Frank Herbert's Dune: Other Memory, Prophecy & Psychology of Future - pontos fathom podcast episode 07

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Frank Herbert's Dune: Other Memory, Prophecy & Psychology of Future  
- pontos fathom podcast episode 07

Welcome seventh episode of the pontos fathom podcast - Frank Herbert's Dune: Other Memory, Prophecy & Psychology of Future - podcast EP07. This episode we begin with exploring the concept of worldbuilding in the fiction of Frank Herbert's Dune,  where deep history and far futures are concerned. What is the psychology of the future, and its impact on the human story? We discover interesting insights in Jung, Theosophy, Anthroposophy. What is time? What is the black iron prison? The Dune Saga is center stage, but we also explore Conan by Robert E Howard, the Exegesis of Phillip K Dick, JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! 


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welcome everyone to pontos fathom press you are watching pontas fathom podcast uh episode seven continuing our frank herbert dune series topic today will be frank herbert's dune other memory prophecy and the psychology of the future so we're really going to go deep into not only into fiction and how world building fiction that projects into the future what's the dynamic at play there but also the looking deep at history and some surprises that come out of some insights not not only in the dune saga but across other writers and then cutting into psychology and into even um science and religion so big topic today i'm gonna just sort of sketch out the idea for everyone as you guys know we're um we have the pontos fathom press uh channel would like you guys to check out the link below to dune revenant 20th anniversary of our seventh dune fan fiction be great to support the channel you can also support us on patreon uh links below and on our other channel pontius fathom hobbies where we do game play of similar topics we're also doing dune gameplay over there so check that out if you're interested so let's jump right in and talk about the let's talk let's start with the future first uh you know obviously dune takes place 20 000 years in the future and it's a great vehicle for frank herbert to explore the evolution of humanity and the evolution of mankind um and and in similar ways um other authors have have done this projection into the future as well right and what you get from that is this ability to um let's say echo the changes that we see from the past let's look at it this way the now is the future of history right so if we if we put ourselves back 300 years ago and then we do that projection forward and we say oh wow back in the 1700s things were this way you know there were no cars there's no planes or horseback we're just discovering certain things in science and then we project forward look we're talking to each other on the internet i'm recording this on a device and broadcasting it to the world as opposed to we used to have printing presses even just 600 years ago something like this right so the idea of this projecting forward allows an author to explore maybe some topics that are interested or or run with some topics and you can see that herbert definitely does this with his his projections into what the future resistance to artificial intelligence could be uh and he doesn't go into the trope of you know the rise of the ai as much as he goes into it's already past the rise of the ai and humanity has sort of taken this transhumanist or uh human first approach in a way where we've become the technology right so i think that this is a great place to start to show where the psychology of the future in general is a place where we can explore the human potential right this is why these great futurist writers even if you go back to h.g wells.

looking at the idea of the advancements of science for example has been a huge one or the advancements of consciousness or what would an alien civilization look like or even look at the foundation of asimov right where the idea is how could we extend that model right interestingly not only does dune project us in a narrative way into the future but it also deals with this concept of prophecy right so now there is another angle to this so in a way the author is being a prophet for us readers but then within his world within a world his future within you know the timeline of the world building let's call it he also introduces a character who wrestles with prophecy so what's prophecy prophecy is the knowing of the future right so here you have a book that takes place in the future so it's already projected all of us forward into the future and what do we find there in the future we find a leader rising up who not only has the power of prophecy to prophesize what's going into the future like we've all been taking on this journey forward but also has the access to other memory which is a deep history now this is very interesting so while we project into the future so let's kind of just ground this in another text for example let's take a look at so we have dune first of all and we can talk about paul's um wrestling with prophecy when paul takes the water of life for example um there's a moment where he is looking to the possibilities before him you know once he becomes the quitsats hederak let's call it you know what what will what will that mean for the world like once he sets that in motion and and then we have this book jung's aeon or ion and here we have some very interesting concepts and i'm just going to show you this diagram he has of this quatronary as a dynamic of the self but it's also a map of time in a way so now i don't know if anyone is familiar with this but you see

