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Leto Atreides II from the Sci-Fi miniseries Children of Dune, portrayed by James McAvoy.
Leto II' (10209 AG - 13724 AG) also known as the God-Emperor was the son of Muad'Dib, the first Atreides emperor, and his consort, Chani Liet-Kynes and the twin brother of Ghanima Atreides.
He overthrew the tyrannical rule of the Abomination, Alia Atreides, his aunt, took on the sand-worm skin in a move that fundamental religionists have always hailed as the Incarnation, and ruled as God Emperor for over 3,500 years guiding humankind with his iron fist towards survival. .
He died in a fall from a bridge
History
Upbringing
Leto II and his twin sister Ghanima were born on Arrakis during the reign of Emperor Paul Atreides. Their mother Chani died shortly after giving birth to the two children, due in large part to complications arising from large amounts of contraceptives that were surreptitiously given to her by Paul's legal wife Irulan Corrino. Paul had anticipated Ghanima due to his prescient visions. However, Leto's arrival came as a surprise to the Emperor.
Following Chani's death, and the apparent death of their father in the desert of Arrakis, Leto and his sister became the legal responsibility of Paul's younger sister, the regent Alia. Though they were granted a fine upbringing, little attention was bestowed upon them by their aunt, who was possessed by Abomination and enthralled by her own power and the mysticism developed around the Atreides name by Paul.
Evolution on Arrakis
Leto II as a worm
When they were nine years old, Leto and Ghanima gained the attention of their paternal grandmother, the Lady Jessica, who returned to Arrakis from planet Caladan to inspect them as part of her obligations to the Bene Gesserit. While visiting, Jessica sensed the latent power present in the twins, and upon the realization that they could be a threat to the psychologically unstable Alia, pressed her Fremen allies to help protect them.
At this same time, Leto's prescient powers began to emerge. Through visions and intuition he discovered the Golden Path that his father had earlier uncovered and begun to follow. However, unlike Paul, Leto developed a greater understanding of the Golden Path's implications. He sensed not only its dangers but also the painful steps that had to be taken to avoid it unraveling, which would be to the peril of humankind.
After Leto and Ghanima escaped a failed assassination attempt by House Corrino, the two split up, with Ghanima conditioned to believe her brother was dead, so that if she were to be interrogated on his whereabouts, she would not be able to tell the truth.
Leto then slipped into almost total anonymity, using the time and relative seclusion to build a foundation of power and knowledge through which the full impact of the Golden Path could be realized. To enact such steps required a strong (almost brutal) grip on power, and a longevity that would override the shortsightedness and impatience of Man.
Thus, after spending time amongst a variety of fringe Fremen elements, including The Preacher, Leto accepted sand trout upon his body and began the conversion into a human-sandworm hybrid. This transformation (which, at the beginning, was essentially a form of exoskeleton), boosted Leto's strength, reflexes and speed immensely, and he was able to move across large distances on foot.
Ascendancy to Emperor
After his transformation had progressed to a sufficient stage, Leto emerged from the desert and returned to the city of Arrakeen/Arrakeen to confront the possessed Alia and claim the throne of the empire. After Alia managed to briefly overcome her possession and take her own life, Leto claimed the title of Emperor and promptly married his sister, to consolidate his hegemony. The marriage was purely legal, however, and Ghanima accepted Farad'n Corrino, who had been taught Bene Gesserit ways by the Lady Jessica, as her exclusive concubine.
Reign of Leto II
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Concept Art by Michael Stribling
Through the evolution of Leto's body and powers (both prescience and access to possibly every dead ancestor in history), he was rendered infertile and slowly evolved into what appeared to be a sandworm with a human face and appendages of limited strength and range. In return, his lifespan, speed and reflexes were significantly increased, and during a reign of some 3,500 years Leto II successfully guided humanity through a period of vulnerability and potential danger.
During his rule, Leto II outlawed the order of Mentats and began shutting down any renegade schools wherever found. The art of being a Mentat had not yet been eliminated, however, surviving through underground schools. Moreover, Leto took control of the Bene Gesserit breeding program, outlawed interstellar travel without his permission, and forced populations to be planet-bound through garrisons of Fish Speakers on all planets of the Imperium.
Idaho-11099, the consummate Atreidean supporter, rebelled against Leto's increasing authoritarianism and questioned his abuse of that same loyalty. He initiated the last, sad Sardaukar campaign, a move that resulted in Idaho's death, the final destruction of the Imperial Legions, and the founding of the Fish Speakers.
