ATREIDES, LETO II, as enigma.
Leto would
have taken extreme pleasure in the idea of future generations attempting to
write encyclopedia articles concerning him. Certainly he held such writers in
contempt during his lifetime, boasting to many that he had burned alive many
a historian upon pyres made of their own works. No historian could dare to claim
equal knowledge of the past with Leto, for, after all, Leto was directly responsible
for over 3,500 years of the past. Moreover given his claim that he had within
him the memories of every single one of his ancestors, one could reasonably
suggest that the words Leto and history are one and the same.
Leto's contempt for history and historians supplies a clue to the nature of
this ultimately unknowable man and god. Leto in The Stolen Journals wrote of
history:
You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents
and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the
conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider.
I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider.
Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was
the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to
use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time.
The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal?
Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in
describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people
feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them?
The right to participate in history.
Leto damned the one thing that he believed was essential to the freedom of his
subjects. He usurped their right to create their own past by living in a free
present. The worlds ran strictly according to the whims of the God Emperor,
and he made clear to all thinking creatures that to live apart from him was
unthinkable. Leto was God and, as God, all was created in his image. With such
a view of the universe, he would not allow anyone to interpret the past or even
to describe it. Only Leto knew the one and only path, the Golden Path, and his
sole ownership of the path demanded that he possess all the maps as well. The
past, or beginning of the Golden Path, had to remain in his hands because it
was a key to what he intended for the future.
Thus, Leto's attitude toward historians was a mixture of ironic jest and tyrannic
policy. On the one hand, Leto knew that those who worshiped the past could understand
so little of it that they were laughable in what they took for truth. On the
other, he had no wish that anyone, even by accident, appear to so interpret
the past that the key to the future be even briefly touched by another. As the
above quotation indicates, his answer to the necessity of historical movement
was to usurp all the roles. By becoming the historical dialectic, he became
history itself, and, therefore, the future as well.
What kind of a being would have such an ego that he would even dare conceive
of such a plan? What kind of a being would have such power that he could actually
carry that plan out? The answer is clear: only the true Kwisatz Haderach, the
Bene Gesserit male whose organic power could bridge space and time. Leto Atreides
was the true God Emperor of Dune because he had been bred to the role.
By calling Leto II the true Kwisatz Haderach, it should not be understood that
the Bene Gesserit intended to create Leto or that they had a hand in guiding
him to the path he took. While his grandmother, the Reverend Mother Lady Jessica
Harkonnen, the concubine of Leto Atreides I, must have played some role in Leto's
early life, she did so against the desires of the Sisterhood. To the Bene Gesserit,
Leto and his twin sister, Ghanima, were both Abominations. Both were fully conscious
in the womb of their mother, Chani Liet-Kynes, the Fremen concubine of Paul
Atreides, Muad'Dib, and both awoke to consciousness filled with the personalities
and memories of all their ancestors. The Bene Gesserit would have preferred
Leto dead and were responsible for a large number of the plots against his life
during the more than 3,500 years he lived.
However, Leto was not Abomination. Unlike Alia Atreides, accurately called Abomination,
Leto learned to control all of the personalities living within him and to make
use of them. As a boy he overthrew Alia and then created an empire that cast
that of his father, Muad'Dib, into shadow.
As incredible as any of these facts might appear even to those who have every
reason to believe their truth, they pale when compared to the biological transformation
that Leto allowed himself to undergo. Immediately before his overthrow of Alia,
he took a child's game of the Fremen to the extreme. Fremen children once amused
themselves by placing sandtrout on their hands and watching them mold themselves
to the shape; they would then shake the trout off and admire the "gloves"
thus formed. Leto, however, placed sandtrout over his entire body allowing open
space only for his mouth and nose. The result was strength beyond imagining
and a life that lasted inconceivable centuries. With the transformation of Arrakis,
moreover, Leto became the last Shai-Hulud or, at least, the last potential Shai-Hulud.
Consider then the combination that Leto represented: he contained within himself
the complete history of the worlds, his father's memories and knowledge, and
the strength of Shai-Hulud, the great sandworm of Arrakis. How it is possible
to believe that Leto was anything but a god?
And what a god Leto must have been, because within him was both Atreides and
Harkonnen blood that had been reared in one of the last of the Fremen sietches
of Arrakis. Indeed, many of the personalities that inhabited Leto's body were
Fremen personalities received from his mother, Chani. Thus, it is worth raising
once again an earlier question: What kind of being would possess such an ego
that he would even dare to conceive of becoming all of history? One such being
might be an Atreides who shared with his ancestors an unquenched blood-lust,
even if individual Atreides were not as cruel or as violent as the general type.
