“I never wanted to be a god…” (45).

Originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and then later published by Berkley Publishing in 1970, Dune Messiah is often regarded as one of the most controversial –even disappointing—sequels ever published. It has received a steady stream of negative reviews almost from initial publication, with many readers hoping to witness Paul’s triumphant ascendance to ruler of the Imperium. However, I had a considerably more favorable view of the book. Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah presents the culmination of themes first explored in Dune –namely, the grave threat posed to civilization by messianic religion and the deceptive allure of charismatic demagogues. An American political speechwriter in the 1950s, Frank Herbert had personally witnessed the dangers of megalomania among various figures in Washington DC, in particular he was concerned about leaders like Patton and JFK. For Herbert, the great danger arises when religious myths are built up around singular figures, elevating them to godlike beings, transforming their personas in the popular imagination, permitting anything in the name of the god. Anyone who can bend the will of others with religious fervor is worthy of the deepest skepticism –fanaticism and hero worship are the fearsome enemies of civilization. In Dune Messiah, we are given the darker side of the hero’s journey as Paul Atreides has completed his Fremen jihad –killing some sixty-one billion people, with ninety sterilized planets, five hundred completely demoralized worlds, and forty decimated religions– and he has now reached the zenith of his power: Paul has become a god. But his utopian Imperium is now teetering on the edge of dystopia. He has grown to despise his movement, to loath his empire, which has mirrored his vision of a falling moon.  

“I belong to a vision” (45).

The original working title for Dune Messiah was apparently “Fool Saint” –perhaps a reference to the foolhardy deification of a figure like Paul, the illustrious “Muad’Dib.” Dune Messiah opens with an Inquisition scene. A “heretical historian” named Bronso from the planet Ix (the ninth planet from the sun in the star system Alkalurops) has been sentenced to death for “claiming Paul Atreides lost something essential his humanity before he became Muad’Dib.” This troubling scene casts a shadow over the rest of the book –it reminds us of the fanatical forces that have been unleashed by the Muad’Dib. From here, we learn about what has happened since the conclusion of the first book. Paul Atreides has completed a twelve-year jihad with his faithful Qizarate missionaries who were dispatched throughout the Imperium. He united the ancient power groups, and married Princess Irulan (daughter of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV); he toppled the fearsome Sardaukar legions (or the forces of the Great Houses of the Landsraad Council), and brought the Spacing Guild to its knees. In essence, Paul’s “religious colonialism brought all but a fraction of the human universe under one rule” (9). Now, Paul rules as the sole undisputed emperor, but he is troubled by visions of the future and he has grown unsatisfied with his Imperium. He is disturbed by the way his name inspires “religious butchery” across the known worlds. Despite receiving the prana-bindu training from his mother, Jessica (who is mostly a background character in this book as she has retreated to the Atreides home planet of Caladan), along with being an all-seeing mentat and the fabled kwisatz haderach, Paul’s powers of prescience appear to be failing him; leading some members of the Fremen to begin to question his divinity. Within the Imperium, there are “agitations” for a constitution, and concerns about taxation from the rebellious Fremen within the Ixian Confederacy. Throughout the known universe, there are signs of Paul’s atrocious legacy. Paul’s disturbance to the established order even extends to the environment on Arrakis where he remakes the ecological patterns of Arrakis, an act which angers the local water sellers and sends the worms traveling in unusual patterns –a metaphor for the profound disruption his holy war has caused.  

