“Dune”: House Atreides’ Fall from Grace
What makes the Dune franchise so successful? For one, it was generations ahead of its time since being published in August 1965. Herbert’s unique vision of the future gave us an intriguing view of the present, which we can still see today. Herbert’s novel takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis, where water is extremely limited and in whose sands the iconic sandworm was born. The first novel mainly revolves around the intrigue surrounding a precious drug the worms (also called Shai-Hulud) produce, called the spice, and a young man named Paul Atreides, who has an extreme sensitivity to it. Not only does the spice help direct interstellar space travel, it also prolongs life and protects against disease. The Fremen, a race native to Arrakis, use it for its benefits and in turn it gives their characteristic blue-within-blue eyes. It should be mentioned that the Fremen make for an extremely powerful and hardy fighting force, part of the term “desert power” by the Duke Leto I (more about him later). Recently in 2021, there was as excellent movie adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve. However, as movies tend to deviate from the plot of the books they are adapted from, I will stay true to the books.
There are spoilers here.
Obviously there’s some other details that I’m omitting, but only for the sake of conciseness.
My uncle told me he reads Dune once each year. It is, beyond a doubt, his favorite book. When he gave me a Penguin Galaxy copy of Dune in 6th grade as a Christmas gift (I was, and still am, a highly voracious reader), I didn’t understand it, but I liked it. After finishing, I thought that he probably gave it to me to read now so I would understand it in the future when I came back to it. Well, he was right. Fast forward six years later to August 2022, when I was a senior in high school. I was probing through my bookshelf looking for something to read when I came across a dusty copy of Dune. I knew what it was, since I had already read it, but it took me a while to remember who gave it to me. I opened the cover and inside was an inscription in Sharpie that said “To Avery, Christmas 2016”. I was overjoyed to find that book again, remembering back to the moment when I thought that I would read it again to understand it. So I did.
Dune: A comprehensive background
Think of me as your guide, although not based on fact since my thoughts are speculative. In order to lead you through the immense continuity that is the Dune series, I must first provide some exposition in the form of summaries. If you’ve already read the series up to God Emperor of Dune, you’re right at home. If you haven’t, now would be a good time to turn back. I should also mention that although I’m summarizing the first book only for expositional purposes, after it I will state what happened at the end of each book, with my thoughts on that particular entry. So without further ado, let’s jump right in!
In the beginning of the series, House Atreides was a fairly innocent house with a reputation for loyalty and maintaining democracy. Its seat of rule is Caladan, a planet known for its lush oceans. It is the polar opposite of House Harkonnen: absolutist, autocratic rule with an industrialist home planet, Giedi Prime. House Atreides had always been a House Major in the politics of Dune, but it mostly operated in the background until Jessica became Leto’s “wife” and gave birth to Paul. The Bene Gesserit (an elusive organization comprised exclusively of females trained in the use of the Voice, a certain use of vocals which makes others do their will, and whose selective breeding program had been seeking to bring about the “Kwisatz Haderach”, or the Messiah) had been pulling strings for thousands of years to achieve what ended up being Paul. As a result of this breeding scheme, Paul realizes he has significant powers, caused by Jessica’s choice to bear a son and his exposure to high amounts of spice.
At the start of the first book, Duke Leto I of House Atreides is faced with a planet-sized problem: Imperial Emperor Shaddam IV, conspiring with the evil House Harkonnen, has put Leto in fief control of Arrakis, the source for the Spice, in an attempt to destroy the Atreides after their arrival there.
During an assault on Arrakis by House Harkonnen, Leto is used as a tool for assassination of the Baron, but the opposite happens. Now, the Duke is dead and the Baron lives. Jessica and Paul are captured, but by the Fremen, and once Paul proves his worth, are assimilated into the population of Sietch Tabr. It is revealed that the Fremen believe in the Kwisatz Haderach, a legend planted by the Bene Gesserit beforehand, and see Paul as their savior. Jessica chooses to undergo a ritual to become a Reverend Mother (a sacred prescient woman-priest), causing the unborn baby she is carrying, Alia, to have her powers as well as all the past experiences of Reverend Mothers. Paul’s visions also reveal to him that Jessica is a descendant of the Baron Harkonnen.
Here’s where Paul is really shaped into the person he is later in the novel. He adapts to the Fremen way of life and takes Chani as his lover, completely assimilating into their culture.
