ATREIDES-HARKONNEN, JESSICA
Mother of
Paul Atreides and grandmother of Leto II and Ghanima, Lady Jessica is the most
important woman in Dune's lengthy history.
One of the most fascinating discoveries of the Rakis Hoard is RRC 13-A700, The
Book of Ghanima. Among the document's most revealing entries is Ghanima's study
of the roots of her own name. Intrigued by the 11 anima" aspect of her
name, Ghanima set about a systematic exploration of her ancestral memories to
discover everything said of the "anima." As a result she learned that
a remote Terran ancestor, perhaps named Seegee Jhung, had outlined a theory
which explained her name. By application of the material in Ghanima's records,
it now appears that Lady Jessica, Ghanima's grandmother, can best be understood
as the fulfillment of Archetypes prophesised by the ancient seer, her ancestor.
From the Jhungian perspective Jessica is-iii her own right, as in her own person-the
long-awaited incarnation of all the major masculine and feminine Archetypes.
Thus, even more than the justly famed Jehanne Butler, she is Dune's, indeed
the Imperium's truest hero as well as its greatest woman.
The ancient seer envisioned four feminine Archetypes: the Mother, the Hetaira,
the Amazon, and the Medium. Jessica's Bene Gesserit lineage and upbringing fitted
her to mother. In fact, as she sometimes complained, she was raised to be a
mere brood mare, an instrument of Bene Gesserit eugenics, rather than a person.
Herself the product of an eugenic exercise, the one-night mating of a Bene Gesserit
(almost certainly Gaius Helen Mohiam) with the Siridar-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen,
Jessica grew up on Wallach IX, the Bene Gesserit home planet, where she endured
fourteen years of education in "mothering," Bene Gesserit style. To
the Sisterhood destiny was biology and maternal influence the strongest of all
life-forces. Accordingly, Jessica was thoroughly trained for motherhood: she
learned to understand and control her own organism so as to be the fittest possible
biological mother, and-still more essential to the Bene Gesserit design she
learned to observe, understand, and hence control others, and by this means
to keep everybody, men, women, princes, and potentates, psychological "children"
to her perpetually dominant "motherliness."
Jessica, however, confounded her teachers by transcending their concept of maternity.
The Bene Gesserit thought her a shockingly unsisterly rebel against their careful
discipline, but actually Jessica did not so much revolt as evolve into another
dimension of selfhood, that of Hetaira. Because she became a true companion
to her mate, Duke Leto Atreides, she freed herself for a much fuller, more substantive
motherhood than the Bene Gesserit projected; as Hetaira Jessica chose to bear
the son her lover wanted, not the daughter planned by the Sisterhood, for as
Hetaira Jessica knew that the loving intimacy of equal, free selves was the
only true generative force in the universe. Jessica's Hetaira role was emphasized
by the fact that Duke Leto made her his Lady concubine but never his Lady wife;
few societal sanctions supported (or confined) her Archetypal compassionate
vitality.
Lady Jessica remained Hetaira all her adult life. She never stopped loving her
Duke, not even decades after his death, and she returned to the Atreides' home
planet, Caladan, whenever she could. More significantly, she instilled the need
to be Hetaira into all her descendants: into Paul Atreides, who welcomed Chani
as his "companion;" into Leto II and Ghaninia, twin Hetairae to each
other; and most notably and tragically into Alia, whose Hetaira nature betrayed
her to the Baron Harkonnen's seductive intrapersonal companionship.
Ironically, it was against this Abominable companionship that Jessica displayed
her fullest, most irresistible Amazonian strength. Lady Jessica first discovered
her Amazonian potential when she fled, pregnant, into the Arrakeen wilderness.