To top things off, a conspiracy against the Muad’Dib’s “Golden Lion Throne” has secretly formed on the planet Wallach IX. Its members include a Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit named Gaius Helen Mohiam, who is desperate for Paul to procreate with Princess Irulan; a Tleilaxu Face Dancer named Scytale (the Tleilaxu or Bene Tleilax are a new species introduced in Dune Messiah, they are genetically altered “human chameleons” as well as “Jadacha hermaphrodites” who can change their appearances and sex at will); a Spacing Guild Steersman/Navigator named Edric, who is a fish-like creature residing in a large mélange tank swimming in orange gas and spice; a Qizarate leader and high priest named Korba (who was originally trained as a Fedaykin warrior and given the title of Panegyrist); and Paul’s wife-in-name-only, Princess Irulan. Together this union of the Bene Gesserit Motherhood, the Tleilaxu, the Spacing Guild, the Fremen, and the Princess intends to make a martyr of the Muad’Dib and blame it on his lover, Chani. Amidst considerable political maneuvering and secret plotting, the conspiracy manages to successfully cloud Paul’s visions of the future. One of their chief concerns is the loss of control of spice production, the mélange which is highly addictive but has vitalizing psychedelic properties and is necessary for interstellar travel. Also, at the heart of Paul’s unstable regime is his inability to produce an heir. His lover/concubine, Chani, has been unable to conceive because Princess Irulan has been secretly feeding her a contraceptive. The princess is jealous and openly wants a legitimate heir with Paul, but he continues to refuse, even when Chani asks him to sire a child with Irulan. Paul has received a vision of the future –he knows that having a child with Chani will kill her, and he does not want to hand his empire over to the progeny of House Corrino and the Bene Gesserit. In time, he offers to the Bene Gesserit to have a child with Irulan through artificial insemination, even though the Bene Gesserit regard artificial insemination as grotesquely unnatural and a Butlerian Jihad taboo (in so offering, Paul hopes he can avoid Chani’s death while still avoiding the act of consummating his marriage to Princess Irulan). However, Chani soon changes her diet to a traditional Fremen fertility diet and subsequently conceives. This changes everything.

“’You can’t stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It’s overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad’Dib hasn’t the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?’” (192).    

The conspiracy against Paul unfolds when the Spacing Guild visits Arrakis. The Steersman Edric offers a suspicious gift to Paul on behalf of the Tleilaxu –he presents a “ghola”, or the reanimated corpse of a dead person who typically assumes a new identity after being revived. In this case, the ghola is none other than Duncan Idaho, the fan favorite Atreides warrior and right-hand man to Paul who died protecting him in the first book. This gift from the Tleilaxu is intended to wreak havoc on Paul, knowing that he could not refuse such a gift even though the Tleilaxu are considered unclean by the Fremen. Strangely enough, despite sensing a dark plot, Paul accepts the “metal-eyed” ghola who goes by the name “Hayt” and has been trained as a mentat by a philosopher of the Zensunni religious order. Hayt has been given to Paul by the Tleilaxu in order to poison his psyche and to destroy him, but Paul’s sister Alia, who has grown into a beautiful young woman at the age fifteen going on sixteen, quickly falls in love with Hayt. And surprisingly, in time Hayt begins to recover his memories as well as his past sense of identity as Duncan Idaho (which was secretly the technological goal of the Tleilaxu). The reappearance of Duncan Idaho in this book is both exciting and disturbing.

“’…what must be done!’ The words began to unfold in the ghola’s consciousness. A sensation of living two lives simultaneously spread out through his awareness: Hayt/Idaho/Hayt/Idaho… He became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, alone. Old memories flooded his mind. He marked them, adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning at the integration of a new awareness. A new persona achieved a temporary form of internal tyranny. The masculating synthesis remained charged with potential disorder, but events pressed him to the temporary adjustment. The young master needed him… it was done then. He knew himself as Duncan Idaho, remembering everything of Hayt as though it had been stored secretly in him and ignited by a flaming catalyst” (311-312).

The plot thickens when the headless of corpse of a Fremen woman shows up in the desert and the daughter of Otheym, one of Paul’s Fedaykin commandos, arrives and beckons Paul to visit her father’s home. But she is secretly the Tleilaxu Face Dancer, Scytale, and Paul is aware of this fact. Still, he travels incognito to Otheym’s house where Paul learns there is an alleged Fremen conspiracy against him and Otheym presents Paul with the gift of an amusing little catalyst-dwarf named Bijaz. The dwarf can recall the list of all the Fremen conspirators like a machine so he returns to the palace with Paul. But secretly, Bijaz has been sent to “hum, a keening, whining monotonous theme, repeated over and over” which is “reminiscent of ancient rituals, folk memories, old words and customs, half forgotten meanings in lost mutterings” (274-275) for the ghola, Hayt, to kill Paul. But Hayt is able to resist as he regains his past persona of Duncan Idaho (he calls Paul by the familiar title of “young master” which he used during their days on Caladan together). Meanwhile, the Tleilaxu detonate a “stone burner” which leaves a trail of destruction and blinds Paul –a deeply disturbing moment which forces Paul to briefly recall his foresight. However, despite calls for him to retire to the desert according to the Fremen tradition for the blind, Paul continues to govern his empire using his ultra-sensory powers which replace his eyesight.