jung sets up this

pyramidal structure this double pyramidal structure and he has these different structures within it and he breaks the history in his world to our real history which would be um in in in jung's time would be a he's marking the idea of the rise of christianity let's say as a as a huge influencer of the progression of history so again if we were to look back at let's think of great empires right we think of great emphasis the roman empire right the roman empire wasn't always before there wasn't a roman empire so if we go back to before the roman empire right so if we do the historical um traveling let's say projecting we project back into time we say oh before there was a greek empire and then mostly the the work done by the green the greek empire led to some uh ability to uh create a roman empire from that and then yet right in that roman empire's establishing itself we have this rise of christianity again maybe the roman empire helped to establish the christian aeon

so what we kind of have in dune is a similar thing where you know you've got the big events of the guild inventing uh the ability to fold space which opens us up to a thousand worlds and then the benny jesuit breeding program which is looking for ways to advance the human and then finally all of this culminates in this christ-like event of of paul as a prophet of this long prophecy and in ion we also have this idea of the turning of the ages right so at this paul event and paul recognizes it the universe will begin to change right and the time will begin to change so part of the psychology of the future prophecy has to do with this idea of the large swaths of time

will suddenly have their reversals and their cycles right you know getting back into not only some of the warnings that herbert has for example when dune moved to dune messiah we see the inversion of the hero right so that same hero who brought about the fall of the saddam's empire is now uh cast out into the desert and becomes sort of a mad blind prophet right so he has he goes from the highest to the lowest right something like this and i think these inversions you know what what jung's ion kind of talks about as well is these turning of the ages and this balancing of you know the let's say the christ force and what he'll call is sort of more of a satanic force you know so it's a balancing of these forces as the ages progress but now it's not the only writer to project into the future right there's lots of futurist writing but let's take a look at that flipped on its head like it's interesting if we look at the reverse of this when we look back into history and you know i'm a huge fan of lovecraft right so with lovecraft he comes up with this idea of the great old ones projecting backwards before memory into a deep ancient history right so here we have an inverted and i'm going to give you this visual again from jung right we have we have lovecraft projecting back into an infinitely forgotten fat past and you have herbert not only projecting us into the future but then having a profit who can see even further in that future and now you sort of see this timeline you can even move it this way or this way where the future has an axis forward and the past has an axis backwards and yet there's this um fractal nature to it almost reminiscent of the nietzschean uh eternal recurrence of the same right so you've got this idea of empires will rise and fall the history will rise and fall and yet huge swaths of time 2 000 years you know can an egyptian empire can rise and fall over 5 000 years and then only be evidenced by pyramids in the sand and some hieroglyphics where where is it where did it go and then if we project back through that as lovecraft would do where is it one of the great things in the later dune books and something we explored in dune revenant is uh you know in the god emperor books it's almost like another aeon happens this is and it's very it's also very foundation-like and it's also very jungian in the sense of laeto as god emperor he decides that he will be that tyrannical that tyrannical aeon for a new age of the dune universe that will allow that pressure of tyranny will allow humanity to even further improve themselves right and this is a lot what jung is talking about in the phenomenology of the self right so the idea of the phenomenology of the self as you can see this is the idea is the christ event was so huge because humanity needed to understand some things about rising raising the unconscious understanding the shadow by making it conscious right now here we go now we're in that space of other memory right so again another topic of dune is access to the ancestral memories you know and you have uh where lovecraft it always comes out in a horrific way right lovecraft will always say oh the gibbering mines the sleeping cthulhu under the ocean you know maybe a real yes sunken will rise one day so it's kind of got this real dread a very existential dread in lovecraft around the um the weight of the unconscious being made conscious right so this is a psychological journey this is an integration that is difficult right it's very difficult to do that if we flip this story a bit cartoonishly almost but it's it's relevant let's look at the way robert e howard covers history right because howard in his howard wrote some backstory again let's think of it as an author herbert writes some future back stories and projects these ages of the future howard wrote a piece called the hyborian age right in which he loosely mixes these pre-cataclystic age which is you know before the flood and he talks about the sinking of atlantis and he talks about the sinking of lemuria and then the way the atlanteans moved across the lands and so he has this kind of deep history and we have tolkien does this too tolkien's uh let me pull it up here tolkien's silmarillion uh tolkien still marillion again an epic backstory to the lord of the rings that goes almost biblical but it's an elven bible it's a bible of middle earth it's the creation of the world and then all the ages that were forgotten through time to reach where we are now and what's interesting to me with that with the conan hiborian age historical view and again now we're overlapping with herbert's other memories so we can imagine those benny jesuit with their other memory able to go back and know all the history and here you have an author robert e howard who may be influenced by none other than madame blavatsky right so h.p blavatsky helena blavatsky wrote about these ancient times the pre-history uh when atlantis before atlantis sunk but even before atlantis lemuria or moo where our perhaps we weren't as physically incarnate as we are now perhaps we're more of a beings of light which again seems tolkien ends up in this space right tolkien ends up in the space of elven uh you know the race of gandalf for example or the the high elves uh being much more

