Becoming Kwisatz Haderach: From the Talmudic sages to Dune

The Shortening of space and time

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“He’s awake and listening to us,” said the old woman. “Sly little rascal.” She chuckled. “But royalty has need of slyness. And if he’s really the Kwisatz Haderach… well.”

Dune, by Frank Herbert

I hope for you that found the time to go and see Dune: Part Two. I saw it this week with a good friend.

If you've seen the movie directed by Denis Villeneuve or read the wonderful book by Frank Herbert on which it’s based, you know that Paul, the main character in Dune, is repeatedly referred to as ‘Kwisatz Haderach’.

It is easy to make the mistake of thinking that this is a concept taken from Islam. In the same breath that Paul is called the Kwisatz Haderach by the mysterious order of the Bene Gesserit, he is called 'the Mahdi' by the Fermen, the native people of Arrakis who adopted Paul and his mother Jessica after the destruction of their royal house. The religion of Islam speaks of the Mahdi, which is 'the Guided', a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who will arrive at the end of history to declare the rule of the true religion in the world.

In Dune, Paul comes to be considered the same Mahadi, the Messiah of Dune. He is also its prophet, known by the Fremen as Lisan al-Gaib, an Arabic phrase meaning ‘The Voice from the Outer World'.

But if the customs and religion of the Fermen are influenced and largely based on the customs and religion of the Arab tribes of North Africa and Asia and their language preserves quite a bit of the Arabic of our Earth; 'Kwisatz Haderach' is a concept that is taken from Judaism. These two Hebrew words Translated into English will become: ‘Clenching of the Road’, in the sense of Clenching your fist.

In the Talmud, where the idea of ​​clenching the road appears for the first time, the intention is to cross vast spaces in a significant short time. In the Babylonian Talmud we read about the "three to whom the land clenched: Eliezer servant of Abraham, Jacob our father, and Avishai son of Zeruiah".

With the fall of the second Temple in Jerusalem, part of the responsibilities that the Talmudic sages assumed was to interpret the words of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. According to this interpretation of theirs – the first ‘Kwisatz Haderach’ in history occurred when Eliezer was sent by his owner, the patriarch Abraham, to find a bride for his son Isaac. Eliezer was sent to his master’s family in Haran, because Abraham did not want his son to marry a Canaanite girl. Eliezer left for Aram-Naharaim and arrived in Haran in just three hours. The Talmud tells us that this very long and tiring journey took place in a much shorter time than it would normally take, And all thanks to the enormous importance of Eliezer's mission.

Suppose you’re living in a world that is separated by over a millennium from the invention of the automobile and the airplane. Wouldn’t the idea of shortening of the roads ahead and the saving of a lot of time and energy on difficult and even dangerous journeys sounds like a dream come true?

The Talmud is vague about the prospect of achieving this dream. Other, later sources wrote down definitive recipes for Kwisatz Haderach. In a manuscript written in Hebrew from the 15^th century we find this "tried and tested" spell:

"Kwisatz Haderach: tried and tested, to walk for a month in one hour. Take a reed of four Cubit size and take a piece of parchment from deer hide and write on it these names. And write “and I came across the place”, etc.

Put a blindfold on your eyes and then write the names “MAA PBP” (מא"ע פב"פ)  and then write the names of the saints "that I ride on so that you may lead me from this place to such and such a place.” And be carful not to take the blindfold off until you yourself feel that you are in that place which you wished to get to. And that is what you write: KNU”I LLAIR”I NAI”I SAI”E NGDIDIO”E PA”O ZHRI”E KD”I SU”A DSIROK”I (כנו"י ללאיר"י מימיני"ת נאי"י סעי"ה נגדידיו"ה פא"ו צהרי"ה קד"י שו"א דשירוק"י")

In this simple to understand and simple to perform spell (a tried and tested one, I remind you) we discover a fascinating magical technique that is behind the use of Kwisatz Haderach. The Talmud does not provide us with any guidance or even a hint as to how the heroes of the Bible, and many of the Talmudic sages as well, clenched their way to make it shorter. In this Jewish book of spell from the end of the Middle Ages I just quoted, however, the technique itself is clear. The invocation of divine names, whether the hidden names of God or the names of various angels, will do the trick.

The use of divine names is very common in the Kabbalah, which emerged a few hundreds of years before this manuscript was written, in the early Middle Ages, first in Spain and from there it spread to other Western European communities. But we can find the use of divine names already in the Talmud. Remember the three biblical heroes who were said to have clenched the road? Eliezer the servant of Abraham was the first. After him the same magical technique was attributed to Jacob, Abraham's grandson when he sought to escape from his deceived brother Esau, and also to Avishai ben Zeruiah - a senior commander in King David's army and the brother of Joab, the leader of the army.

