Dune, Planetology and Mythology

“The horse-leech is a small fresh-water animal akin to the medicinal leech, with thirty teeth in its jaws. When a beast goes down to a stream to drink, the leech swims into its mouth and fastens on the soft flesh at the back of the throat.  It then sucks blood until completely distended, driving the beast frantic, and its type of relentless greed gives its name to the Alukah, who is the Cananite Lamia, or Succuba, or Vampire.”-Robert Graves

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the life cycle of the sandworm is: plant sandplankton, animal sandtrout, little maker, worm, water of life (as somatic Eucharist beverage), union with man, ruling king-god, then back to the river as “pearls of awareness.”   With symbiosis between sandtrout and man, Leto II “becomes God.”  This is a complex circular allegory for the soma of god; the Eucharist.

Before the Jesus figure came who could “become god” by ingesting the Eucharist, the Eucharist was transmitted by reverend mothers.  Successful completion of the spice agony resulted in the Reverend mother regurgitating an altered form of the spice which was safe for tribal orgiastic consumption.  In shamanistic cultures, mushrooms, such as aminata muscaria were consumed by shamans.  The urine of a mushroom imbiber has the full potency of the original intoxicant.  Herbert was an amateur mycologist and was likely familiar with this traditional practice.  I believe the “Spice Orgy” was an adapted version of the mushroom rites of ancient shamanic cultures, and the “water of life,” an expelled, second hand intoxicant.

It is also significant that Leto I was killed, in Robert Graves mythological cycle there are always two male twins, one living, one dead.  They represent man and his weird, the spirit of the waning and waxing year.  The best modern Christianity can be adapted into this ancient formula (according to Graves) gives us the Virgin Mary as the White Goddess, Jesus as the waxing sun, the Devil as the waning sun.

From Wikipedia: “The sand plankton is food for the giant sandworms, but also grows and burrows to become what the Fremen call Little Makers, "the half-plant-half-animal deep-sand vector of the Arrakis sandworm.  The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase. — Leto Atreides II, Children of Dune  Kynes' "water stealers" die "by the millions in each spice blow," and may be killed by even a "five-degree change in temperature." He notes that "the few survivors entered a semidormant cyst-hibernation to emerge in six years as small (about three meters long) sandworms.^” A small number of these then emerge into maturity as giant sandworms, to which water is poisonous. A "stunted worm" is a "primitive form ... that reaches a length of only about nine meters." Their drowning by the Fremen makes them expel the awareness-spectrum narcotic known as the Water of Life.”

             The water of life is an entheogen, and like many drugs, is poisonous to a layman, whereas the master shaman can imbibe the poison.  The drug is produced in the ritual drowning of a juvenile sand worm, who exhorts the liquid upon death.  This ritual drowning is akin to the ancient symbol of the lingam and yoni.  The lingam represents the life force in phallic form and the water trough represents the yoni, the vagina or womb.  Yoni translates to spring or fountain.  The lingam represents the generative force, hence, “water of life.”  A participant in the ancient Indian rite of Darshan enters the holy spring in darkness and drinks from it.  In the Freemen ceremony a reverend mother drinks the water of life and then regurgitates it, transformed from a poison substance into one that the tribe can participate in drinking.  The Freemen ceremony where a small sandworm is drowned in water draws could represent the triumph of life over death.  It is a fertility ceremony and is appropriately followed by group orgiastic rite.

Another myth which Herbert may have drawn upon with his Sandworm, was that of the Serapis.  According to Manly P Hall, “...meanings suggested for the word Serapis are: “The Sacred Serpent,” and “The Retiring of the Bull.”  The last appellation has reference to the ceremony of drowning the sacred Apis[Bull] in the waters of the Nile every twenty-five years.”  The Serapis is depicted as a snake with the head of a lion.  I find it interesting that the Egyptians associated a snake-like being with ritual drowning, as snakes can be a water-loving species; the connection is clearly of a symbolic nature.