they're immortal they're they're between the ages something like this so what we what we see here uh so you know we started out talking about the future and projecting forward but now we have authors projecting backwards what's interesting is we find ourselves in a similar place what does isis unveiled have for us oh the pre-atlantean civilization super high technology something that was forbidden right we have frank herbert's butlerian jihad super high technology something was forbidden we have ages of crisis right we have these egyptian kind of migrations from atlantis to the world we have the god emperor of dune restricting travel we have a lot of this blurring of all these these themes these jungian themes right we have rises of ages we have lovecraft's projections that in the future the stars will be right right a kind of a prophecy right and then oddly enough all of this takes us to a very very strange place which is maybe we'll wrap up here is somehow and again this is the cyclical nature of ion we start seeing how these you know we start off with dune we project forward into the future history but then by by nature of it we're looking back to ancient history and then we're trying to extend past the limits of futurism extend past the limits of pre-history and what we find is as i mentioned before this is this eternal recurrence

what we find in dick is very interesting because it's very symptomatic we talk about the psychology of the future because dick does both right so philip k dick as you guys know uh do androids dream electronic sheep valles ubik uh minority report lots of futuristic sci-fi things but also dick's exegesis was one of these books and part of it you see in valles uh he had explored some of this in timothy archer so some of this some of these notes notebooks of his

were a speculation into gnosticism so again we're back to gnosticism right uh who's more gnostic than the god emperor laeto the second right a tyrant who installs himself uh as a demiurge over all of humanity until humanity comes to a point where they can overcome him right so dick's mad historical trick that he plays on himself maybe and on us uh is you know as you guys may know or may not know so philip k dick had a bad i think a bad toothache of some sort or some abscess tooth and had some surgery and back in uh 1974 he's waiting for the chemist from the pharmacy to come with uh his prescription some pain meds and they were wearing the christian this christian fish symbol sort of like this cover as a necklace and the light for the sunlight when he opened the door to get his delivery of medicine from the bag the sunlight caught the necklace of the delivery person and it beamed this pinkish purple light into his eye and dick felt like he was having a religious experience like information was being downloaded into his brain and you guys can check this stuff out on you know dick talking about simulated worlds and things like that there's this famous speech where he talks about that but dick went on to write this amazing

