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This article or section refers to elements from Original Dune |
- "The Fremen must return to his original faith, to his genius in forming human communities; he must return to the past, where that lesson of survival was learned in the struggle with Arrakis. The only business of the Fremen should be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings. The worlds of the Imperium, the Landsraad and the CHOAM confederacy have no message to give him. They will only rob him of his soul"
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
The Preacher addresses a crowded marketplace in Arrakeen, thundering against Alia's regency
The Preacher was the name given to a mysterious blind prophet who appeared on Arrakis during the Imperial regency of Alia Atreides.
He was guided by Assan Tariq, a young boy, and frequently appeared in Arrakeen to rail against both the Atreides Empire and the environmental changes occurring on the planet. His oratories evoked a variety of emotions from the people of the city, including awe, reverence, anger, and ridicule.
After meeting with Leto Atreides II in the deep desert the Preacher revealed himself to be Paul Atreides, who had been captured by a sietch of rogue Fremen known as Jacarutu when he went out into the desert to die, shortly after the birth of his children and the death of his concubine, Chani.
The Preacher was ultimately assassinated in the main square in Arrakeen, just prior to Leto II taking the throne, with only a handful of individuals (including Leto Atreides II and Gurney Halleck) knowing his true identity. Thus, all that the great Paul Atreides was had become legend.
His message was deep and profoundly rooted in the reality of his day: Muad'Dib was worshiped blindly by the common folk as 'the messiah' of Arrakis and the parasitic Qizarate priesthood took full advantage of this fact. What The Preacher did was to try to awaken his people to the reality of their ignorance, especially since, unknown to most, the "messiah' myth of Arrakis was planted by the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva.
"You fool yourselves with images you cannot possibly understand. You cripple yourselves with these toads of ritual and ceremony!" he tells a bewildered audience. This is the essence of his message: the ignorance of the ordinary every-day citizen of Arrakis of having worshiped a man as a god (note that he calls them "idolaters") and the foolishness of submitting blindly to a group of power-hungry, traitorous fools. But it was only after the end of Leto II's reign (and the beginning of the Golden Path) that humanity realized the great extent to which it had been sabotaged for centuries by Bene Gesserit interests, Guild intrigues and disrupted in its enlightenment by petty feuds and individualism.
The Preacher was played by Alec Newman in the Children of Dune (2003 miniseries).
Quotes[]
- "I will not argue with the Fremen claims that they are divinely inspired to transmit a religious revelation. It is their concurrent claim to ideological revelation which inspires me to shower them with derision. Of course, they make the dual claim in the hope that it will strengthen their mandarinate and help them to endure in a universe which finds them increasingly oppressive. It is in the name of all those oppressed people that I warn the Fremen: short-term expediency always fails in the long term."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
- "This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad'Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
- "You Bene Gesserit call your activity of the Panoplia Prophetica a “Science of Religion.” Very well. I, a seeker after another kind of scientist, find this an appropriate definition. You do, indeed, build your own myths, but so do all societies. You I must warn, however. You are behaving as so many other misguided scientists have behaved. Your actions reveal that you wish to take something out of [away from] life. It is time you were reminded of that which you so often profess: One cannot have a single thing without its opposite."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen: A message to the Sisterhood
- "Church and State, scientific reason and faith, the individual and his community, even progress and tradition—all of these can be reconciled in the teachings of Muad’Dib. He taught us that there exist no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men. Anyone can rip aside the veil of Time. You can discover the future in the past or in your own imagination. Doing this, you win back your consciousness in your inner being. You know then that the universe is a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen after Halq Al-Ada
Appearances[]
- Children of Dune (First appearance)
- Frank Herbert's Children of Dune