Frank Herbert's Dune: Origins of Bene Gesserit and Butlerian Jihad - pontos fathom podcast Ep 06

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Frank Herbert's Dune: Origins of Bene Gesserit and Butlerian Jihad
pontos fathom podcast Ep 06

Welcome sixth episode of the pontos fathom podcast - Frank Herbert's Dune: Origins of Bene Gesserit and Butlerian Jihad  - pontos fathom podcast EP06. This episode we explore the origins of the Bene Gesserit and the Butlerian Jihad, not only in the Collective Unconsciousness of Carl Jung, and in the works of Samuel Butler. The implications of  Ixians, Tlielaxu and Bene Gesserit align with our current challenges of Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! 

We're going to talk about the origins of the benny jesuit and other memories in frank herbert dune this is a the second in our frank herbert dune podcast where we are exploring some of the details of frank herbert his writing his world building but also some of the resonances with psychological and even esoteric themes that come out of the dune book and maybe one of the reasons why it's such a powerful book and has been remade so many times and has so much interest and even the expanded universe books continues to bring more people to this work so first of all maybe we'll talk a little bit about the benny jesuit and the dune world in general so spoilers if you haven't read dune this is some insights into the backstory of dune in the world building of dune a quick quick note before we start just want to make a shout out to dune revenant it's our 7th dune novel fan fiction you can check out the link below really support the channel and you can also help us out by subscribing and liking the video if you do we also have a patreon below check out our website www.pontusfathom.com where you can buy these books and others and yeah we really like to hear your comments and suggestions looking to make this a live live podcast once we get some followers so let's let's talk about dune and looking forward to your comments below so we'll start out with some of the backstory of dune so dune takes place let's say a roughly ten thousand years in the future it's after a sort of a diaspora from the earth and there's been many different changes even to humanity and i'd even say that some of those changes lead us toward you know some some ideas about artificial intelligence and also transhumanism you know so the ideas in dune were at some point in the dune history there was something that was called to the butlerian jihad


so let's i'm just going to read from august moldenhauer's the gearbox giraffe where he talks about dune he goes frank herbert's butler in jihad what are the countermeasures to okay the backstory of frank herbert's dune universe includes the butlerian jihad the great revolt that was an ancient war of humans against their artificial intelligence machine overlords in frank herbert's science fiction classic dune and throughout this five sequels of his dune saga the reader is introduced to a future world with a vast history which has been described as real as our own so we're talking about the world building here if you've already read the book if you're familiar with dune or the films frank herbert's doom we know that paul tradies rises up to become the muadeeb

and it's a multi-planet empire in which humanity has left earth some 10 000 years in the future so this great revolt is only mentioned marginally through the novels but its impact is at the core of herbert's speculative vision so the great revolt goes by the more popular name in the dune saga as the butlerian jihad but herbert's attention to detail in the back history of the universe doesn't stop with this historical war in human victory the butler in jihad is one of those events that changed the course of human history you know something akin to the the american civil war and its impact on the ending of african-american slavery right so it's sort of like a this is a war that freed us from the machines okay for the butler in jihad redefined all the time as humanity's view of artificial intelligence with the primary commandment of the what they call the orange catholic bible in the dune books as thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of man so here is the herbert's master stroke back story really the edict is that man shall not be replaced and when he says man he means people like humankind i mean it's you know it was back before we had the correct use of human we don't mean man as as males we mean humankind we shall not make a machine in the likeness of humans is really what that means in sort of modern day talk so let's just talk about some of these edicts of the butler and jihad so we had this kind of revolt against machines which meant in the backstory that there was a time where machines had grown so powerful that humans had to revolt against them so this idea of you cannot replace humans and you cannot create a machine in the likeness of a human led to some very interesting things now just a quick note on this buttlery in jihad where does the name come from i know in the dune saga they say i believe in the appendix here we might we might be able to get some hints from it if we look up the butlerian jihad in dune we say see jihad butlerian also great revolt so let's look at the great butlerian jihad the crusade against computers thinking machines and conscious robots that began in the year 201 before guild and concluded in 108 before guild its chief commandment of the orange catholic bible is thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind right so this is very interesting right and then we have the great revolt is another interest the great revolt the common turn for the butlerian jihad so that's literally 10 000 years ago so whatever earth history led us to the rise of the machines then we had the great revolt against the machines and that starts a hundred years before the guild and who was the guilt well the guild is the spacing guild which learned to fold space so this is where space travel really begins to flourish now we're doing it totally with human means so let's go back to the name again in dune lore some say that there's a i think in the the old dune encyclopedia i'm not sure if that's canon anymore but that used to say that jenna or genna jenna butler jenna butler was the lead revolutionary in the butlerian jihad but there's an interesting person in history that frank herbert may have been influenced by and i'll just show you this face here from the laptop this is samuel butler samuel butler was a english writer and he wrote a novel in 1872 called erawan that was called darwin against the machines or subtitled darwin against the machine so interestingly enough in butler's erawan we have some some resonances with with this so in butler's erawan he kind of speculates the idea of a

