Frank Herbert's Dune ties together a galactic empire embroiled with sophisticated politics, ancient blood feuds fought across the stars, bloody rebellions rooted in theo-economics, and a Messiah risen from the desert. Anatomically, they are the limbs of the body cosmic, each one fed and nourished by the universe's lifeblood: the spice melange.
Coveted beyond all things, the spice allows for the star-spanning civilization of Herbert's iconic novels to exist. When imbibed in the proper dosage under the right conditions, the spice has almost limitless applications. The following will describe its origins and some of the powerful entities -- or, in one case, person -- that have become entirely spice-dependent.
What Is Spice in Dune, and Where Is It Found?
Melange resembles cinnamon in color, odor and taste but with a flinty undercurrent and is highly addictive. Prolonged exposure to spice results in a phenotypical response of brilliant blue eyes, what Arakeen natives call the Eyes of Ibad. The only place to harvest spice in all of the known universe is the desert planet Arrakis. Once a poor backwater world, it is now the de facto center of the universe. Spice not only serves as a resource currency akin to precious metals but also as a supplement that improves overall health dramatically and increases the average human lifespan by hundreds of years.
How The Space Guild Navigators Sustain On Spice
Mankind discovered the ability to fold space and traverse the stars long ago, but a computer that is capable of calculating proximal gravity wells, uncharted stars and other interstellar phenomena across the length and breadth of the entire known universe has never been built successfully. Enter the navigators of the Space Guild, spice addicts whose minds have transcended mere data probability and advanced astrophysics and ventured into the realm of prescience.
Encased in helmets that circulate spice gas constantly for their survival, they are both less and more than human. By trafficking in the quantum fluctuations of the unknowable, they can plot a course anywhere in the galaxy with safety and reliability. Without them, commerce and travel across the universe would come to a screeching halt and revert civilization to a pre-warp era of existence. Government, as it exists, would crumble, mercantile fortunes would evaporate, famine, war and pestilence would thrive on a galactic scale, and the highways of the universe would remain barren.
Sandworms of Arrakis Are Vital To Spice Production
The great worms of Dune are colossal in size and mythic in cultural stature. Capable of living for thousands of years feeding on sand particulate, these titans of the desert are worshipped as gods by the native populace. In many ways, they serve as the alpha and the omega of the melange life cycle. In their larvae form, when they are known as sandtrout, their excretions form the primary component of spice.
Although sandworms are terminally averse to water, sandtrout gestate externally in liquid water environments. When a group of sandtrout gathers in these nurseries, their excretions combine with the water producing a highly combustible, unrefined spice mixture that is jettisoned to Dune's intensely hot surface under great pressure, thus producing refined melange. Those sandtrout that survive this chemically unstable detonation then develop into sandworms.
Sandworms are violently territorial and are drawn to vibrations on the surface, which makes spice mining exceedingly dangerous, aside from the potential explosions, lack of drinking water, intense heat or the understandably hostile native presence. When a sandworm dies, it releases a clutch of sandtrout that burrow into the deep desert, seeking water near the Arrakeen mantle and renewing the cycle. If a sandworm is drowned in water, it secretes a potent spice mixture known as the Water of Life.
The Fremen Have an Entangled Relationship With Spice
The people of Arrakis have learned to live in harmony with the land that sustains them and have an intimate relationship with the spice. Present in whatever water they can find, in the air they breathe and the food they eat, all Fremen have the distinct burning blue eyes of spice addicts. Culturally, the spice plays a spiritual role as well as a practical one.
The scarcity of water on Arrakis makes habitable conditions fraught, at best, and reliance on spice adepts called Sayyadina paramount. They were women of the tribe who had retained the perfect oral history of their people from the time they came to Arrakis due to enhancements created from guided spice meditations. They were vital in preserving traditional ways of life but also providing detailed knowledge of the land passed down through memory. They are also a people of prophecy, and their legends describe a warrior, the Mahdi, who would become their savior.
The Secret of the Bene Gesserit
Publicly facing, the Bene Gesserit are a sisterhood who use their precognitive abilities to serve as advisors to powerful families and interests within the Imperian. Trained in a variety of academic and martial disciplines, their mental and physical abilities are enhanced by spice and rigorous training. A Bene Gesserit can only attain the rank of Reverend Mother by surviving the painful ingestion of the Water of Life. If their training and mental discipline allow them to metabolize this spice concentrate, they ascend to a higher level of awareness.
The sisterhood internally has been working for centuries to chart humanity's destiny along a path they find most desirable. To achieve that end, they have used their influence to create a breeding program spanning millennia to produce a male Reverend Mother. No man has ever survived an attempt to assimilate the Water of Life, which, according to the Bene Gesserit, would produce a perfect being capable of being in all places at once, The Kwisatz Haderach.
The Messiah That Is To Come
The culmination of Bene Gesserit lineage manipulation and Fremen prophecy, Paul Atreides fulfilled both by surviving the Water of Life ritual, the only man in all the known universe to ever do so. Paul had been trained in the prana bindu practices of the sisterhood since birth and, due to genetics that had been cultivated over the course of hundreds of thousands of human generations, was uniquely prepared to undertake the ritual.
After a coma that lasted three weeks, he rose with perfect knowledge of the past, present and future, the Kwisatz Haderach and Mahdi. One man who was a scion of altered science, meticulous engineering and, most importantly, spice.