47 pages • 1 hour read
Frank HerbertDune Messiah
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Perils of Hero Worship
The first Dune novel largely concerns Paul’s rise to power and reluctant transformation from a precocious teen to Fremen messiah and hero. In Dune Messiah, Herbert challenges the idea that Paul is a hero and that heroes generally are positive influences on society. A common generic element of science fiction novels is the “chosen one” narrative, a messianic plot device in which an individual is either destined or selected to save a particular population, or sometimes all people. Herbert subverts genre expectations early in the Dune saga by indicating that the entire Fremen religion is a carefully crafted mythology planted by the Bene Gesserit centuries before Paul arrived on Dune as a kind of theological safety net should a Bene Gesserit sister ever need to exploit it. With the help of Bronso of Ix’s contextualization, the reader understands from the outset of Dune Messiah that Paul has accepted the mantle of messiah, but it is not genuine. Herbert’s insistence on secular, non-supernatural science fiction helps to reinforce this throughout the novel.
After 12 years of Jihad, Paul’s “heroic” exploits have established Fremen culture throughout the universe, but at the cost of billions of lives and countless other cultures. Herbert cautions that heroism is relative, and even the Fremen grow disillusioned with Paul’s ability to represent their ideals. The Fremen warrior Farok describes how initially, “It was said this Atreides came to change our world and our universe […] to make the golden flower blossom in the night” (61), but that eventually many Fremen understood that the changes Paul brought threatened their traditions and replaced culture with empire. In embracing a messiah, they abandoned self-determination. Farok, disenchanted with Paul, can see what Paul has difficulty acknowledging: “The universe is unfinished” (63). Through Farok’s regret over the dilution of Fremen culture—later echoed by even the loyal Otheym and Stilgar—Herbert suggests the social dangers of lionizing individuals, who are always flawed and ethically complex.
Paul himself is dubious of heroes. As he tells Hayt when the ghola chides him for his arrogance, “I’ve heard enough sad histories of gods and messiahs. Why should I need special powers to forecast ruins of my own like all those others?” (168). Paul knows his own moral ambivalence and believes in the transient nature of all heroes, gods, and empires, yet he nonetheless believes a prescient, all-powerful hero is necessary to keep humanity from extinction. By the end of the novel, Herbert leaves Paul’s dilemma unresolved; Paul Atreides escapes deification only by offering his son in his place.
Time, Fate, and Free Will
Through the combination of Paul’s powerful prescience and his struggle against his own prophecy, Herbert theorizes on the complex intersection of time, fate, and free will. Early in the novel, Paul wonders, “Could it be that the oracle didn’t tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future?” (48). This question becomes Herbert’s thesis statement on fate in the novel, characterizing each of Paul’s interior monologues about his ability to reject or embrace his role as the Fremen messiah. Paul—who can access alternative versions of the past, present, and future—experiences time in terms of agency. He cannot change what has already occurred in the past but can make active choices in the present to manifest the different potential versions of the future he sees. In this dynamic, the present exists as the fulcrum between past and future for Paul, and he uses his visions of both before and after to guide his decisions in the now.
Paul becomes frustrated when his oracular visions indicate that there is only one possible future in which humanity’s survival is ensured (in later novels, this is referred to as the Golden Path). Unable to identify alternate paths through time, and unable to abandon humanity to catastrophe, Paul feels trapped by fate, doomed to be a hero. Paul sees that guiding the universe toward the Golden Path requires his own deification, but the cost of this deification is mass death and the loss of his beloved Chani. Paul desperately searches for a way to escape this fate, worried that he has already missed the moment in the present that would allow him to create a different future. In the crowd during Alia’s public rite, Paul experiences “the heady feeling […] that he might still avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But the crowd pushed him forward and he experienced the dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost personal direction over his life” (216). Crucially, this moment occurs just before Paul commits to performing the actions at Otheym’s house that he has seen in his vision. In that moment, Paul’s individual agency and the opportunity for decision are overcome by the chaotic influence of the crowd. Through this, Herbert challenges Paul’s assertion that one man could have the power to set the course of time for the entire universe.
In a rare moment of insight, the Guild navigator Edric tells Paul, “If prescience alone existed and did everything, Sire, it would annihilate itself” (129). This statement proves true, as Paul’s total embrace of his prescience as an alternate mode of vision limits his agency; changing the future would destroy his ability to predict the smallest details of his surroundings. As he wills one future into reality, that future transforms into both past and present for Paul. When Chani reminds Paul, “You may have eternity. I have only now,” Paul replies, “But this is eternity” (252). Time collapses for Paul when he loses his physical sight, and he begins to experience past, present, and future all at the same time. With the birth of his prescient son, Paul loses his ability to see the future, but gains the ability to make choices again, rejecting the messianic path that made him a tyrant and cost him the love of his life. With this ending, Herbert posits that knowledge of the future limits individual agency, rather than empowers individuals to make choices.
The Exploitative Nature of Governments and Religion
The Atreides Empire is founded on both political and religious claims: Paul is the Mahdi, the Fremen messiah fated to lead the Jihad, and the spouse of Irulan, daughter of the deposed Emperor. As Paul struggles to control the universe through both statecraft and mysticism, Herbert interrogates how both governments and religion manipulate the populace to benefit those in power.
In his audience with Paul, Edric notes: “What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can […] what manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?” (132). The rhetorical question condemns and exposes Paul’s methods of governance: He justifies his totalitarian rule through claims of divine right, not unlike historical monarchies. Edric’s observation exposes that Paul’s beliefs about humanity echo rather than resist the Bene Gesserit’s and Bene Tleilax’s. Rather than seeking the liberation of people and worlds, the Empire and its opposing power groups seek to control them and their resources. Though Paul’s goal is the survival of the species, his methods are still corrupt.
Late in the novel, Paul cynically tells Chani, “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos” (253). Through Paul’s declaration, Herbert suggests that government and order are by nature antithetical to freedom. Still, Paul acknowledges earlier that it is truly his “legions [that] control the known universe” (139), and that he is powerless to stop the Jihad carried out in his name and which facilitates his dictatorship. Korba, Paul’s head priest, does recognize that Paul’s religious significance is more important than Paul himself and attempts to install the state religion as the sole governing body, rather than an ancillary branch of the empire. Korba even attempts to kill Paul to do so, indicating that his desire for power is greater than his religious devotion. In her letter to Alia, the Lady Jessica refers to the combination of religion and government as a “paradox,” implying that two separate systems of belief cannot coexist but must ultimately reconcile into one, centralized code of ethical-cultural values. This conflation of powers might enable Paul to dictate the future of the universe, but it also undermines self-expression, democracy, and freedom.
Herbert is careful to distinguish between religious mysticism, philosophy, and chemically altered consciousness. Although Paul and Alia possess significant powers of prescience, this is attributed to their extreme intelligence and spice-activated consciousness, not to supernatural or mystical influences. Similarly, despite being referred to as “witches” several times throughout the novel, the Bene Gesserit do not practice magic but skillfully manipulate their movements and vocal patterns to induce a kind of hypnosis in others, and the Tleilaxu gholas are the result of advanced genetic science, not necromancy. That these “power groups” allow public perception to mythologize their abilities supports Herbert paternalistic portrayal of government and religion. Whether separately or in tandem, Herbert suggests that centralized government and religious fervor supplant a population’s powers of self-determination.
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