a time where an encounter with the people who no longer use machines because they so these erawan they had a book called the book of the machines and it was kind of this weird idea of tech question of technology so so the question of machines in erawan starts immediately when higgs the character arrives in the hidden society and the first people he meets are acting strangely because he has a pocket watch and in the book of machines they've preserved machines as a warning for humans to not let the machines take over so they've moved beyond this now what replaces the machines in the dune universe is these schools of thought and i just pulled out these cards from the from the dune board game just so that we can use the use them as visuals here but we have the spacing guild first of all we just mentioned the spacing guild they use the spice of dune to fold space so they not they don't they don't rely on computers to fold space-time they actually use the spice trance to be able to see the navigation to travis traverse the universe so let's say so the spice becomes the replacement for a transhuman group called the spacing guild then we have another such group which are the tulilaksu now that's lilacs who also they have they're training mentats and face dancers so what's a men's hat a mentat is a spice enhanced spiced enhanced human again sort of a transhuman in which they are able to think like a human so so the first indication of the tlilaksu are their building of the tlilaksu mentats so these mentat schools right so what what replaced human what replaced thinking machines human calculators so they actually were able to develop the human mind to the point where they're able to take over all those roles that computers used to use now people could do that or these specially trained people could do that in their own minds so you have this idea of now the human is surpassed the ai the human is like the ai now right the human has these powers and then thirdly we've got another group in here that kind of fits as well which is the bene jesuit right and we we we introduced the talk of the benny jesuit now who are the benny jesuit the benny jesuit another spice enhanced school so the benny jesuit it was a sisterhood in in dune it's only female members of the benny jesuit and we can read about it in herbert's glossary again if we look up bene jesuit

it says the benny jesuit an ancient school of mental and physical training established primarily for female students after the butlerian jihad destroyed the so-called thinking machines and robots right and now one of the things that the benny jesuit are involved with is a breeding program to create a superhuman that's called the kwitsats heterok so the quitsats had iraq the shortening of the way this is the label applied by the beni jesuit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution a male benny jesuit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time so very interesting there's also a a report of the benny jesuit here in the dune appendix i believe it's in appendix 3 it says report on the benny jettison motives and purpose so the beni jesuit because the benny jersey operated for centuries in their breeding program of the quits hadarach they detected paul moadib or who is politreitis and they saw that he had a power to be a

prescient which means he had the ability to protect the future and he defied four-dimensional explanation they call it now one thing that's interesting is the benny jesuit have a number of powers if we call them that the benny jesuit they are able to not only practice truth saying which they can they can tell if someone is speaking the truth or not they at times have the power of limited prophecy and they at times have the ability well not at times when they become reverend mothers which is a elevated state of a benny jesuit sister who rises up and then takes the spice to transform herself to a sort of the high priestess of the benny jesuit they are able to know all of their ancestral memories now this is a very powerful world building technique and topic that that a herbert uses right so the idea of the benny jesuit's other memory they call it the other memory is that which the benny jesuit use to know all of their ancestors and that other memory comes across as a very powerful tool in human intelligence because now that they have now that they have other memory they're also able to follow this multi-generational plan of improving the humans and very powerfully written in the books now in the biography in the biography that

