Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Kensai wrote:

Superdog wrote:One of the things we definitely see in Dune is the moral degeneracy that comes with victory. When the Fremen conquer Shaddam, they flip their lids and kill billions of people. Fremen lose their culture, become dug addicts, criminals, corrupt priests, dishonest etc. Things you would never have seen before they achieved their ascendancy.

Well thats what the Fish Speaker wern't supposed to be, but I think in reality they wouldn't be that exempt from all that (and banning men from the military doesn't solve the problem it just puts it away put of sight.

Maybe in Dune 7, where Frank Herbert would have revealed the identiy of the Great Enamy that had driven back the Honored Matres back to the Old Empire, the Great Enamy would have been revealed to be a race of Nazi Zombies.

In Dune, they're called gholas, not zombies.

Kensai wrote:

Superdog wrote:One of the things we definitely see in Dune is the moral degeneracy that comes with victory. When the Fremen conquer Shaddam, they flip their lids and kill billions of people. Fremen lose their culture, become dug addicts, criminals, corrupt priests, dishonest etc. Things you would never have seen before they achieved their ascendancy.

Well thats what the Fish Speaker wern't supposed to be, but I think in reality they wouldn't be that exempt from all that (and banning men from the military doesn't solve the problem it just puts it away put of sight.

Maybe in Dune 7, where Frank Herbert would have revealed the identiy of the Great Enamy that had driven back the Honored Matres back to the Old Empire, the Great Enamy would have been revealed to be a race of Nazi Zombies.

The Fishspeakers were exempt from it just because Leto II held a stern hand over them I suppose. But after he was gone they morphed into HM, so that didn't turn out well.

I'm not so sure the Honored Matres were "driven back" to the Old Empire. They were there looking for ways to fight the Enemy but I had the reeling they were just part of a much larger force still out in The Scattering.

Freakzilla wrote:I'm not so sure the Honored Matres were "driven back" to the Old Empire. They were there looking for ways to fight the Enemy but I had the reeling they were just part of a much larger force still out in The Scattering.

Too lazy to look for quotes now, but I think somewhere the BGs speculate that the HMs must be running away from a powerful adversary, which is either supported by a conversation between Logno and the Spider Queen, or inner thoughts of one of them, or Odrade suggests this during her imprisonment, and the Spider Queen does not deny it.

MrFlibble wrote:

Freakzilla wrote:I'm not so sure the Honored Matres were "driven back" to the Old Empire. They were there looking for ways to fight the Enemy but I had the reeling they were just part of a much larger force still out in The Scattering.

Too lazy to look for quotes now, but I think somewhere the BGs speculate that the HMs must be running away from a powerful adversary, which is either supported by a conversation between Logno and the Spider Queen, or inner thoughts of one of them, or Odrade suggests this during her imprisonment, and the Spider Queen does not deny it.

You mean Lucilla's imprisonment I suppose.

So you're saying that there are NO HM still out in The Scattering and ALL of them have retreated to the Old Empire?

"These are people from the Scattering. Their offer of alliance is an opening
into places where Honored Matres originate."

Note the use of the word "originate". If it had said "originated" I might believe they had all been chased back to the Old Empire. However, this leads me to believe they are still coming from there.

Freakzilla wrote:So you're saying that there are NO HM still out in The Scattering and ALL of them have retreated to the Old Empire?

Nope, I didn't say or imply that. It is my understanding that the only thing that can be said for sure from the information provided in the books is that the HMs who came to the Old Empire are not merely conquerors, but they were looking for more resources to counter the attacks of the unknown Enemy. I've no idea if they were a scouting party, or a large portion of the HM army, or they were making their own Scattering (remember the Face Dancers who infiltrated the HMs in Heretics say that each "cell" splits from the rest of the group, erasing all data about their origins from their ships?). In any case, it is suggested that the HMs have become desperate and are losing to the unknown Enemy.

OK, I can agree with that.

Thanks Now I'm not sure about this, but I think that what little information is there in the books does not allow to make any clear statements about the HMs, except that there were lots of them compared to the population of the Old Empire - which should not be very surprising since the Old Empire constituted only a small fraction of human-colonized space. I am also not sure if the command structure of the HMs was centralized - that the Spider Queen's title of the Great Honored Matre gave her authority of all HMs everywhere in the Universe, or she was just a local warlord, and the political situation in the HM-conquered space was that of feudal division

Well, as you noted previously, the HM seem to cut themselves off and form a new cell each time they expand. I would assume that each cell would have its own GHM.

lotek wrote:Frank was always one for hidden symbolism and messages, so it is a safe bet to think the Jews had a potential role to play, but the beauty of his writing(to me anyway)lies in the fact that it is not necessary.
For most not too uneducated people(we know what they represent for some...) they are the embodiment of scattering for survival, and their presence gives that extra thing just by that "simple" fact.

Adding the wild RM card to that is a way of giving them more importance than just making a point...

I haven't read Chapterhouse in a while so I'd not want to come up with theories based on partial memories though.

As always your insight wins.

Frank taught me the difference between education and understanding. Because in the end, I am finding, they are not the same - education is useless without understanding.

Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse down that inner corridor, saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep. Scenes of brutal ferocity opened to her like the petals of a terrible flower. And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina - first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak . . . and now developed to subtle strengthen Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.

Far down the inner corridor, another voice screamed: "Never to forgive! Never to forget!"