The very notion of any Duncan Idaho leading the hated Sardaukar in an ill-fated yet grandiose, campaign battle against an Atreides is the stuff of which a latterday Harq al-Harba could have made great tragedy.
Last Days
Toward the end of his reign Leto sensed the need for the next step on the Golden Path, and knew that his rule must end for further progress to occur. Thus using Siona - a distant descendant of Ghanima and her concubine Farad'n - and a Duncan Idaho ghola created by the scheming Tleilaxu, he sowed the seed of the Atreides genes for future generations. Additionally, he began the reversal of the terraforming on Arrakis, and witnessed the planet begin to revert back into a desert world from the realised Fremen dream of a lush paradise.
Ultimately Leto lost his own life when Siona ordered the bridge he was crossing to be cut by a lasgun and he fell into the Idaho River. Following Leto's death, a chain of dramatic events took place over a span of 1500 years, that included the Famine Times, the Scattering, and the recreation of the sandworms on Arrakis, which emerged from the sandtrout that escaped from Leto's body when he fell into the water.
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.
Of the God Emperor, several
things are certain. His voluminous
dictatel recordings are largely selfserving
and completely lacking in
objectivity. Consider his famous
statement, one he reiterated again and
again, before any audience: "Only fools
prefer the past!" Yet has there been any
person — if one may refer to Leto as a
person — in the thousands of years of
recorded history who was so totally
dominated by the past as Leto himself?
Did not his conversation continually
concern the knowledge he had derived
from his thousands of ancestral voices?
Did he not refer, again and again, to
legendary, perhaps mythic Terran
figures such as Chaucer or Alexander?
Have we forgotten the wisdom — for
such it was, no matter our final
assessment of Leto — contained in The
Stolen Journals: "If you know all of
your ancestors, you were a personal
witness to the events which created the
myths and religions of our past,
Recognizing this, you must think of me
as a mythmaker."
What then did Leto mythologize? First of all, himself. He created more legends concerning his immutability, his omniscience, his omnipotence, indeed, his eternal nature, than anything else. Yet, in reality, it was the brute physical strength of the biologic adaptation of the sandworm that he had become that was me original source of his imperial power. He capitalized on that strength — and how many legends he created of his inhuman abilities! — to cement his position as emperor and to terrify entire populations. From that moment on, religious awe and blind superstition, combined with the longevity of the sandworm he was becoming, made his rule inevitable.
Leto, then, was false to himself and to the ancient Atreides line and its sense of truth, honor, and devotion. It is imperative to remember that he was but an adolescent when he assumed both the throne and the sand-worm skin. He never had the opportunity to grow up, to mature. He had never enjoyed a normal life. He was forced to overcome temptation, test after test. Struggles for his very life were for him simple rites of passage even before he was a teenager. And as an early teen, he exhibited all of the outlandish, ridiculous activity we have associated with both adolescence and adolescents for centuries. In fact, one psychologist, Professor Istrafan Koye of the University of Ix, has maintained quite cogently in his monumental [[The Last of the God Emperors]]
How then can we explain the eccentricities, the foibles, the genuine accomplishments of the famous/infamous God Emperor? Because he was worm, he no longer seems human. Because he was human, we tend to forget he was worm. However, we must never forget that he was also, in the grand mythic sense of a long-abused word, King. He ruled over his desert kingdom for nearly four millennia, attempting to birth a civilization, a people, and a culture that did not need to fear itself. One persistent myth, perhaps dozens of centuries old, from legendary Terra, may help explain him. It is the myth of the Fisher King who ruled over a Waste Land, a land so desolate that crops did not grow, humans did not reproduce, and despair was endemic. Wounded in the genitals, the Fisher King's kingdom was sterile, with both ruler and subjects awaiting a Redeemer, a pure Knight who would heal the King and return fertility to the land.
Leto Atreides II was that Fisher King. His Arrakeen desert made any historic or mythic Waste Land seem fertile by comparison. Yet his vision of Arrakis was inevitably limited, perhaps because of his youth, perhaps because of incarnate nature, perhaps because of his very perversity, perhaps because of his essential lack of humanity as evidenced by his lack of genital activity. If his vision for his home planet was limited, so was it also for the Imperium. Because he fancied himself as the Redeemer of his planet and the Imperium, he attempted to become the Knight of particular purity who would heal himself. He failed in one sense. He triumphed in another. He was the once and future King. His vision for his planet and his kingdom failed because, as Leto himself was more than once forced to admit, he was not God in any ultimate sense.
