The Last of the God Emperors

The Dune Encyclopedia

This article or section refers to elements that appear exclusively in The Dune Encyclopedia.

The Last of the God Emperors (subtitled There But For the Grace of God Goes God published by Salusa Secundus: Karshak was a monumental work about Leto II Atreides by Professor Istrafan Koye of the University of Ix; it comprises at least 3 volumes.

Content

In the third volume, Koye argues that the key to Leto's character is quite simply that he was an adolescent for the entirety of his 3,500-year reign and that if one wants to understand "His Annelidity" one must approach him as one might approach any other juvenile delinquent.

This helps one understand Leto's repeated temper tantrums over the fact that his Duncans might disagree with him on even trivial matters; it also explain that his major-domos might dare to suggest that "His Ouroborosity" might occasionally have "feet/segments of clay".

Leto's love life

A classic "brat kid" could be that unaware of the discrepancy in his own life between appearance and reality, between shadow and substance. Historians know from his last dictatel messages recorded shortly before his demise, that he had developed a mad quasi—"adolescent" — passion for the "incomparable" Hwi Noree. While sexual union was impossible because his wormself had subsumed his human genitalia, he mooned over her like a teenage boy in beat.

To be sure he had his ancestral memories of rampant sexuality to sustain him, he said again and again and again and again, until Idaho or Moneo or Nayla, might not wonder if he were protesting a bit too much.

Koye cogently argued that if memory of sexuality could sustain Leto, why did he not apply the same principle to food and refuse to eat? Surely if memories of ancestral licentiousness could satisfy his sexual need, so also memories of gluttonous banquets stretching back in time for thirty or more centuries should satisfy his physical self.

Breeding program

Koye also was the first to articulate the incredible contradictions between Leto's famed Golden Path and the breeding program he had taken over from the Bene Gesserit. The two seem at opposite ends of the scale: you cannot plan to breed humanity into some higher type and at the same time give humanity the essential freedom which is supposedly at the heart of the Golden Path.

Koye even argued, with some accuracy, that the Bene Gesserit were far more successful with their ages-long breeding program than Leto was with his.

This article needs Cleanup, and may require formatting and copyediting.