In the end, Chani dies giving birth to twins –Leto and Ghanima—but the conspirators, having demonstrated that Duncan Idaho can be successfully revived, offer to do the same for Chani if only Paul will relinquish his CHOAM holdings and step down from the throne. But instead, Paul taps into the vision of his son Leto and throws a dagger which kills the chief conspirator in question, Scytale. And in keeping with Fremen tradition for the blind, Paul then wanders alone into the desert not as a god, but as a man. He becomes a gift to Shai-Hulud, hoping to end all the violence and fanaticism in his name. Will he die of sun exposure? Dehydration? Eaten by a sand worm? Or will he somehow survive and return again? Whatever happens to Paul, his empire has been left to his children who are now in the care of Alia. And the traitors Gaius Helen Mohiam, Edric, Korba, and “a few others” are all executed (notably Princess Irulan is not mentioned because she will become the teacher of Paul’s children). Thus, Dune Messiah ends on a somewhat ambiguous note as the future of the Muad’Dib is left up to speculation.

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Dune Messiah concerns the downfall of Paul Atreides –it shows us what happens after the conclusion of the hero’s journey, and it forces us to ask whether or not a hero’s journey is ever truly desirable. There are lots of fascinating new elements of the Dune universe introduced in this book, such as the Tleilaxu and the undead gholas, but there are also several unanswered questions. For example, Paul mentions in passing that Korba’s forces managed to steal a sand worm from the desert and take it off Arrakis, hoping to undermine the Atreides monopoly on spice production. But how did this occur? Why wasn’t it described further in the book? Where was the worm taken? Earlier in the novel, it was suggested that the Spacing Guild were planning to hijack a sand worm, even though a captive worm cannot live without “sand plankton,” also called the “Little Makers,” on another planet. Perhaps the Spacing Guild would take the worm to Tupile Entente, a secret place of sanctuary for the defeated Great Houses (the the Guild refused to inform Paul of the planet’s location).

There are numerous other rich details in Dune Messiah that further expand upon the world established by Frank Herbert in the first book, little details like: Semuta music which is played on a rebec and a baliset; the “coriolis wind” on Arrakis; Naibs, or heads of a Fremen seitch; axolotl tanks which are used by the Bene Tleilax to create both gholas as well as Face Dancers; Chakobsa, the language of hunting within a seitch; Prajna meditation; Dune tarot; Salusa Secundus (the home world of the deposed House Corrino); Zabulon Computations (at one point, Paul asks Stilgar to learn the history of Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler via Zebulon Computations); huge swarms of pilgrims visiting Arrakis on a “hajj”; the use of floating glowglobes; Hiereg artwork and tapestry hanging on the wall depicting Fremen mythology; and a Fremen sandclock built into an orrery with a suspensor mechanism from Ix, carrying both moons from Arrakis in the classic Worm Trine aligned with the sun. All of these minute details I happened to note only serve to further color this fascinating world of Dune. I found Dune Messiah to be another powerful examination of themes first explored in the original book, even if the bulk of Dune Messiah concerns various plots and political scheming, rather than high octane action. Ironically, the relative unpopularity of this sequel only serves to further validate its point: political and religious demagogues are popular for a reason, people lust after tales of ascendant underdogs and self-righteous martyrs, but rarely will they accept what is often desperately needed –a tempering narrative that exposes the darker side of the hero’s journey.   

“All power is limited…” (124).

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Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah. ACE, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House. NY, NY (2008, originally published in 1969).