Kwisatz Haderach
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- See related article: Kefitzat Haderech.
The Kwisatz Haderach is a fictional name of a prophesied messiah figure in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert.
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[edit] Overview
In Terminology of the Imperium, the glossary of the novel Dune, Frank Herbert provides the following definition:
KWISATZ HADERACH: "Shortening of the Way." This is the label applied by the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution: a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.
The Kwisatz Haderach is also known as "the one who can be many places at once."
The origin of Kwisatz Haderach is most likely from the Hebrew expression Kefitzat Haderech (קפיצת הדרך), which means the "jumping of the path/road/way."
The Bene Gesserit hoped to create a male who could survive the ritual spice agony that changes a female acolyte into a Reverend Mother, a male thus capable of absolute powers of prescience, able to predict all possible futures and to cause select threads of time to be realized through manipulation. A female Bene Gesserit was limited:
She ... was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled. That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention — the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.[1]
The Sisterhood planned to use their Kwisatz Haderach to strengthen Bene Gesserit power among other power loci within the Empire.
[edit] Dune
The Bene Gesserit breeding program had been conducted for centuries to preserve important bloodlines, but with the Kwizatz Haderach as its primary goal. A product of the program herself, Lady Jessica, concubine to the Duke Leto Atreides, had been instructed to bear him a daughter, but no sons. This daughter was to be wed to Feyd-Rautha, nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and heir to House Harkonnen, healing the generations-old rift between House Atreides and House Harkonnen. And, of course, their son would be the Bene Gesserit's long-awaited Kwisatz Haderach. However, Jessica fell in love with Leto, and produced a son for him: Paul Atreides.[2]
As Dune begins, the Sisterhood is still furious over Jessica's insubordination, but the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Jessica's former instructor) is somewhat intrigued by the potential she sees in 15-year old Paul. Unknown to them at first, Paul is indeed the Kwisatz Haderach, a generation earlier than expected.
After surviving the spice agony himself, Paul further explains the divide between the female Reverend Mother and the male Kwisatz Haderach:
There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed ... The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking ... I'm at the fulcrum ... I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without ...[3]
Unprepared for his early arrival, the Bene Gesserit fail to control the young man as planned; by seizing control of the planet Arrakis and the all-important spice melange, Paul manages to seize control of the Known Universe. The very superbeing for whom the Bene Gesserit had schemed and waited becomes the very instrument by which their order is diminished.
[edit] The extended series
In Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, Paul and his Empire set the Imperium on a course that will ultimately last thousands of years. Much to the frustration of the Bene Gesserit, they do not control Paul or his son, Leto Atreides II, and even their breeding program is taken from them. Jessica's infraction becomes notorious to the Sisterhood; in the coming centuries, for a Bene Gesserit to choose her love over the instructions of her order is known as "the Jessica Crime".
Due to the advent of Paul and Leto II and the millennia of oppression suffered by humanity, the Bene Gesserit become terrified of accidentally producing another Kwisatz Haderach. They believe that being able to see the future fixed the future along a certain path; to avoid this, the Bene Gesserit provoke the Honored Matres into destroying most of the remnants of Leto II, whose prescience had locked the human race into a fixed path. The Bene Gesserit also kill a number of offspring of the Atreides line in order to prevent another Kwisatz Haderach from controlling their destiny ever again.
In Dune Messiah, the Tleilaxu Master Scytale reveals that the Bene Tleilax "once bred a kwisatz haderach of our own." When asked how this invidual was "overcome," he notes that "A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation." Mohiam realizes that the Kwisatz Haderach committed suicide.