Eliezer used Kwisatz Haderach (pronounced in Hebrew as Kefizat Haderech) to arrange a marriage for Isaac, Jacob used this technique to escape his brother Esau, and Avishai ben Zeruiah did it to save his King from death. It is said that one day the general was taking a shower in his home and discovered that blood had seeped into his water jug. He understood this as a warning to the welfare of King David and quickly rode - and was helped by Kwisatz Haderach - to reach the King. On the way to the palace, he noticed Orpah, who in Jewish tradition is identified as the mother of the giant Goliath whom David had slaughtered years before. She was the one waiting on the road to kill the King. To save David from danger, Avishai invoke some unmentioned divine names so he could hide the King between heaven and earth until the danger passed.

Paul Atreides as Kwisatz Haderach

After understanding its Jewish origins, it is appropriate that we ask: what does Kwisatz Haderach looks like in Dune?

Paul Muad'Dib Atreides' Kwisatz Haderach is a bit more complicated to explain. He does not move in space – shortening a yearlong travel in one day, or one month in an hour. This is what our modern transportation did for us, and the much more advanced transportation in the novel for Paul and the other characters. In the universe of Dune there are spaceships that travel at the speed of light (and much faster) - the main reason why the various houses are fighting for control of the planet known as Arakkis, the spice supplier of the universe. What Paul does, his Kwisatz Haderach - or rather, the Kwisatz Haderach that he is, is a combination of the ability to see into the future, combined with perfect knowledge of the past. It is Muad’Dib's ability to clearly foresee the endless divergences of time, the countless forking paths as Jorge Luis Borges called them in the story 'The Garden of Forking Paths', and by seeing them clearly, he can take actions that brings about the desired path for him and the whole of humankind.

The novel and the films express wonderfully Paul's tragedy because the path he chooses inevitably leads to a holy war, which in the book is called Jihad. Paul does not want to bring jihad into the world but he understands perfectly that without it he and his family will be lost, as well as his struggling people - the Fremen and possibly the whole of humanity.

Nietzsche warned us that "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Thanks to his ability to look into the future, when Paul sets out to fight the monsters that murdered his father and almost destroyed his entire family - he consciously chooses the possibility of becoming a monster himself.

Throughout the book, Paul Atreides collects various names and titles on his way to become the Kwisatz Haderach. But while in Judaism the divine names give the person using them superior powers - because these are actually the names of heavenly beings - the titles that Paul accumulates are based on his own actions, on points in his spiritual development that he has to go through in order to become the Kwisatz Haderach. These actions of his are much more reminiscent of the realization of hidden potential than a true alchemical transformation - when a simple metal is turned into gold. And here lies a great truth in the universe of Dune and a basic principle in the philosophy of the entire series. This is why the Bene Gesserit are so important in driving the hidden plot of the books: the mysterious order of women is entrusted with overseeing the blood lines. 

 Religions in Dune contain only partial truths and are subject to wildly different interpretations and cynical political manipulation. We saw this with the original Islamic idea of the Mahdi and the Fremen interpretation of it. In genetics, however, lies an undeniable truth. Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach because of his particular genetics more than anything else. Or, to phrase it more gently, Paul's genetics are the necessary condition from which he embarks on his journey of becoming Kwisatz Haderach. This is also the reason for his great failure, which is described in the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. Precisely because his mother "skipped" a generation and gave birth to a male heir instead of a female, to Paul, he will not be the one to guide humanity on the "Golden Path" that will save it from destruction. This role will be taken over by his son, Leto II. The God Emperor of Dune.

A short final thought: more uses of divine names in Judaism

With the rise of Kabbalah, the use of divine names practiced by medieval Judaism and up until our present day became widely and fruitfully used in Judaism. Creating a Golem is probably the most well-known magic that invokes divine names. In my humble opinion, a much more interesting spell that utilizes divine names is the so-called "writer's name" (‘Shem hakotev’ in Hebrew), a spell that is nothing less than an early version of the automatic writing that the Surrealists would popularize at the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea is simple, channeling higher inspiration through the use of an angel's name.

Homer began his immortal poem the Iliad with the invocation of the Muse: "Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles, of Peleus' son”. And thus asks the Muse to sing a poem from his own mouth - to pull one thread from the mighty Trojan War. The Jews had a slightly different version as inspiration for writing, using other angels.

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