He read S. I. Hayakawa’s seminal work on this subject, Language in Thought & Action, and the works of other writers in the field. Semanticists of the time recognized the existence of “metamessages” beneath actual spoken words—messages that would not be picked up if the words were merely displayed on paper. Something in the tone of voice revealed what was really meant. Perhaps the person didn’t actually mean what was being said, or of two meanings, the normally secondary meaning was really primary. This was linked to my father’s studies of the subconscious and to his analysis of subliminal advertising.
For the names of heroes, he selected from Greek mythology and other mythological bases. The Greek House Atreus, upon which House Atreides in Dune was based, was the family of kings Menelaus and Agamemnon. A heroic family, it was tragically beset by flaws and burdened with a curse pronounced on them by Thyestes. King Menelaus was the husband of Helen of Troy, whose abduction by Paris led to the ten-year Trojan war. Menelaus’ brother, King Agamemnon, led the confederated Greek armies in the war. Upon returning from Troy, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra.
This suggested the troubles Frank Herbert had in mind for the Atreides family. The evil Harkonnens of Dune are related to the Atreides by blood, so when they kill Paul’s father, Duke Leto, it is kinsmen killing kinsmen, just as occurred in the household of Agamemnon.
In Greek mythology, Leto was the mother of Apollo and Artemis. In Dune, Duke Leto is a man, the opposite sex of the mythological base. Dad said he did this in order to highlight a Janus-facing in the story. Janus was an ancient Roman god with two bearded faces, one looking forward and the other looking backward. One of the children of Duke Leto, Paul, can look far into the future, while the other child, Alia, can see far into the past. The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam was in part named after Helen of Troy.
The characters fit classical archetypes from mythology. Paul is the hero prince on a quest, as described by Carl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Lord Raglan. One of the books my father studied, Raglan’s The Hero (published in 1936) outlined twenty-two steps followed by classic heroes. These included (all of which closely approximate the life of Paul Muad’Dib): (a) the hero’s father is a king (a duke in Paul’s case); (b) the circumstances of his conception are unusual; (c) he is reputed to be the son of a god (Paul is reputed to be a returning god, a messiah); (d) an attempt is made to kill him at birth (in Paul’s case, the attempt occurred in his youth); (e) after a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast, he (f) marries a princess (Irulan, his wife in name only, is the daughter of Emperor Shaddam Corrino. The mother of Paul’s children, Chani, is the daughter of a kinglike figure to the Fremen, Liet-Kynes) and (g) becomes king.*
Other mythological archetypes were found in Dune as well, including a fool (Rabban), a witch mother (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam), a virgin witch (Alia), and the wise old man of Dune mythology (Pardot Kynes).
The planet Caladan was named from Calydon, a town in ancient Greece where the Calydonian boar was hunted. This was one of the most famous stories of Greek mythology.
Dune is a modern-day conglomeration of familiar myths, a tale of heroism and great sandworms guarding a precious treasure of melange, the geriatric spice. The planet Dune features thousand-foot-long worms that live for untold years—ferocious dragonlike monsters who have “great teeth” and a “bellows breath of cinnamon.” This is the Pearl of Great Price myth. In the Bible, a parable described a man who obtained a great treasure and then kept it hidden. This parable was linked to mythological stories of protected treasure, such as the golden fleece of the sacred ram sacrificed to Zeus, given by Phrixus to his wife’s father and nailed to an oak tree, where it was guarded by a dragon that never slept.
In Beowulf, written by an unknown English poet, a ferocious fire dragon guarded a great treasure hoard in a lair under cliffs at the edge of the sea. A close reading of the epic poem reveals interesting detail, in which the dragon is described as a worm:
…a foul worm, a dragon, took it upon itself to hold sway through the heavens at night…It seems there was a worm that slept upon a pile of treasure, which it had zealously heaped up under a stone bluff…
…the worm took to the air, burning the houses of men, belching red fire in his anger….