brian herbert writes about frank herbert biography says where did this other memory idea come from so the other memory idea and he speculates in and i think it's a great speculation and on some levels i think it's an adequate spec speculation he speculates that because frank herbert was influenced by psychologist carl jung that this is where frank herbert drew a lot of his inspiration from but i've got a new theory that i'd like my research has sort of uncovered and it'll link us back to the butlerian jihad so so on the one hand we have let's just kind of go through the universe let's do a quick summary before we get into into dune so in the one hand we have these schools of enhanced thinkers the spacing guild the tlilaksu and the benny jesuit they all use spice and in rebellion to the machines humans have become enhanced these are out of frame here humans have become advanced

in place of machines but we also have the ixians ixians somehow are allowed to defy some of those butlerian jihad edicts to ban thinking machines so the ixians are sort of a black market broker of machines so we have the benny twilight we have the the tlilaksu which not only have mentats but they have one other feature which is called the gola and the gola is like a clone that they can bring back to life and this is going to be very important to the other memory topic that we're going to talk about and then we have the spacing go that they can fold space and then we sort of have normal power structures you know we have the emperor right we have the emperor we have the houses you know the of the lands rad we have the harkonnens and the atreides and they're following more like the political side of frank herbert so frank herbert's following politics there's a galactic empire there's various houses that are influenced and then these groups the spacing guild the twilights the benny jesuit and the ixians they sort of are working different parts of the mercantile religion they're very intricate in the society and then you have this wild card that comes up the fremen right the fremen kind of are between both sides and if you know dune's story you'll kind of understand what i'm talking about but we'll get back to this okay let's jump into the influence of the benny jesuit from from carl jung now we we know that there's a name kind of like the benny jesuit if we say the jesuits the christian organization the jesuits that may kind of serve as a inspiration for the benny jesuit jesuits because the jesuits were throughout european history at least moving forward with knowledge and and were behind many secular although they were religious order they were also

able to help integrate scientific knowledge into the slow-moving church and one of the powers of the one of the one of the missions of the benny jesuit they also manipulate religion so in their breeding programs not only are they looking to breed this superhuman this kwitsat hadarak but they're also keeping an eye on planets by sparking up cults here having some religions there so they are kind of very influential in the religious experience of the empire of the dune universe so to show that benny jesuit's power of ancestral memory which they call other memory or ancestral memory and the way it works basically is when the benny jesuit mother reverend mother takes the water of life from the sand worm her consciousness is able to remember the ancestral memories but only on the female side back through history and only up to the age of the childbirth of the ancestor so the idea is say if your mother had you so say you are a female benny jesuit your mother had you when she was say 30 years old so when you awaken you will have your mother's memories up to her 30th year in full detail as if they're your own memories and then you'll also have your grandmother's memory your mother's mother's memory as her memories up to so you say your grandmother had you when she was 25. so you'll have your mother's memories up to when she was 30 your grandmother's memories up to when she gave birth to your mother and so on and so forth all the way back through history now this is a phenomenal science fiction idea that herbert comes up with and and as i was mentioning in the in the in the brian herbert biography he speculates it has to do somewhat and i and i agree with it to a degree and it's a great explanation to jung's collective unconscious so let's switch gears what's the collective unconscious of jung jung's collective unconscious is a similar idea so let's just think of it just quickly to kind of fast track it those of you who know i'll do my best so jung's collective unconscious let's just say that there are human roles that we see in myth in family in narratives in crises right we have the warriors at war we have mothers and fathers we have lovers we have betrayals we have heartbreak we have young love we have so many this father-son relation the mother-daughter relation the mother-son relation the father-son relation the hero to the tribe relation the you know the the horrors of war the things that go bump in the night the looking out into the darkness the near-death experience the stranger who arrived in town one day all of these kind of archetypal stories have been a human thing for millennia so whenever we're born we automatically have a have parents right and so that parent role is something that we react to and we've been reacting to that through all of time so what jung found in his that was my best shot at that so what jung found in the collective unconscious is that we're not so different from each other across cultures and across human endeavors in that we all participate in these ideas so our ancestors have been through wars our our ancestors have been children our infest our ancestors have been mothers and fathers our ancestors have been sons and daughters all the way back through history right some of them have been cowardly some of them have been heroic some of them died from a sacrifice someone lived old with regrets you know there's all these kind of some have been beautiful some have been crohn's right some have been strong and athletic others have been old and feeble like all of these myths encapsulate all of our human ancestors you know you could go in your own family history and think back you know what what was my grandfather's life like what was my great grandfather's life like what was my great-grandmother's life like and then you think what about my great grandmother's life and as we speculate on these jung kind of titrated out from this some patterns that are are linked to what he called the collective unconscious and you can see there is intuitively a lot there within the benny desert other memory there's a lot of details in the betty desert other memory that kind of seem like jung's collective unconscious except when we go back to this person samuel butler so we know samuel butler for his butlerian jihad right so we talked about the rise up against the machines but what may not be as famously known samuel butler wrote another book

