more philosophical understanding of Zensunni tradition was derived by Muad'Dib from his conversations with the ghola Hayt (Duncan Idaho). The ghola had been trained by the Tleilaxu as a Mentat and philosopher of the Zensunni, in order to increase, if possible, his abilities with the sword (the legendary Samurai combat ability was still remembered). Unfortunately, this influence only encouraged Muad'Dib's taste for irony and love of paradox, fostering the increasing crypticism of his public utterances. Several of the ghola's remarks may be traced to key passages in the O.C. Bible or the Commentaries, as when Hayt first met Muad'Dib: "The cleansed mind makes decisions in the presence of unknowns and without cause and effect." The saying derives from a comment on Bodhisat. 73:9: "When you are sinking in the river do you hold your feet still while you consider whether you fell from the bank or were pushed by a friend?" The Koan Answers are recalled by the ghola when he suggests to Muad'Dib that infinite power can be contemplated in comfort only by remembering that all things are finite. On another occasion, the ghola told Paul that "We Zensunni say: 'Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering,'" from Ohashi XII:12. After Muad'Dib walked blind into the desert, the ghola shared with Stilgar a moment of true Zensunni understanding: "'He will not be found,'" Stilgar said. "'Yet all men will find him.'"
Muad'Dib's explorations of his inner life were very much in the Zensunni spirit. His abiding concern to "see into his nature" goes back to Hui-Neng 5 but, as with so many of the Zensunni, he was not able to look beyond the self (or in Paul's case, the selves) to find the divine, the jewel in the lotus. "Find Buddha in your own heart, whose essential nature is the Buddha himself," teaches Eisai 11:6, but Muad'Dib, who found so much, did not find That.
After he became The Preacher, Paul sought to reawaken the relapsed Fremen to their Zensunni heritage. At Arrakeen, he proclaimed: "The only business of the Fremen should be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings." In his desert years, however, Paul himself seems to have reverted more to a Navachristian, even a Judeoslamic style of thought. Zensunni thought-patterns were by no means eliminated, however, as can be seen when, on his first appearance at Alia's Temple, he cried out: "The religion of Muad'Dib is not Muad'Dib" (cf. "The finger which points at the moon is not the moon itself." [Sutra 124]).
On his dramatic first appearance before Alia's Temple, Paul displayed as a kind of credential a mummified, human hand from the desert. Regarded as the relic of some final encounter with a sandworm, such a token was universally regarded as a communication from Shai-Hulud. However, Paul further substantiated his claim to be a messenger from God by drawing on texts in the O.C. Bible. "I bring the Hand of God, and that is all I bring!" he shouted. "I speak for the Hand of God. I am The Preacher." The title of The Preacher refers, of course, to the author of the text of that name, traditionally identified with Solomon, the wisest man of the past, and so considered to be a title highly appropriate for the former emperor, once Paul Atreides. The Hand of God authenticates The Preacher's witness via a more obscure text in Job VII:11: "I will teach you by the hand of God: that which is with the Almighty will I not conceal."
The speeches of The Preacher are sot only full of biblical texts but also redolent of biblical rhetoric. The prophetic rhythms are strong in "Thus it is written! They who pray for dew at the desert's edge shall bring forth the deluge! They shall not escape their fate through powers of reason! Reason arises from pride that a man may not know in this way when he has done evil." The formula, "Thus it is written," occurs several times in Gospel, but the actual text quoted is not to be found there, nor has it been discovered in any other text after the most prolonged scholarly search. Presumably it was once part of a text known to the Fremen and so may be tentatively placed in the half-legendary Shah-Nama, the First Book of the Zensunni Wanderers, or in some secret text of the old Fremen religion. This sermon was addressed particularly to the ears of Muad'Dib's priesthood, "those who practice the ecumenism of the sword"; and memories of the Gospel text (XXXVL52), "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword," lie closely behind The Preacher's stern words: "They who learn the lesson of self-deception too well shall perish by that deception." In this sermon, also, The Preacher refers to "the illusion of Maya" and almost reproduces the words of the Commentaries in explaining that "such thoughts have no independent reality."
For a time Paul as The Preacher seems to have cast himself in the role of a Jeremiah or an Elijah, exposing corruption in high places, speaking truth to power, and uttering prophetic warnings of the dire consequences of that evil-doing performed in the name of Muad'Dib. If this is how he saw himself, however, it is not as Leto saw him. Leto cast The Preacher as John the Baptist and used him quite deliberately to herald his own Messiahship. It is recorded that Leto associated the death of the historical John the Baptist (Gospel IV) with the pseudo-death of his father, which locked him into his father's prophetic vision. "Poor Baptist John," Leto thought. "If he'd only had the courage to die some other way....But perhaps his choice had been the bravest one. How do I know what alternatives faced him? I know what alternatives faced my father, though." It was in order to break out of the cruel jihadic path set for the Empire by Muad'Dib that Leto chose for himself the terrible Golden Path. This decision required that Paul Muad'Dib, who had imposed his will upon countless millions in the Empire, should himself be subjugated to the will of his son, Leto, the future God Emperor. The transfer of power took place during the great meeting of Leto, already in his sandtrout skin, and his father in the
desert, where there took place a duel in which the weapons were visions of alternate futures. Leto saw further, as far as to Kralizec, the Typhoon Struggle, the great battle at the end of the universe, known in the O.C. Bible (Revelation) as Armageddon, and so Leto prevailed over his father.
When The Preacher vouched for Leto's integrity (that he was not Abomination) before Gurney Halleck, he already accepted his John the Baptist function, as is shown by his words: "Once I opposed him, but now I do his bidding. He is the Healer." He made that role explicit in his final sermon at Alia's Temple. This sermon is full of biblical texts and applications of texts to the situation on Arrakis.
The Preacher began his address by associating the Desert of Zan, the place of the first trial of the Zensunni Wanderers, with the wilderness of the Exodus, where the Israelites (those ancient Fremen desert dwellers) were tried over forty years. "I found myself in the Desert of Zan," The Preacher shouted (see Ohsshi IV-VII), "in that waste of howling wilderness [Laws XXXII:10]. And God commanded me to make that place clean [cf. Laws XVIII:25-30). For we were provoked in the desert, and grieved in the desert, and we were tempted in that wilderness to forsake our ways" (Psalm XCV:8-10). By these allusions, The Preacher not only commanded the attention of his Fremen hearers but authenticated his words as springing from the most ancient prophetic sources. The words themselves challenged the Fremen with the charge of apostasy and stirred all hearers by their lightly veiled reference to the mysterious breachings of the qanats. One of his hearers was Alia herself, who caught the Zan reference and wondered whether The Preacher was taking credit for the destruction wrought against the sietch strongholds of the loyal tribes.
His voice booming across the plaza, The Preacher continued to revive the associations of ancient prophetic words. "Wild beasts lie upon your lands," he said. "Doleful creatures fill your houses [Prophets V:21]. You who fled your homes no longer multiply your days upon the sand. Yea, you who have forsaken our ways, you will die in a fouled nest if you continue on this path [Job XIX: 18; note: the original nest has become 'a fouled nest']. But if you heed my warning, the Lord shall lead you through a land of pits into the Mountains of God. Yea, Shai-Hulud shall lead you" (Prophets LII:6-7).
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