At a writing workshop recorded by his friend Bill Ransom, Dad said that the heroic warrior Duncan Idaho was named with a place in mind, the state of Idaho. Such a technique has traditionally produced solid-sounding appellations, such as “Dutch,” “Scotty” and “Tex.” For the antagonist family, he selected a harsh-sounding name, Vladimir Harkonnen, which to the Western ear sounded Soviet, a suggestion of the Communist enemy in existence at the time Dune was written. Dad found the name Harkonnen (which is actually Finnish) in a California telephone book. And, as he typically did in his stories, Frank Herbert included a friend’s name in the novel. One was Holjance Vohnbrook, an anagram of Jack Vance’s full legal name of John Holbrook Vance. Another was Poul Anderson, under the anagram Pander Oulson. (See Dune, Terminology of the Imperium—“krimskell fiber” and “Lady Alia Atreides.”)
The planet commonly known as Dune is called Arrakis by the ruling nobles, a harsh-sounding name that is suggestive of an inhospitable place. And inhospitable it is, under the short-sighted, usurping control of the noblemen.
The very name “Dune” is like a great sigh, suggestive of a faraway, exotic land. The native Fremen have blue-within-blue eyes there, and they use an unauthorized planet name in defiance of authority. The name Fremen (pronounced Frem-men) sounds close to “free men,” a suggestion that they are an independent, rebellious tribe who will never permit themselves to be dominated by outsiders.
According to edicts from the Imperial military-political powers holding this place, the desert world is named first Arrakis and later Rakis. But the Fremen of the desert, who have been there since time immemorial, understand the spirit of Dune and of the great Maker-worm, Shai-hulud. These are rebels, and the very name they use for their world, Dune, suggests this. No outside force, no foreign authority, can force them to alter their ways.
It was this spirit of rebellion, of human defiance against injustice and oppression, that Frank Herbert captured so magnificently when he set up his desert world and the empire encompassing it. He pitted Western culture against primitive culture, and gave the nod to the latter. In a later work, Soul Catcher, he would do something similar, and again he would favor old ways over modern ones.
In a tragic, ironic scene, Imperial Planetologist Liet-Kynes lies dying on the sands of Arrakis, left there by the Harkonnens without a stillsuit. They do this thinking it will be amusing for the planet to kill its ecologist, despite all his efforts, despite everything he knows about the environment. As my mother pointed out, this makes his death all the more terrible, knowing that his life could have been spared with a stillsuit, knowing that water is only a hundred meters beneath the surface of the sand.
Liet-Kynes is a metaphor for Western man, bearing all the adornments of scientific and cultural knowledge. But the rhythms of his life and Imperial society, like the rhythms of Western society, are out of synch with the rhythms of the planet. Intensifying the irony, Kynes sees desert hawks approaching, preparing to slash him, waiting to feed upon him when he dies—hawks that his father brought in from another planet to regenerate the ecosystem of Arrakis.
Like the nomadic Bedouins of the Arabian plateau, the Fremen live an isolated existence, separated from civilization by vast stretches of desert. And like the Bedouins, the Fremen feel their lifestyle is superior to that of more civilized people. The Fremen take psychedelic drugs during religious rites, like the Navajo Indians of North America. And like the Jews, the Fremen have been persecuted, driven to hide from authorities and survive away from their homeland. Both Jews and Fremen expect to be led to the promised land by a messiah.
The life and legend of Muad’Dib are rooted in the familiar religious concept of messianic impulse, along with t
he idea of a political and religious super hero. These themes are found in Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and other faiths. Frank Herbert even used lore and bits of information from the people of the Gobi Desert in Asia, the Kalahari Desert in southwest Africa, and the aborigines of the Australian Outback. For centuries these people have survived on very small amounts of water, in environments where water is a more precious resource than gold.