samuel butler so he's writing in the 1800s and he was a critic somewhat of of darwin but not the way you think so he's not wasn't like a creationist thinker for necessarily but he was a scientific thinker but he was a very mind-blowing scientific thinker so again butler's work erawan sort of a satirical like in the tradition of a gulliver's travels or something like this was a call out to the idea of machines taking over from humans right and we see in in butler's writing of erawan he talked about one of his arguments in erawan was the future of machines one is that machines become an extension of the human and they're almost like an extra limb or another part of the body right his second argument is that the extensions

will eventually become more powerful than the body so the body will just be the appendage of the machines and so the idea of the machines outpacing us has been around for i mean literally since the rise of the industrial revolution so you so you sort of see herbert had reacted to butler's writings of erawan in his butlerian jihad but and while herbert for sure is influenced by jung butler's other book is what we what we've what our research has sort of revealed here so i want to talk a little bit about this so in in butler's book unconscious memory so butler writes in 1870 1871 i was writing erawan and i thought the best way to look at machines was to see them as limbs which we had made and carried about with us or left at home in pleasure i was not satisfied by this and and i had already finished i returned to the old subject continuously as other businesses would allow and propose to myself to see not only machine as limbs but also as limbs as machines i felt immediately that i was upon firmer ground i use the use of the word organ for a limb told its very orange story the word could not have become so current under this meeting unless the idea of a limb as a tool or a machine had come to agreeable and common sense what would follow then if we regarded our limbs and organs as things that we ourselves had manufactured for our conveniences right so very interesting and he goes on to say the first question that suggested itself was how did we come to make them without knowing anything about them and this raised another namely another question namely how come any how come any with anybody can do anything unconsciously and the answer of habit did not seem fair can a person be said to do a thing by force of habit or routine when his ancestors and not he had done it in the past not unless he and his ancestors are the same person so again this is butler speculating on human memory ancestral memory perhaps they are not the same person after all what is sameness i remember bishop butler's sermon on personal identity read it again and saw very plainly that if a man of 80 may consider himself identical with the baby that he had developed from so that he may say i am a man who at six months old this did this or that then the baby may just as fairly claim identity with its father and mother and say to its parents on being born i was only you a few months ago but parody of reasoning each living form now on earth must be able to claim identity with generations of its ancestors up to the primordial cell inclusive again if the octogenarian may claim personal identity with the infant the infant may certainly do so with the impregnant ovum from which it developed so if the octogenarian would prove to have been a fish once in his prior life this is like he was living yesterday so here we have the seeds and his book unconscious memory goes on to explore this insane idea what's the linkage between our biological evolutionary biology and our memory biology and again this is very much explored in the later dune books with the character of duncan idaho so what do we have duncan idaho so again duncan idaho was a loyal atreides who who was killed in the harkinin raid that toppled duke lado and sent paul and jessica fleeing to the desert the dunkin idaho in the sequel to doing dune messiah is reanimated by the tilaksu right so dune messiah there's a conversation between paul and this gola so duncan idaho is reborn as a gola called hayet and paul speaks almost in a platonic ideal he calls a plastic form of duncan idaho separate from the goal of flesh he mentions that the ancients probed into this area before the butlerian jihad what is he of referring to the gola hayet is a tilaksu experiment in trying to awaken cellular ancestral memories concepts that have been one of the most compelling in herbert's novels as the reverend mothers of the benny jesus were able to awaken their ancestral memories from the female line through breeding training and the properties of the spice melange the tilaksu sought to manufacture a similar similar awakening of cellular memories using bioengineering and trauma-based mind control techniques and genetic manipulation so this is where they get the the nickname the dirty talilaksu right so the dirty talilaxu would be you know the tiliksu you know they're using these as axolotl tanks which are actually genetic birthing chambers based on like genetically stunted members of of the human race right so they're using humans as birthing units to create clones and then they experiment with duncan idaho to actually create a gola that remembers that awakens the memory so there it's almost like the lilacs who are competing with the beni jesuit who have other memory the beni jesuit do other memory through a more of a mystical genetic way where they use melange and a natural sort of process to awaken the female line but the lilacs who want to use a genetic way now where does this come from it doesn't seem like that's what jung's talking about i mean jung's talking about a collective unconscious a familial patterns of humanity you know archetypes of humanity that yes we all have these archetypes in common but butler clearly is talking about is it possible that there is some genetic memory now there's been some experiments i think butler goes into some of them the idea of i think they use and this is the real clincher like when i read this i was like no way this cannot be true there were experiments done with worms worms of all things right why worms so there's experiments done with worms in which the worms are trained by some stimuli not to do something sort of like a pavlovian reaction okay so they'll get a shock something i don't know the exact experiment but there was an experiment involving worms and the worms would learn not to approach a certain thing and to approach another thing because of some kind of pavlovian kind of pain pleasure response they knew where to go you know for the food and where not to go from for the pain thing now they found that after a number of generations of worms the worms were born knowing the difference between

