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This article or section refers to elements from The Dune Encyclopedia |
Bene Gesserit by Digital Alpha
The Bene Gesserrette was the Terran evolution of the Bene Gesserat group. It marked a glorious era of that group and saw the beginnings of space travel. Eventually they evolved to the Bene Gesserit.
Origin[]
The northern group of the Bene Gesserat gained a self-proclaimed savior, a man born out of peasant gene-carriers and educated in the ancient traditions who believed himself a god-emperor and set out to gain an empire,[1] His conquests reunited the northern and southern genecarriers, reopening thus communication through the female espionage agents he planted within the hareem system. He also sought (through intermarriage of the aristocracy of the north) to reunite the two northern lines. From women within the hareems and women within the northern Bene Gesserat was established the Bene Gesserrette.
Their Mother House was located in Wallachia, an area at the junction of the northern and southern units. Here the southern and northern breeding records were reunited in an updated Summa.
The old Bene Gesserat training programs were reactivated across the north and sent to the newly occupied territories across a Western Ocean. Within three centuries, the northern and southern units had been finally integrated once more.
Both units remained secret, but while the southern unit retained its traditional hareem structure, the northern operated under the guise of an educational religious order,[2] providing cloistered education for aristocratic females and occupational training for working-class females.
The northern culture experienced an improvement of technology, leading within less than a century to radical social revisions. The Mother House recognized the usefulness of technology and trained women to gain powerful positions within the northern group (particularly in the advanced western group).
The rogue group[]
One women's group in the western territory became independent of the Mother House, calling themselves Daughters and trying to assert political claims by making their breeding charts the basis for social acceptability.
These publicized their breeding charts, set standards of etiquette, bred male children for political office, and viciously attacked units of the Mother organization.
They no longer believed in group consciousness, and they bred for a purely secular savior, trying to nullify the power of any other breeding group. However within two and a half centuries, the Mother House had successfully excommunicated them, deprived them of public validity, and retained only breeders who had not participated in the splinter group.
The Sisterhood saw early thought machines as an expedient means of streamlining the programming of its breeding programs. Voice Maura Macume lived in that technological era and details the work by which the machineprogrammed breeding charts were integrated to the mnemonic records of the charts of the Mother House; allowing more complex experimental breeding patterns.
Controllers of the thought machine were infiltrated by the Sisterhood. Sierre Kaikilani was the chief programmer for the off-Terran exploration undertaken by a political coalition of the northern, southern, and western powers. The Mother House, through Sierre and other women like her, used the expedition to develop the eventual seeding and breeding plans for off-Terran colonization.
By that time, the sisterhood was named Bene Gesserit.