The purpose of the jews in chapterhouse may be linked to the first book through the above quote, which i always associate with the Holocaust. Just a little context here, this thread is well done.

racheal really stuck it to the rabbi over the abject horror of past attrocities committed by The jews which their faith had ignored and forgotten,

but frank wrote it as if she hadnt had access to these memories until sharing with lucilla... which doesnt makes sense if she was already a reverend mother.

id say he included them to call bullshit on their modern states manifestations

"our god should mature as we do" racheal put it

I don't remember it that way but maybe she had no mohalata (sp?) to help her collate her memories until she received the Lampadas hoard.

distrans wrote:racheal really stuck it to the rabbi over the abject horror of past attrocities committed by The jews which their faith had ignored and forgotten,

but frank wrote it as if she hadnt had access to these memories until sharing with lucilla... which doesnt makes sense if she was already a reverend mother.

id say he included them to call bullshit on their modern states manifestations

"our god should mature as we do" racheal put it

Your assumption here is that Rachels ancestors had the memories in the 1st place. Which of course may or may not have been the case, Perhaps she just didn't look.

frank did go out of his way to make them seem as though they had been cloistered and underground since old terra,
my earlier takes honestly was that the sharing brought these memories to here, rather than revealed them

mabe it was just the sharing and the bene gesserit understanding she recieved
allowed her to understand the memories she had already
well enough to use them in dealing with the rabbi

any discussions of wild reverend mothers here?

distrans wrote:any discussions of wild reverend mothers here?

You're referring to the Freman Reverend Mothers?

After a quick look this is all I turned up. Do you have a theory or question?
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=961

edit: add url

thinking of the fremen and jewish wild ones,

id always thought that bene gesserit training was essential to surviving the ordeal
so it was implied that all wild reverend mothers were decended from BG trained at the very least
sometime back

i dont think that anymore

but i do think that without the training
the wild RM would emerge from the ordeal
quite different than what bene gesserits do

inhuien wrote:

distrans wrote:racheal really stuck it to the rabbi over the abject horror of past attrocities committed by The jews which their faith had ignored and forgotten,

but frank wrote it as if she hadnt had access to these memories until sharing with lucilla... which doesnt makes sense if she was already a reverend mother.

id say he included them to call bullshit on their modern states manifestations

"our god should mature as we do" racheal put it

Your assumption here is that Rachels ancestors had the memories in the 1st place. Which of course may or may not have been the case, Perhaps she just didn't look.

This seems more likely to me. After seeing the same events from multiple points-of-view she was much more likely to put everything into perspective. Indeed, she probably didn't even look because for what reason would she have needed to?

It's my guess that Frank included them because of the similarities they share with the Museum Fremen and in our current time they're one of the groups that reaches for that unbroken chain to the past.

I like the jews in Dune.
They are a twist in the story.
Their culture unchanged for millennias, they are able to remember from that older days.
I think that they are the counterparts of the Bg.

They're contemporariness not counterparts of the BG. Like the Van Gogh, Thatched Cottages at Cordeville in Mother Superior's anti chamber. Remnants of old earth.

Superdog wrote:

Kensai wrote:

Superdog wrote:One of the things we definitely see in Dune is the moral degeneracy that comes with victory. When the Fremen conquer Shaddam, they flip their lids and kill billions of people. Fremen lose their culture, become dug addicts, criminals, corrupt priests, dishonest etc. Things you would never have seen before they achieved their ascendancy.

Well thats what the Fish Speaker wern't supposed to be, but I think in reality they wouldn't be that exempt from all that (and banning men from the military doesn't solve the problem it just puts it away put of sight.

Maybe in Dune 7, where Frank Herbert would have revealed the identiy of the Great Enamy that had driven back the Honored Matres back to the Old Empire, the Great Enamy would have been revealed to be a race of Nazi Zombies.

The Fishspeakers were exempt from it just because Leto II held a stern hand over them I suppose. But after he was gone they morphed into HM, so that didn't turn out well.

You're correct. The lesson here is, a group of women working together are so formidable that they can conquer almost anything with no additional help. But to fully realize their potential they need a benevolent male leader to guide them. The same is true for humans today, and bonobo society functions similarly, sort of like the chimps, but more benevolently, with more love, and more sex.

But to get back to the topic of jews in chapterhouse. I think what Herbert was trying to say is that, no matter what happens, they are such a strongly cohesive group that they will weather anything and last through it. Einstein's writings on anti-semitism echo this if you can find them.

If nothing else, the Jews are survivors. I mean, he did express it rather eloquently. It is implicit that they are the same Jews that we know today, I contend. They made a brief appearance only at the very end directly that I remember (it's been too long since I reread the canonical-6), but the fact they were still around, after ~50K years before Dune, survived Paul's rise to power, survived Paul's insane sister's brief reign, survived Leto II's 3500 year reign, survived the lean years that the guild nearly didn't survive, survied the rise of the Tlielaxu, and Ixians, survived the wars with the HM with Teg, and were still fucking there after the proliferation of no-ships. At this point, I'm not sure a galactic-wide extinction event could kill them.

The lesson I gleaned from all of that is this: It is far worse than a waste of time to anything but be their uneasy allies because they will simply outlive you to death. If that is the case, might as well make friends with them, but accept that they look after themselves first. To each their own, eh?

edit: Paul's sister, not Leto's.

pathjumper wrote:.. Leto's insane sister's brief reign,..

Just to nitpick, that'd be Paul's insane sister, yes?