set of notes in which he talks about maybe we're still living in roman times maybe there that all of history is just like a hologram and that nothing has really changed it's still like the christ event it's a very gnostic book it's a very it's a very meltdowny schizophrenic chernobyl uh book but it it sort of is wrestling with that exact same shadow wrestling but here here is dick taking on almost all of history all of time all the way we know how time flows and he uh i'll i'm going to do a month on philip k dick so if you guys are interested in the exegesis i will definitely get into that but i think what's interesting for us here is you sort of see this merging indeck of the two opposites so just as jung tried to describe it as the age is turning you know howard talks about the hyborian age and then the coming of conan it's just to sort of show this unfolding of history like the pre-history when magic still was alive and there were sorcerers and devils and and and and howard uses it in a fantasy sword and sorcery kind of device it's almost like he crips some interesting things from blavatsky like he borrows a little bit from blavatsky to make an exciting world building for his conan saga and listen lovecraft does the same thing but lovecraft takes the fear psychological fear of the deep history and uses that for his world building and herbert does a similar thing he not only projects into the future but he has other memory projecting back to the past and then you've got this uroburus almost you've got this snake eating its own tail and again when we go back to the idea of closing the circle uh you see that there is a kind of world snake here a world serpent a mandala that the anthropos this uroboros gives the following you see the anthropos or rotundum and the serpents and the lapis and the sapiens the homo sapien right so this kind of circular rotation of the circular rotation of time time is a circular component right and you see it in medieval religious art you see this in in young talk about this quarter neo right you even see this circular point where it starts to talk about it and you see this is a chemical equation so these chemical circles it's it's interesting how uh you sit in the iching you know yom talks about the iching words the world is a block to be traversed in time and folded folded through time so conclusions where do we go from this so i mean obviously there's so much we could talk about here but i just wanted to introduce the idea here of um you know when when herbert starts looking at the idea of future prophecy you know maybe we'll wrap up in like in a psychological way just to say it this way what are we doing when we look to the future well we're looking to better ourselves right we're looking to to play out a scenario right you know there's a classic uh sort of like that delusion rhizome stuff right so the idea of the potential the realness of potential right so the idea is if we project ourselves into the future we get to see how something will play out right so it helps us with our discernment and it helps to take the fears out of it right so what you see with with a writer a writer wants to create a a world view right so you see lovecraft will actually play on the fears lovecraft will take the part psychological part of what if there's a deep forgotten history and there's something scary back there right and that scary thing back there is our own coming to grips with our shadow right and for lovecraft he just projects it forward almost in a in a steiner way we've talked a bit before on in other podcasts about uh rudolph steiner steiner's uh the angel mark michael the archangel mikin michael his mission and ours is very interesting in this note so you have love crafty and fear and you have jungian shadow work right and then there's an odd you know we know jung's wotan lecture but there's this odd place with the steiner archangel michael work which talks about talks about the idea of yes we can do shadow work for ourselves in a jungian term we can work on ourselves we can have personal improvement let's just call let's just simplify it as that and then we can even take on a cause right um the lots of trash in the neighborhood you get the neighborhoods neighbors together and you clean up your neighborhood there's uh you know you plant gardens in your neighborhood so now that the neighborhood creates a vibe and everybody kind of follows this vision right so you sort of do the shadow work of your neighborhood right you i remember that there was a guy who was filling potholes on his street because the town ran on a budget and he would fill his own potholes right this is something like this right the idea of taking into your own hands the betterment of things but what steiner brings up in the archangel michael is as we go out from improving the self and improving the you know our friends and family and and taking on these world causes you know world hunger you know um uh health uh equity right um the gap in the wealthy and the poor right finding a better system that works for everyone right these kind of challenges as they get bigger we bump up against something that steiner talks about it's like well there is you know back to the young question there is christ and there's satan in the sense of well maybe evil if we believe spiritually that evil is real eventually you will come to an evil shadow so large that you do not have the power or the ability to conquer it it will just consume you and again back to nietzsche he talks about you know looking into the abyss and the abyss looking back into that kind of thing but there's hope because what steiner talks about in the archangel michael is well there is someone who can help redeem all evil that's the angels and god so the idea is this is a sort of an argument for when you get an evil that's so big there still is a bigger force that can take that on right so something like this happens in even in our fiction worlds right you have um you have the idea of in dune the god emperor lato the second is thinking about this huge world shadow work and it he takes it upon his shoulders where paul may have escaped a bit and just became a mad monk his son lato by becoming a 2000 year worm tyrant embodies all the evil so that the humanity will rise above it so he's sort of like taking this epic sacrifice almost