The Fremen are also like any number of peoples who throughout history have concealed themselves in inhospitable mountain or desert regions, using them as bases of guerrilla warfare against more powerful occupying forces. The Turks did this after World War I when their country was occupied, while the Yemenese Arabs and Algerians did it after World War II. The tactic has been particularly effective against colonial powers, making occupation too expensive to continue. The Germans and Spanish resisted Napoleon’s occupying armies in this manner. So did the North Vietnamese, driving American forces from Vietnam. The Fremen of Dune do this as well, resisting the occupation of the Imperial Empire and its franchise holder, the Harkonnens.
In creating the Fremen, Dad called upon personal memories of the Great Depression, in which the hardy, stubborn personality survived best against adverse conditions. The author understood the survivalist mentality, the ability of human character to overcome difficult circumstances.
Under his interpretation, the behavior of such people in extreme situations such as those found on Arrakis became inseparable from religion. It was ingrained in their group personality, in their ethics. And the religion of these people was in large part based upon the mystical practices of societies of people whose spiritual belief systems originated in desert regions—Muslim Sufis, Jewish Kabbalists, Navajo Indians, Kalahari and Gobi primitives, Australian bushmen…and more.
The Fremen religion spoke of “The Pillars of the Universe,” a cosmology that derived in part from the four pillars of the Christian universe, the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Master chef Frank Herbert concocted quite a banquet for the senses of his readers. His sprinklings of mysticism blend surprisingly well with portions of ancient mythology and handfuls of Jungian psychology about the workings of the subconscious. It all works because the reader, more visceral than he realizes, is a conglomeration of these things after millions of years of human history. The reader identifies with passages without consciously knowing why.
Dad studied and incorporated aspects of the life of “the Mahdi” (Mohammed Ahmed), who operated in the Egyptian Sudan in the 1880s and claimed to be a messiah. The Mahdi led rebellious Arab forces against the colonial British Empire.
Dad also studied the life and literature of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), a British citizen who during World War I (with Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca) led Arab forces in a successful desert revolt against the Turks. Lawrence employed clever guerrilla tactics to destroy enemy forces and communication lines, and came close to becoming a messiah figure for the Arabs. This historical event led Frank Herbert to consider the possibility of an outsider leading native forces against the unlawful occupiers of a vast desert land, and in the process becoming a messiah to them.
He studied other historical military strategies and tactics as well. When Paul Muad’Dib attacked the Harkonnens under cover of a desert storm, this was an operation reminiscent of Eisenhower leading an allied invasion in 1944, aided by a storm that concealed much of the movement of his forces.
The Butlerian Jihad of Dune’s history was a movement against machines, preventing them from ever exerting domination over men. This touched upon a natural fear humans have of machines. In recent years, this apprehension has focused largely upon computers, upon a fear that computers can be loaded with artificial consciousness and intelligence that will be superior to humans in important respects, eventually relegating men to subservient status.
The distrust of machines is actually, perhaps, a fear men tend to have of anything they do not understand—of things that are arcane and unpredictable from their perspective.
The roots of the Butlerian Jihad went back to individuals my parents knew, to my mother’s beloved grandfather Cooper Landis and to our family friend Ralph Slattery, both of whom abhorred machines. Whenever Mom had trouble with a machine, she invoked Cooper’s invective, well-known in our household: “Oh! The mindless malignancy of mechanical devices!”
In Dune, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood had a collective memory—a concept based largely upon the writings and teachings of Carl Gustav Jung, who spoke of a “collective unconscious,” that supposedly inborn set of “contents and modes of behavior” possessed by all human beings. These were concepts my father discussed at length with the Slatterys in Santa Rosa.
The Bene Gesserit were in part based upon my father’s maternal aunts, who attempted unsuccessfully to convert him to Irish Catholicism in his youth.
The three experiences my father had with drugs provided details that he wrote into the story of Paul Muad’Dib when the character took melange, the precious spice drug of Dune. Melange was irresistible, addictive, capable of transporting its user to alternate realms. It is interesting as well that at the bottom of a bottle of mescal (an intoxicating Mexican beverage) is a tiny worm which is said to contain so much “essence” that people have been known to hallucinate after consuming it. My father, of course, spent considerable time in Mexico.