Buckminster Fuller taught the importance of seeing the planet as a “spaceship earth.”  James Lovelock argued the entire earth exhibits a form of consciousness.  The movie Avatar, similarly, shows native people "plugging in" into a world tree in order to contact the matrix, or living consciousness of their planet.  Paul Stamets describes the mycelium of Earth as forming exactly the type of super computational grid which is depicted in Avatar.  Dunes’ Frank Herbert was a forester, desert survival instructor, and amateur mycologist.  In Dune, there is a fictional field of science called planetology.  Full-planet ecology is well known today due to the theories of Lovelock and the impact of greenhouse gasses is a “hot-button” political issue. 

The Arrival, is a 1996 Charlie Sheen movie in which an alien race conspires to terraform the Earth by releasing gasses into the atmosphere.  The aliens plan on raising the temperature worldwide and then, presumably, colonization, saying: “If you can't tend to your own planet, you don't deserve to live here.”

Terence Mckenna believed it was possible that mushrooms were interplanetary travelers; a true alien species.  McKenna suggested that the mushroom spore could act as an information storage device for an interplanetary panspermia due to its well known resistance to cold and hostile elements.  Could an alien life form such as the mushroom form a synaptic neural-net type consciousness across the face of the earth?   Are we the only specie with the combined ability to affect the ecology of our planet, intentionally, on a planetary level?  Is the mushroom is the “sand trout” phase of a superior organism?

                               In Tenebroust’s The Stench of Truth Blog, he complains, in a post titled DUNE; Retrograde Apotheosis; rise and fall of the machines; plans within plans, “One thing I want to point out before we go on is what is conspicuously ABSENT from the film.  Can you guess or do you know?  What's missing?  ALIENS!  The whole galaxy in this mythology is peopled by humans; there is no other intelligent life, just humans.”
                               I have to differ, because, while there are no aliens per se, there are many themes which allude to alien abduction and two specific characters that especially resonate with the elusive companion or watcher meme.    Two important characters along these lines are Daniel and Marty.  These mysterious characters have the ability to see across space and to “drop a net upon humans,” to abduct them.  The characteristics of Daniel and Marty diverge even more in the prequel and sequel novels which were not written by Frank Herbert.  Following Frank Herbert's original intention for these creatures:
"Herbert gives us a segment narrated from their point of view only at the very end of the novel. They are offshoots of the Tleilaxu Face Dancers sent out in the Scattering and have become almost godlike because of their capacity to assume the persona of whoever they kill — and they have been doing this for centuries, capturing Mentats and Tleilaxu Masters and whatever else they could assimilate, until now they play with whole planets and civilizations. They are weirdly benign when they first appear in the visions of Duncan Idaho as a calm elderly couple working in a flower garden, trying to capture him in their net..."-Wikipedia

Furthermore, the T-Probe in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse novel is a device straight out of an abduction account.  The device, used by Honored Matres, causes full spectrum pain thoroughout the body and is intended to be a mind-reading device.  The result of the T-Probe, with Miles Teg, is that it unleashes latent genetic abilities; blinding speed, prescience, and the ability to see no-ships.

David Lynch was known to use Theospohic concepts in his Twin Peaks series.  As the Director of Frank Herbert’s Dune movie, he added Weirding Modules, which take the users voice through a microphone mounted at the throat, and project the tone as a sound weapon.  This concept predates the modern development and use by modern police and military of sound-based weaponry.  I read somewhere that Herbert liked the weirding module idea.  Theosophy’s founder, M. Blavatsky wrote; “the name Jehovah, said with a certain intonation, was said to kill from afar.”  In the Dune movie, Paul, Muad’Dib explains the weirding module: “This is part of the weirding way, that we will teach you.  Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being equivalent to a form.”  The name of God, to his enemies, is a “killing word.”

I am saddened when I remember that David Lynch was unhappy with his Dune adaptation.  It will forever be one of my favorite movies.  I am now as much Lynch’s fan as I am Herbert’s, and I am thrilled these two amazing, talented people collaborated on a project.  Herbert’s books have always hit on major topics of my own interest, from genetic memory to transhumanism.  Lynch explores reality, consciousness, in his works, and is a practitioner of transcendental meditation. 

Edited on 5/20/12