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This article refers to elements from The Dune Encyclopedia Pages for this subject as it appears in other canons:
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- "I bring the Hand of God, and that is all I bring! I speak for the Hand of God. I am The Preacher."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen[src]
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. Both Leto II and Irulan Corrino believed that the Preacher was Paul Atreides back from the desert. Sources conflicted as to the true identity of the Preacher, with even different sections of the Dune Encyclopedia differing in opinion. It was common for a crazed blind man to wander into Arrakeen, claiming to be the reincarnation of Muad'Dib which raised further doubt that the Preacher was indeed the messiah back from the desert. Muad'Dib or not, it was undeniable that the Preacher had a large influence on the Fremen ideology of the time and influenced the events that led to the downfall of Alia.
Biography[]
The Preacher appeared at Arrakeen guided by Assan Tariq, a young Fremen from an unknown place of birth. The Preacher made his first appearance on a winter morning, led by Tariq. He wore a bourka over a traditional Stillsuit from Dune times. The Preacher furiously scolded the Fremen, calling them Blasphemers against the true religion of Muad’Dib before leaving with Tariq. Rumours spread across Arrakis that this blind prophet was indeed Muad’Dib, returned from the desert.
The blind prophet continued to preach at Arrakeen, each speech more outrageous than the last. He brought 4 messages, each for an associate of Muad'Dib's.
For Alia: “You who held the secret of duration in your loins, have sold your future for an empty purse.
For Stilgar: “The most dangerous of all creations is a rigid code of ethics. It will turn upon you and drive you into exile!”
For Irulan: “Humiliation is a thing which no person can forget. I warn you to flee!”
For Duncan: “You were taught to believe that loyalty buys loyalty. Ohh, Duncan, do not believe in history because history is impelled by whatever passes for money. Duncan! Take your horns and do what you know best how to do.”
After his four messages, The Preacher once again told the Fremen that their current worship of Muad’Dib was an affront to everything he had stood for. That holiness has replaced their love. Even though The Preacher has committed blatant heresy, nobody seeked to stop him as he left Arrakeen with Tariq. On the twenty-eighth day of mourning for Leto II, the Preacher appeared in the plaza near the temple of Alia, his hand on the shoulder of Assan Tariq. After the crowd has silenced itself, the Preacher told the crowd that he had come to preach in honour of Leto. Many in the crowd thought that the Preachers words were the antithesis of what Muad'Dib stood for. The Preacher asked the crowd "Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men?". The Preacher declared himself the prophet of their times.
- "I mean to disturb you! It is my intention! I come here to combat the fraud and illusion of your conventional, institutionalized religion. As such with all religions, your institution moves towards cowardice, it moves towards mediocrity, inertia and self-satisfaction."
- ―The Preacher at Alia's Temple
The Preacher continued to attack the priesthood with his words, asking whether their religion is real when "It costs you nothing and carries no risk". The Preacher told the crowd that Muad'Dib risked and paid the price. That Muad'Dib failed in his mission. That all he achieved was a religion. that is doing away with him. After this revelation, the Preacher violently pulled Alia from the crowd, continuing to preach about the true intention of Muad'Dib. The Preacher departed the plaza. Alia later ordered her forces to capture the Preacher but not kill him, however they were unsuccessful in both, leaving Alia furious. Duncan Idaho was loyal to the Preacher, believing him to be Paul. The ghola joined a group called the Zarr Sadus, a group who refused to submit to the will of the priests. Duncan informed the Lady Jessica that he was leaving the current Atreides for enemy territory, emphasising that he was loyal to his one true Duke, Paul. The Preacher used a secret hand signal from the Atreides royalty to their swordmasters, convincing Duncan.