Two years pass, and in that time, Alia is born. Paul has visions of the future, where the Fremen have started a Jihad in his name that has swept the entire known universe. This is the event that lights the fuse for the rest of the series. Paul embraces his father’s belief that these Fremen can be used as a powerful tool to combat the Imperium and Harkonnens, but he also realizes that if not stopped, the Jihad will become reality. Paul concludes that he needs to drink the Water of Life, a highly poisonous Spice concentrate which, if successfully passed, increases prescience.
He then falls into unconsciousness for several weeks, but when he wakes he and the Fremen realize that he has finally become what the Bene Gesserit were formed to achieve from the very beginning: the Kwisatz Haderach. He is now able to see into that forbidden place where the Reverend Mothers cannot go.
Paul senses that the Baron and Imperium are about to quell the rebellion, and prepares the Fremen for a major offensive. Under the cover of an electric storm, which nullifies the Baron and Emperor’s force shields, Paul and his Fremen arrive riding sandworms, where they assault the capital where the Baron and the Emperor are, and during the chaos Alia kills the Baron.
The Emperor reluctantly cedes the throne and promises his daughter’s, Princess Irulan, hand in marriage. As Paul takes control of the Empire, he realizes that while he has done so, the Jihad has started and he is unable to stop it due to the Fremen’s strong belief in him.
So the tale of the degeneration and “false messiah” of the Atreides begins. When the Imperium threatened Paul and his family (and his planet for that matter; he has become the Duke due to his father’s death), he had no other choice than to fight, but doing so would have disastrous consequences on his descendants that not even he could anticipate.
At the end of Dune Messiah, Paul had seen visions of what would happen if he became a martyr. The Fremen would continue the Jihad, which could possibly result in exterminating the majority of humanity. He had seen what the Jihad had become and tried to quell it by going down the only logical path: he chose to walk into the desert where no one could posthumously revere him, thus (ideally) stopping the holy war. Only it didn’t. It made him a martyr, an iconic monomyth that his sister Alia would later exploit in an attempt to gain power.
By the time we get around to Children of Dune, the degeneration has become impossible to miss. That “fairly innocent house” has gone from becoming the ruling house of the known universe, to the martyrdom of its leading figure, and devolving to a poorly maintained theocracy led by Alia, which was so unstable that it collapsed within twelve years. So, when reviewing the history of the Atreides line, one naturally assumes that its lineage can only get worse from here. In fact, Frank Herbert’s intent when writing these books was to liken the series “…to a fugue, and while Dune was a heroic melody, Dune Messiah was its inversion. Paul rises to power in Dune by seizing control of the single critical resource in the universe, melange. His enemies are dead or overthrown, and he is set to take the reins of power and bring a hard but enlightened peace to the universe. Herbert chose in the books that followed to undermine Paul’s triumph with a string of failures and philosophical paradoxes.” This reminds me of JRR Tolkien’s tale of The Children of Hurin, which follows Hurin and his children in a similar pattern: initial success of the progenitor and the downfall of his descendants. It looks like even heroes have their time.
So now, around 3500 years have passed since the events of Children of Dune, in which Leto II fuses with a school of sandtrout and becomes nearly immortal. Due to Dune’s rapidly evolving climate for past millennia, the planet is no longer a desert. In fact, water is in such abundance now that there are rivers and even seas on Dune. Because water is highly poisonous to sandworms and the desert is no more, the native sandworm population have become entirely extinct, except for Leto II, henceforth referred to as the “Worm” or the “God Emperor”.
The God Emperor of Dune controls the biggest spice hoard in the galaxy; and because of this, his being descended from Maud’Dub (Paul’s Fremen name), and his physical strength, almost all known civilization is under his complete control. Although he is nearly immortal, the Worm is prone to instinct-driven bouts of violence when provoked. As a result, his rule is one of despotic fear and religious awe. You may be wondering, how has the Atreides line come to this? The answer lies within the confines of history, which always proves certain social, political, and other civic trends given enough time. Therefore, history has proven this: although absolutist rulers (it must be one individual who has complete control with no one to check him) may start out benevolently, if time enough passes in their rule, their morals will inevitably disintegrate and they will be seduced by the power which sits at their very fingertips. This is not always the case, but in the context of Dune, it is.
Applying this dogma, the Worm’s Golden Path had originally started out as a way to save mankind with Leto as its guiding principle, but over thousands of years morphed into a civilization ruled by fear. Leto still believes he is guiding humanity to a new Golden Age, but in reality he is disillusioned by his grasp on power. Even though Leto is far from human, he is not quite a sandworm yet. Therefore, he has retained some of his original humanity, which, given the fact that humans will make mistakes, succeeds in tempting him into becoming a disillusioned character with too much power.