the pavlovian experiment so something of the experiment you know maybe it's an epigenetic kind of phenomenon who knows how it's explained i don't know how it's been explained by science recently hey if you guys know please leave a link below that or leave a comment below but you know back in in samuel butler's time samuel butler's time he was exploring some of these offshoots of the you know this this mind-blowing darwinian research so i believe that frank herbert may have been influenced not only the benny jesuit are influenced by jungian for sure there's a jungian angle there's a jesuit angle for the benny jesuit but also from samuel butler again so samuel butler's unconscious memory shows up in the benny jesuit's other memory it shows up in the tilaksu gola program which becomes a huge phenomenon in the dune saga and and it also shows

the kind of secret sauce of frank herbert's inspiration and a lot of this comes out of these you know 18th century thinkers that were already warning us about these transhuman and ai type concerns and i guess i'll leave it with a you know the final kind of note of dune which you know comes back to the wild card you know so if we look again at you know you've got ixians keeping the machines you know they're like the tech giants today you've got the benny jesuit with the breeding programs you've got the tili laksu with their human computers you've got the spacing guild using spice to fold space you've got the harkonnens and the atreides playing by the rules of the empire but then you have a strange thing that happens because you've got the benny jesuit sort of playing both sides and then the freeman sort of overlapping with the atreides and then you have paul kind of emerges at the root of this where it's sort of like the wildness of the fremen who are the spice right and it becomes a circle right it becomes a mandala which for sure is a jungian influence right so you have the idea of empire and spirit you've got the the the axis of human and superhuman and you've got the the the axis of the fremen and their wild card but also we have this other axis because the atreides also end up being kind of the fremen later and you've got this kind of hearkening spacing guild tilly laksu ixian

you've got something like this going on right this four-fold view of things let me try to make this clearer so you have at the axis the atreides noble and the fremen wild you've got the harkonnen corrupting evil right and you've got the ixians forbidden technology you've got the benny to lilacs and the benny jesuit transhumanists and you've got the politics of the spacing guild and the emperor so it sort of forms a bit of a jungian mandala so i i you know i think that it's fair to go with the influences of dune and frank herbert's benny jesuit and butlerian jihad a lot of these are heroic stories that are very jungian a lot of it is un collective unconscious but there is a huge debt to samuel butler and something i'm going to be doing some more research on so if you guys are interested with what we've done today please like and subscribe i'll be doing another podcast about dune about world building and also can check out gearbox giraffe by august moldenhauer talks about these topics dune revenant would love to hear your comments below and join our patreon and thanks for watching and hope this was interesting let me know what you think and stay tuned next week for our next podcast i'll talk to you all later thanks bye-bye


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