Fremen women, thoroughly liberated to the world of men, showed Jessica that
she, too, could survive Dune's rigors. As Amazon she mastered both the shifting
sands of Dune's deserts and the shifting tides of Imperial politics. As Amazon
she retired to Castle Caladan during her son's reign, and there, in those familiar
surroundings, used the Amazon's resourceful objectivity to outthink and at last
outgrow her Bene Gesserit conditioning. The depth and range of her matured Amazonian
powers were especially evident during those anxious, almost disastrous years
between Muad'Dib's disappearance into the desert and Leto II's assumption of
the Imperial throne: throughout that near-decade Jessica proved herself a formidable
diplomat, intriguer, and (mostly psychological) warrior, effectively countering
even her own daughter's plots against Atreides ideals.
Alia would not have dwindled into Abomination, nor Paul into Muad'Dib and then
The Preacher, had they, like their mother, wholly embraced the Archetypal role
of Medium. As Medium Jessica bridged the unconscious world and the human community,
mediating these vast collectivities by her perfectly balanced and tuned self-consciousness.
Lady Jessica became Medial because the Fremen, seeking a new Reverend Mother,
sent her into a perilous spice-trance. Melange catalyzed her evolution, but
Jessica's already Archetypal psyche stabilized and vivified it: as Hetaira she
infused her Medial wisdom with personal caring, while as Amazon she preserved
independent individual selfhood against the onslaughts of the collective unconscious.
Conversely, as Medium she maintained a healthily cosmic perspective on her personal
and social involvements. Her Medial energies saved Jessica from the centripetal
egotism which crushed her children.
On the other hand, Jessica's Medial experiences introduced her to her psyche's
very core-to the genuine, Archetypal Motherhood that the Bene Gesserit had almost
persuaded her did not and could not exist. Even after she had understood her
way past the Sisterhood's other pronouncements, she continued to believe the
Bene Gesserit dogma that Archetypes were public relations illusions whose only
use was to manipulate the gullible. Jessica's residual skepticism was seriously
debilitated when as Medium she encountered the Great Mother within herself;
her doubts-fell utterly away when as Mother, centered in her new Material self-awareness,
she sensed the Great Mother as an exterior presence as well-when she knew the
grand, essential shaping force that Liet-Kynes, his Fremen followers, and above
all her God Emperor grandson so passionately sought. Mother Jessica realized
that humans (not to mention Worms) neither originate nor control generativity
in any of its manifestations.
She understood that all life-forms and all life-processes-including her own
roles as lover, leader, and mother-really are channels for the Great Mother's
creative and sustaining energies. This was the teaching she imparted to Farad'n,
the teaching to which she devoted her mature life.
In our age, when Arrakeen culture is imbued with the Motherly spirit, one can
scarcely believe, much less comprehend, the resistance which Mother Jessica
confronted in her contemporaries. In that desolate era masculinity still ruled
throughout the Imperium, though only as the debased confraternity of brutal
pragmatism (expressed by the Harkonnens and Sardaukar) and mechanistic rationality
(the spirit of the Mentats and Tleilaxu). Most people then retained the traditional
belief that intelligence, power, order indeed, civilization itself-were essentially
masculine property; but they knew, too, that even the best, most vitally Archetypal
manhood was somehow insufficient, for Duke Leto Atreides, who perfectly incarnated
whole Archetypal manliness, died defeated. So Jessica lived at the time when
masculinity was losing its exclusive hold on people's psyches and feminine consciousness
was just beginning to come into its own.
Given its long-term investment in male chauvinism, the popular mind understandably
hesitated to acknowledge the importance of being feminine. Partial glimpses
were easiest: women were tolerable as Hetaira (witness Gamont), or (more reluctantly)
as Amazons (witness the Fish Speakers), or (most reluctantly) as Mediums (witness
the Fremen Reverend Mothers). Motherhood, in its pure Archetypal glory, was
simply unthinkable. The reasons for these psychological blocks have been well
explained: merely masculine thinking is esoteric, directed toward discovering
and working with the facts of the external, (especially) physical world. By
contrast, feminine consciousness is esoteric, or interior; it deals with the
inwardness of reality. Meeting the Great Mother, as Jessica did, means realizing
that the inward shapes and sustains the outward - that the physical universe
has a spiritual core. Such a realization is inevitably shattering to the esoteric
outlook: from the merely masculine perspective, the only Mother is the Terrible
Mother.