The book opens with Leto’s giant wolves chasing a group of rebels who stole classified papers from Leto’s citadel, brutally killing all of them except for their leader, Siona, who is the daughter of Leto’s right-hand man, Moneo. Furthermore, Siona is part of the Atreides line. It’s Atreides against Atreides. Who would’ve thought? But as it is with all absolute rule, there is always a rebellion, a rejection of the current power with the aim to make a new, reformed one. And the cycle ultimately repeats itself. Finally, we have a sense of what is right and what is wrong in the world of Dune, keeping in mind that the Atreides’ morality has been slowly devolving since Paul became the Kwisatz Haderach.
Siona is Leto’s polar opposite: she is the living embodiment of the justice that would ultimately come to visit The Worm. Leto has disbanded the Landsraad to all but a few Great Houses; those that remain are bound to him by his hold on the spice. The Fremen are no more; the only vestiges of that culture are the so-called “museum Fremen”, who are simply pretenders and who are often an annoyance to Leto, who constantly has to deal with their proposed legislation in protest to his reign. The Imperial army now consists of Fish Speakers, an all-female group who obey Leto without question. Space travel is non-existent to most people in his Empire, which he has purposefully kept to a near-primitive level of technological restriction. He has done all of this in accordance with a precognizant vision that will establish an enforced peace, preventing humanity from killing itself through destructive behavior. However benevolent his intent may have been, the fact remains that atrocities were committed. The penalty for his transgressions is, of course, death. You see, I believe in karma. Apparently, so does Herbert. Do something wrong, and retribution will come to you, often in the form of avengers of the wronged.
I’m going to skip through most of the book straight to the end; the intricacies of the plot aren’t quite relevant enough to be included here. So, this karmic repercussion was exactly what visited Leto, resulting in his climactic death. After falling from a bridge into a river, which (remember that water is poisonous to a sandworm, which is what Leto almost has become!) rends his sandtrout skin apart, Leto, defeated, reveals a secret of the Golden Path to Siona and Duncan: the production of a human who is invisible to prescient vision. Having begun millennia before with the union of Ghanima and Farad’n, Siona is the product, and her descendants will retain this ability. He explains that humanity is now free from the restraints of oracles, free to scatter throughout the universe, never again to face complete domination or complete destruction. After revealing the location of his secret spice hoard, Leto dies, leaving Duncan and Siona to face the task of managing the empire.
So there we have it: the tale of the degeneration of the Atreides line told in full. It’s a sad story, but as mentioned above, Herbert intended it to be this way.
My interpretation of why he would want to do this is here: he wanted to let society as a whole know about the danger of making a man-made god, and the myth that follows in the martyr’s wake. Herbert is trying to teach us, through the history of the Atreides, that these things cannot be natural or good. Man takes something natural, such as letting a martyr fade away into legend, and corrupts it, boding doom for all. I’m also inclined to say that this book in particular analyzes the cyclical patterns of human society as well as the ever-present evolutionary drive in human beings. Due to his being preborn, The Worm has access to many thousands of years’ worth of ancestral memories (such as the Babylonian Empire), and from them, analyzes the patterns and effects of past tyrannical institutions and modified them to form his own unique empire, which was intentionally designed to be destroyed as the first part of a plan which would save humanity from inevitable self-destruction: The Golden Path.
At the start of each chapter, there is always a quote by Leto but varying in source, although the most frequent source is the Stolen Journals (the same ones that Siona stole). These quotations are meant to be discovered in the future after Leto has died, explaining some of the things he did and why he did them while simultaneously humanizing him. Informationally, they consist of thought-provoking passages, from the nature of language and religion, to history, prophecy, and government. Here’s one of my favorites:
“Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you — the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group…each with its masters and servants, its hosts and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to “those better times”. I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles”.
Food for thought.
In a sentence, this quote demonstrates that this is the reason why empires fall apart and return to the primordial soup from whence it came: humanity, however far separated from tribal forms it is, has a tendency to return to those very forms. If we are going off of Herbert’s canon and beliefs, this is precisely what happened with Paul’s empire, therefore it is inevitable that it would happen. Although it’s a rather melancholy conclusion for this sect of the Atreides line, it’s a fresh start for humanity. If we backtrack to the beginning of the essay, one can reasonably conclude this: Paul, through the tumultuous history of his line, ultimately restarted humanity and freed it from the confines of prophecy.
Maybe that’s not such a bad ending for the Dune saga after all.