like a christ-like sacrifice to to build this up right so we have that kind of concept of what the future speculation is for right when when we see it in world building when we see it in lovecraft's world building it's sort of like let's use fear to illustrate those heroic journeys when we see it in a howard's world building we see let's use it as a place where magic can still happen where there's threats and where the world that we thought we knew is mysterious but when we get to dune and herbert what we see is a huge critique and a huge insight into the potential of humanity right uh the potentials of humanity and the risks of humanity right so we see you see him taking it in both directions and some of those themes get explored even in dune revenant where we take a look at even an even further future and and this will maybe we'll end up on this concept because when we project into frank's world far enough eventually we start seeing the dehumanization of people right people become to become dehumanized you know you see also in the work of steiner when he talks about the ariemonic age right some of the things that dicks struggled with were the dehumanization of people you know we see if we see dick as a science fiction writer but dick is also very much a political writer and it's a political writer out of that berkeley california time where he was coming up where it was a lot of social social change happening so a lot of times when we see dick what's great about dick is this at in the same breath where it's science science fiction critique it's social critique right and and the ariemonic forces that maybe steiner will talk about also seem to have a political thing it's like what does it mean to be human right what does it mean to be human and that's one of the topics you know may we'll end up with this when we bring future speculation as a betterment for ourselves or a projection of ourselves how can we do that shadow work how can we how can we um improve ourselves looking to the future is one way we do that looking to the past history is is one way is a wick what are our origins how did we get this way and when we have frightful and fearful pasts and hidden histories again it's the unconscious where oh i didn't realize i'm still being programmed by this deep history right so these are these are both psychologically looking to the future and looking to the deep past are are a eternal heroic journey you know psychologically in a union way of transformation origins and futures right uh again the the the warning maybe that comes out of the dune revenant book was it so let's project frank herbert's future even further even further we already started to see by the dune period that the benny jesuit weren't didn't seem so nice right that lilacsu and their ex-lotto tanks not so friendly right the some of these directions of the evolution of these human transhumanists become quite inhuman in a way you know we're dehumanized right and the very same uh forces and again we go back to steiner here this very same forces of call them luciferian forces that gave rise to science and gave rise to this uh the genius of the the illumination of enlightenment become the shackles of a demonic imprisonment you know dick talks about the world as the black iron prison right he calls it the bip the black iron prison and the and steiner talks about the ariamonic forces which what they seek to dehumanize they seek to marginalize they make us cogs in a gnostic nightmare so what happens in june revenant is there are a kind of historian that uses the spice not to project into the future but to try to remember through spice dreaming an ancient past when we were more human right some of that humanity has been slip stripped away some of that individuality had been handed over generation after generation like gibbons fall of the roman empire uh in a slow descent from civilization into um you know into i mean similar to the foundation by asimov right into a long period of a regression period so we can see you know something akin to the grays let's call it in dune remnant which are these ones with many faces there's the face dancers that have advanced beyond humanity they're a hive mind they're looking out into the into the into the past and then you've got the spice dreamers who are the you know the the descendants of humanity or the uh the the children of humanity far in the future seeking what humanity means right so they're looking to the past to find humanity they're looking to the future to find what humanity is right and so you see their struggle is to prove that paul was real and they do this by their spice dreaming and they find that maybe there's a secret a secret in the anthropos right we'll call it the anthropos right but we'll just call that humanity maybe just to be correct the the human element uh the personality let's call it the personality of um the spiritual source not as an impersonal force not as a machine force not even as waves of history or projected future but as a relation between the inner self and each other right so this is sort of probably a good place to stop but uh hey if you like what we're doing here please um please like and subscribe uh we'll be doing uh like i said i mentioned a philip k dick uh podcast would love to do more dune uh i'm really thinking that a dune god emperor of dune series maybe a month of podcast on god emperor of dune will be will be good um i want to continue pulling in steiner uh jung interesting would also like to do a tolkien tolkien one because a lot of rich things in tolkien but i think maybe philip k dick will come come next with a sci-fi month continuing uh as the dune movie approaches i'll probably get into some dune ones uh but let me know in the comments below if you guys would like to see anything special any comments that you have on this super interested let's get a conversation going help me build the channel if you can join on the patreon check out the dune revenant book all of those things help but mostly helping by your comments your subscriptions sharing let's get this out to people so we can start um having a conversation together with like-minded people and uh looking to talk to you guys in the comments in the patreon and talk to you soon thanks for listening and bye-bye


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