Yet he succeeded because he died, and Redeemers must die for their people. When he died, his limited vision of the Golden Path also died. Thus after the Starvation and the Scattering, we are now free — free from Leto, free from the Golden Path, and free from the threat of ourselves. Who knows what waits beyond the stars?
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."
- ―{{{2}}}
Leto damned the one dung 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?
Legacy
anarchy followed his death, the Starvation and the Scattering that eventuated in our present civilization. The Rakis Finds, have been immensely helpful in our quest for knowledge of his era. We had long since studied and restudied the invaluable, priceless Stolen Journals, but they pale to virtual insignificance beside the richness of the materials in the Dar-es-Balat diggings. So voluminous are they that several decades will elapse before even their cataloging is completed, to say nothing of their analysis.
has proved more mercurial, more difficult of understanding, even in the centuries since his timely/untimely death than any other figure in the entire history of humanity on hundreds of star systems or thousands of planets. He is a myth enshrouded in legend, and it may be that he himself created both myth and legend. It may be, in fact, that we will never know the truth about this erratic genius, this predator of the galaxy, this wormlike, wormy god... the epithets could be multiplied exponentially and we will never come near the final truth.
Legacy During the Scattering and Later
During and after his reign, Leto II was viewed as an extremely controversial figure. Many of the established power brokers who existed at the start of his rule were either destroyed or significantly weakened, due to his draconian tactics and a monopoly on the Melange. To his admirers, Leto II was known as the God-Emperor, but to his enemies (including the Bene Gesserit) he was labeled the Tyrant of the known universe.
It was also said that within each sandworm that grew on Arrakis after his death, a pearl of his consciousness existed. This theory was supported when, approximately 1500 years after his death, an Arrakeen girl named Sheeana, who was a direct descendant of Siona and Duncan Idaho, had the power to control the worms.
The religion of the God-Emperor continued on Dune, until the attack on the planet by the Honored Matres, and also with those returned to the Old Empire from the Scattering, who called Leto II Dur or Guldur.
the Church of the Divided God claims that the stunted sandworms that still may be found in one small spare desert on Rakis are embodiments of Him — they use the capital letter — and that He will return as the fully grown, terrifying, majestic Shai-Hulud, Old Father Eternity, to restore Arrakis, His home world, and the Fremen, His faithful disciples, to greatness.
Journals
The collection of 2,126 ridulian crystal volumes, secreted in a primitive Ixian no-room, contains the preserved writings of Leto II, the God Emperor; this is the central find of the library discovered at Dar-es-Balat and known as the Rakis Hoard. Each of the Journals consists of one thousand 50 x 30 cm sheets of ridulian crystal paper imprinted by an Ixian dictatel and bound between covers of ridulianbased hardboard. Owing to the extreme thinness of the paper (ridulian crystal can be processed into sheets only several molecules thick) the volumes are only 1.5 cm thick from cover to cover. Static charges prevent the pages from touching each other and aid the automatic page turner embedded in the spine. In sheer size — each of the ridulian crystal originals requires forty paper volumes of ordinary size to reprint — such a single-author collection is awe-inspiring; given the nature of that author, however, it becomes historically overwhelming. First to last, these books record 3,500 years of history and autobiographic ruminations set down by the one being who has survived such a period of time. Their importance cannot be overstated, as is evident from their frequent citing as source material throughout this encyclopedia.
It is impossible to summarize, no matter how briefly, the contents of even a fraction of the Journal volumes. Until such time as it becomes possible to issue a full translation (and a hundred-volume set of excerpts will not be ready for publications for a minimum of three years) overviews such as this one will have to suffice. ATREIDES, LETO II, Journals of 106 Regrettably, only the most significant items can be discussed in so short a space; deeper analyses are certain to come later.
Perhaps the most fascinating revelations contained in the Rakis Hoard are those pertaining to the God Emperor himself. Because of the Oral History and the teachings of the Church of the Divided God, humanity has already been given two views of Leto II: inhuman tyrant and omnipotent God. Now his Journals offer a third view, one that will undoubtedly be difficult to reconcile with those proceeding it. The Lord Leto, it appears, did not possess infallible prescience; he could suffer distortions of his future vision not only when dealing with the "missing" persons his breeding program produced, but also when attempting to view the extreme future as well.
He also feared that time would distort his reputation. Many references show his anxiety to explain himself and his reign, as we read in a soliloquy from Rakis Reference Catalog 1-A42:
- "You, encountering my chronicles after
thousands of years, beware. Do not feel honored in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it.... I am not sun what the events in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which recount have undoubtedly been subjected to historical distortion for eons...."