I find pieces of our family history throughout my father’s writings, and particularly in Dune. Lady Jessica, with her beauty, intelligence, loyalty and love, represented the way my father felt for my mother. She was perfection to him, all things that were right with his life. She was his strength and sustenance, nurturing all of us. Like the busy Duke Leto Atreides, my father was too wrapped up in his work to pay adequate attention to his offspring. Much of this responsibility was left for Lady Jessica, just as it was left for my mother in our family.
Lady Jessica’s etiquette, like my mother’s, was always impeccable. Such women knew how to behave in different, often challenging, situations—no matter the faces each situation presented. In Lady Jessica’s case, if she needed help with a decision, she searched her Bene Gesserit past lives to determine the best course of action. It is interesting in this vein to note that “adab,” the demanding and instant memory of the Bene Gesserit, is a word in Turkish Arabic for etiquette and politeness.
The Bene Gesserit genetic memory and the surrealistic effects of melange were occult phenomena, akin to the interests and powers of my “white witch” mother. These literary creations were linked with events in my father’s life, including “Rhine consciousness” card predictions he made in the 1930s, his studies of Jung’s collective unconscious theory, and personal experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
Frank Herbert himself was in many of the characters in Dune, for they sprang from his mind. He was the dignified, honorable Duke Leto, and the heroic Paul as well. He was the swashbuckling risk-taker in Paul and in the loyal Duncan Idaho as well. Dad’s religious and philosophical beliefs closely approximated those of Paul Atreides, combining the wordless, enigmatic elements of Zen with the self-determination of Existentialism.
My father once told me he felt he was most like the Fremen leader, Stilgar. This surprised me until I realized that Stilgar was the equivalent of a Native American leader in the story—a person who defended time-honored ways that did not harm the ecology of the planet. Stilgar was an outdoors man like my father, a person more comfortable in the wild reaches of the planet than in its more “civilized” enclaves. Such a strong name, Stilgar, combining the phonetic elements of “steel” and “guard.” He was the stalwart and determined guardian of Dune, a position not dissimilar from the one my father placed himself in with respect to Earth.
Portions of the book were semi-autobiographical. Only a short while before, in 1961, Dad had been at the lowest point of his literary career, unable to write. He had been forty-one at the time, with a chronic sick feeling in the pit of his s
tomach, a fear that he had wasted his life. Recollections of that crisis come instantly to my mind whenever I read this excerpt from “Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain” in Dune:
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.
I lived with my father during the years he worked on Dune, and I understand a great deal about the making of the work. Nonetheless, the creation of this magnificent piece remains to me almost beyond comprehension. I find something new and intriguing in it on nearly every pass through the pages. My father was a man who spoke to me often of the importance of detail, of density of writing. He understood the subconscious, wrote his books in vertical layers. He said a reader could enter Dune on any one of numerous layers, following that particular layer through the entire work. On rereading, the bibliophile might choose to follow an entirely different layer.
Despite all the work Dune required, my father said it was his favorite book to write. He used what he called a “technique of enormous detail,” in the process of which he studied and prepared notes over a four-year period, between 1957 and 1961, then wrote and rewrote the book between 1961 and 1965. In all, it took the better part of a decade to complete the work with all the changes his editors wanted.
Dune is not a novel to be grasped entirely on first reading. There are important messages beneath the adventure, deftly intertwined with the action of the story. The layer of action is the most obvious one, the one most readers follow and remember best. It is an essential component, my father told me, for without structuring a book well, without remembering to entertain first, an author cannot hope to hold a reader’s attention.
Frank Herbert said he was in love with language, particularly the English language. Dune is a marvelous tapestry of words, sounds and images. Sometimes he wrote passages in poetry first, which he expanded and converted to prose, forming sentences that included elements of the original poems. There are natural rhythms to life, to the desert, to forces of nature, and he wanted his book to echo such rhythms. This required careful word selection and sentence formation, with onomatopoetic words that imitated the sounds they were describing.
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