The Preacher walked into Arrakeen plaza once more with a new guide, Alia heard the chants of "Preacher! Preacher!" coming from the crowd, shocked that he would dare come back. The Preacher was pleased to see people chanting for him to help them. His preachings had helped, some of the Fremen had realised how they had strayed from their original faith. The Preacher shouted at the crowd
- "This is no lost djedida which is no more inhabited forever! Here have we eaten the bread of heaven and here the noise of strangers drives us from our homes! They breed for us a desolation, a land wherein no man dwelleth, nor any man passeth thereby. The waters which we spread upon the desert have become blood, Blood upon our land! Behold our desert which could rejoice and blossom. Behold them as they go forth to their evil work. It is written: 'And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!.' One blasphemy remains. And the name of that blasphemy is Alia!"
- ―The Preacher's final words at Arrakeen
Silence filled the square. The silence was suddenly broken by the angry screams of the priests. The Preacher stumbled, separated from his guide. In a swift motion, a knife was plunged into the Preacher's back. The Preacher fell to the floor. "They've killed Muad'Dib!" came shouts from the crowd.
Legacy[]
Leto collected the Preacher's water and put it in a large canopic jar next to the Golden Lion Throne. Some time after the death of The Preacher, Harq al-Ada archived the Preachers speech about the church and state corrupting the words of Muad'Dib. He also wrote Riddles of Arrakis, including a riddle involving the Preacher. The Preacher at Arrakeen was a work that archived many of the Preachers teachings. It was written by the priests present during the preachings. In 11673, years after his death, the Preacher was posthumously put on trial for heresy. The author of the Paul Atreides section of the Dune Encyclopedia hoped that their work would be a valuable asset in this trial.
Ideology[]
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.
Gallery[]
Preachings[]
- "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[src]
- "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
- "The only business of the Fremen should be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
- "Thus it is written! They who pray for dew at the desert's edge shall bring forth the deluge! They shall not escape their fate through powers of reason! Reason arises from pride that a man may not know in this way when he has done evil."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
- "They who learn the lesson of self-deception too well shall perish by that deception."
- ―The Preacher at Arrakeen
- "Every religion needs its Judas just as badly as it needs its saints."
- ―The Preacher in reference to Wellington Yueh, as quoted in Judgement on Arrakeen after Naib Guadaff
- "I found myself in the Desert of Zan in that waste of howling wilderness And God commanded me to make that place clean.For we were provoked in the desert, and grieved in the desert, and we were tempted in that wilderness to forsake our ways.Wild beasts lie upon your lands, Doleful creatures fill your houses. You who fled your homes no longer multiply your days upon the sand. Yea, you who have forsaken our ways, you will die in a fouled nest if you continue on this path. But if you heed my warning, the Lord shall lead you through a land of pits into the Mountains of God. Yea, Shai-Hulud shall lead you."
- ―The Preacher quoting the Orange Catholic Bible at Arrakeen
- "O God, my flesh longeth for Thy way in a dry and thirsty land! You are the only help remaining! You were rebellious. You brought the dry wind which does not cleanse, nor does it cool. You bear the burden of our desert, and the whirlwind cometh from that place, from that terrible land. I have been in that wilderness. I did know thee in the wilderness, in the land of great drought']. Water runs upon the sand from shattered qanats. Streams cross the ground. "in the wilderness shall 'waters break out, and streams in the desert"]. Water has fallen from the sky in the Belt of Dune! "the land...drinketh water of the rain of heaven."] O my friends, God has commanded me. Make straight in the desert a highway for our Lord, for I am the voice that cometh to thee from the wilderness."
- ―The Preacher quoting the Orange Catholic Bible 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 Sarduakar 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
- "What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. When did you last hear of a clerk giving his life for the company? Perhaps your deficiency rests in the false assumption that you can order men to think and cooperate. This has been a failure of everything from religions to general staffs throughout history. General staffs have a long record of destroying their own nations. As to religions, I recommend a rereading of Thomas Aquinas. As to you of CHOAM, what nonsense you believe! Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness- they cannot work and their civilization collapses."
- ―A letter to CHOAM, Attributed to The Preacher
- "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 Harq al-Ada
Appearances[]
- Children of Dune (First appearance)