Leto's father was one of the gentler Atreides. He was never comfortable with
the actions performed in his name. Some scholars have even suggested that it
was this gentle aspect that determined Muad'Dib's course when he walked as a
blind man into the Arrakeen desert. He was sick of his life as the leader of
the Second Jihad. But Leto was not of the same nature as his father. He could
take on the skin of the sandtrout, and history has ample records to prove that
Leto did not shy away from the exercise of raw, bloody power.
Another such being with ego strong enough might be a Harkonnen. While equally
bloody as the Atreides, the Harkonnen also equally gloried in the use of power.
It was the Harkonnen talent to gain and exercise power by diplomatic intrigue,
with a frequent assassination thrown in. While Leto's great-grand- father, the
Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is best known for the luxury he surrounded himself
with and for his death at the hands of Alia
Atreides, it must be remembered that he was also a diplomatic genius. He was
able to manipulate a number of business ventures into a rapid restoration of
his family's power after an earlier Harkonnen had seemingly destroyed the family
by an act of cowardice. Given the constant power struggles during the rule of
the Padishah Shaddam IV, such a feat is remarkable. And, once again, history
reveals that Leto knew well how to apply the velvet glove of diplomacy where
it was needed.
A third being capable of such an ego might be a Fremen who was convinced that
what was at stake was the tau of his sietch. Given what is known of Fremen culture
and the Fedaykin, it is not difficult to see the single-mindedness in Leto as
an expression of Fremen devotion to oneness. Leto not only invented the Golden
Path, he believed in it as well. To him it was the one true way to preserve
the worlds from vast, overwhelming destruction. A Fremen, faced with the potential
destruction of the sietch, would act to preserve the tau by any means within
his grasp. Leto acted to preserve the tau of humanity, but the means within
his grasp far exceeded those available to a mere Fremen.
Finally, there is a fourth being capable of such an ego: Shai-Hulud, "The
Old Man of the Desert," "Old Father Eternity," and "The
Grandfather of the Desert." By Shai-Hulud, it is not meant here any of
the sandworms of Arrakis or the stunted ones that now exist on Rakis. No, this
is the Shai-Hulud that the Fremen used to personify the very elemental forces
of the planet, those forces that were so great, so overpowering that they stood
for all time. Shai-Hulud was, to the Fremen, the only true eternal force. So
vast, so incredible were the powers of Shai-Hulud that the Fremen believed it
to be beyond reason. Shai-Hulud lived only for itself, uninterested in and incapable
of understanding the petty creatures that shared its world. And clearly Leto
was equally capable of such monumental indifference. Moneo Atreides, the last
steward of the God Emperor, frequently saw Leto in such moods. He called them
"the stirrings of the worm."
Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, Shai-Hulud--any of these might be a being with
ego powerful enough to dare become the history and future of the universe. But
Leto was all four; he had to dare because it was an essential part, of his nature.
Leto had no choice. Because of what he was, he was destined to pick up where
his father failed and become the true Kwisatz Haderach. And because he was destined
to be the Kwisatz Haderach, he perforce must become the God Emperor, for they
are one and the same.
A second quotation from The Stolen Journals will serve well as an illustration
of this point:
When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path, I promised them a lesson
their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern which humans deny with
their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security
and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the
seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm
in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while
I record these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility
which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe
me, the memory of Leto's peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek
their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.
Within this passage are all four personages. Here can be seen the cynicism of
the Atreides, the delight in gamesmanship of the Harkonnens, the harsh world
view of the Fremen, and the laughter of Shai-Hulud. No wonder then that so many
scholars propose so many different versions of Leto Atreides II. Some would
see him as a blood-thirsty tyrant who loved to toy with his Duncan Idaho gholas
through a perverted sense of "the good old days." Others would see
him as a corrupted politician whiling away his time in obscene pleasure with
Hwi Noree. Yet others would see Leto as the compassionate but harsh teacher
of mankind, instructing Siona Atreides to take on his mantle and lead mankind
further on to the Golden Path. And still others would see him as God laughing
at all his creation simply because he wanted to.
When Leto toppled from the bridge to be dissolved in the water below, who or
what is it that died? It is House Atreides that died, and House Harkonnen, and
the Fremen, and Shai-Hulud, and that being that was the synthesis of them all,
the Kwisatz Haderach. Each died singly and as a unified entity because that
is how Leto lived. He was warrior, pleasure-seeker, teacher, and God. No one
thing he did was for a single reason, for each action was done to please each
personality that lived within him. No human will ever know Leto Atreides II,
the God Emperor of Dune. The very best that can be hoped for is that mankind
will understand why such knowing is impossible.
S.G.
Further references:
ATREIDES, PAUL MUAD'DIB; KWISATZ HADERACH; Leto Atreides II, Journals, RRC 65A-302,
RRC 7OA-392; Herk Elanus, The Tree of Atreides 5 v. (Caladan: Apex); Gwenewera
Apturos, Home-Life of the God Emperor (Tleilax: Mentat).