Jessica's children and grandchildren were the most pitiable yet instructive
victims of the then-pervasive anti-Maternal bias. Paul, first modern man to
liberate his feminine intelligence, nonetheless imprisoned himself and the Fremen
in Muad'Dib's stereotypical masculinity and eventually blinded himself rather
than face the ultimate Motherhood he feared. Alia rejected Motherhood because
she identified it with Jessica's invasion of her pre-born mind and the consequent
Medial awareness that made her a freak; she used her Hetairal energies to escape
Motherhood and her Amazonian energies to fight it. Leto 11 was comfortable with
the Hetaira, Amazon, Medium, and Mother within himself, but was sure that the
Terrible Mother governed all natural events; he sacrificed his subjective humanity
to buy time from the objective monster Mother Nature he imagined. Ghanima agreed
with her Bene Gesserit ancestresses that "motherhood" was preferable
to "Motherhood"'; to preserve her sense of personal identity she needed
to control, even to diminish the Archetypal, viewing it in safely personal terms.
For Jessica, however, Motherhood could not be evaded, rejected, distorted, or
diminished, because for her the Great Mother was irresistibly attractive. Her
entire life was a quest for the Mother. It was a long and arduous ordeal, requiring
great personal growth, constant psychological balance, and unremitting courage,
vigor, and determination. She had both to become Mother and to be Mother in
a time when neither had been done before and among a people to whom "Mother"
meant "witch."
Important though this quest was for Jessica, it was absolutely vital for Dune.
Jessica arrived on Arrakis at precisely the moment when the fantasy of the subject-object
gap threatened to devastate that planet with powerplay after powerplay. Liet-Kynes
and the Fremen intuitively knew that there needed to be a more balanced, conscious
relationship between humans and nature and that the way to that relationship
was understanding the life-force that binds "subjective" and "objective"
in a single interpenetrating continuum. But these ecological visionaries lacked
the Archetypal experience to reach their goal. It was left to Jessica to complete
the quest and by so doing show others how they might meet Mother themselves.
First Jessica and later, through her School, more and more of her followers
became initiates. Each initiate underwent an excruciating alienation from his
or her original mindset, transformed his or her thinking by direct, protracted
awareness of the Great Mother, and labored to refashion every element of Arrakeen
culture in accord with Motherly views and values. Jessica, the very first such
initiate, sacrificed much more than her successors did. She endured alienation
from her Sisters, her children and grandchildren, most of her Atreides associates,
and all of Dune's common folk. She refused to play "mother" in the
Bene Gesserit way of frightening others into psychological childhood, but instead
let people make up their own minds about the Archetypal reality she embodied;
and so she sacrificed the satisfaction of knowing whether her transformation
had really benefited anyone but herself.
Jessica's sacrifices were genuine and (unlike Leto II's) necessary, for, as
she well knew, Archetypal Motherhood was bound to confound the very thought
that most languished for lack of it. There is, however, a deep and horrible
irony in the dismal fact that while Jessica was living Archetypal Quest, Initiation,
and Sacrificial heroism (the major masculine Archetypes) and, simultaneously,
incarnating the four major feminine Archetypes as well, her contemporaries mostly
reviled or ignored her and focused their hopeful attention on the grand but
misguided careers of her children and grandchildren. Even Dune's historians
were shockingly slow to recognize that the real Dune story is Jessica's.
J. H.
Further references:
ATREIDES, GHANIMA; ATREIDES, DUKE LETO; ATREIDES, LETO II; ATREIDES, PAUL MUAD'DIB;
MOHIAM, R.M. GAIUS HELEN; Harq al-Ada The Mother of God, tr. Harq al-Lutag Atreides
(Gruniman: Tern); Ghanima, Elaine, and Leto II Atreides, The Book of Ghanima,
RRC 13-A700.