- ―{{{2}}}
Much of the material making up the Journals was composed in the same introspective mode, and by studying samples taken at random from the collection, we can observe a trend in the Lord Leto's writings. While the earliest writings noted even the most trivial events — minor rebellions quelled for example, in cities whose names became meaningless within the God Emperor's lifetime — later volumes contained more autobiographical material and anecdotes concerning the "inner voices," or ancestral memories with whom Leto often shared consciousness. Another shift- can be observed when such excerpts are carefully read. For several centuries after his acceptance of the sandtrout skin which changed his form, the God Emperor avoided writing much about the transformation itself, or about his own reaction to it. Self-descriptions become more frequent in those writings covering the second and third millennia of his rule, and remain clinical until well into the third. Not until the volumes written during the last two hundred years of Leto's reign does the reader discover the God Emperor's own feelings about his changed body. One of the best examples also comes from RRC 1-A42:
- "I have ordered all mirrors removed from the
Citadel. My servitors wonder at this, but say nothing; they know the foolishness of questioning God. How much greater their wonder would be if had followed my initial impulse after catching glimpse of myself in the great entry hall mirrors yesterday, and smashed them to sliver with a single blow from this many-segmented body which traps me. But this grotesquery has its purpose, as surely as do the centuries I have spent this way. They prevent a greater smashing an irreparable smashing. I must remember that."
- ―{{{2}}}
As more evidence of the God
Emperor's slipping humanity comes to
light, his reference to his Journals
causing pain for their reader may well
be proven right. It is difficult to avoid
sympathizing with one who could fear
his own reflection although he
controlled the known universe.
Information concerning other
members of House Atreides — in
particular, the God Emperor's father,
Paul Muad'Dib, and his aunt, the Lady
Alia — has also surfaced during the
Journals' translation. Leto reveals, for
example, that he was not the first to be
shown the Golden Path or to be offered
the transformation he accepted. His
father, he states, faced the same choice
several years before Leto's birth but
picked a different way. (The effects on
humanity of Muad'Dib's Jihad and
Leto's Peace may have to; be evaluated
before an informed opinion of the
better choice can be offered.)
He also delivers one of the -few sympathetic opinions of Lady Alia Atreides. He was in a better position than any other historian to do so; not only had he escaped the possession that befell his aunt by forging an internal alliance in which he was the controlling force (a method which differed from hers less than might be supposed), bat he had access to the same ancestral personality that had ruined Alia. In Leto's community of voices, the Baron Harkonnen was kept firmly under control, but Leto could appreciate how his aunt had been taken over.
As a treasure trove of historical data the Journals are completely unparalleled. For example, the Oral History abounds with descriptions of the Atreides descendants" extreme sensitivity to melange and its effect on their ancestral memories. The reason for this sensitivity had been shrouded in mystery since the earliest centuries of the Lord Leto's reign (at least from the general public; the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, it was said, never forgot it) and not until the Journals were discovered was it relearned. A full description can be found in the entries pertaining to the God Emperor and to his mother, the Lady Chani, but tile phenomenon known as pre-birth was brought about by a combination of genetic factors and maternal addiction to melange. Because they were descended from one who had been preborn, all of the later generations of Atreides possessed the ability to achieve contact with their "inner voices" when under the influence of the spice. Records found in the Journals indicate that this forced awareness was part of the testing Leto conducted when choosing his Atreides administrators, and that nearly a third of those who underwent the spice test died or went mad when the new awareness was thrust upon them. (This percentage dropped only slightly through millennia of careful breeding, and Leto therefore kept a number of second-choice candidates in reserve whenever testing one of the breeding lines.) The eventual publication of all the Journals, and the influx of new findings, will not only affect the scholarly world but also the Oral History, which has served in conjunction with the Stolen Journals as a basis for law and custom on all of the known worlds, will undergo probing reconsideration. The Church of the Divided God, and by extension its billions of followers, has already been profoundly affected by the information unearthed at Dar-es-Balat, as witnessed by its new directives concerning the status of Holy Sister Quintinius Violet Chenoeh and Nayla the Betrayer. The full effects of the Rakis Hoard on society as we have known it will not be seen in our lifetimes — and possibly not in the lifetimes of many generations of our posterity. As regards their continuing effect, a still- popular Bene Gesserit expression comes most readily to mind: "Each day, sometimes each hour, brings change."