Bene Gesserit - Goals, Strategies, and Ritual - Breeding Program

Breeding Program

The ultimate goal of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, up to the end of the novel Dune, is the creation of a male Bene Gesserit they call the Kwisatz Haderach. They intend to achieve this superbeing through a massive human breeding program, which they have conducted for countless generations; using careful manipulations of relationships and breeding sisters to "collect" key genes, the Bene Gesserit have controlled and finessed bloodlines through the ages. The Kwisatz Haderach, with supreme prescience and access to both male and female lines in Other Memory, will be an overt figure in the Bene Gesserit's manipulations, thrust upon the universe as a messiah.

In Dune, the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme is, in theory, to have come to full fruition from the union of an Atreides daughter (planned to be born of the Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica and the Duke Leto Atreides) and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, nephew of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (himself secretly the natural father of the Lady Jessica). This plan is disrupted when Jessica chooses to conceive an Atreides son rather than the daughter she had been ordered to produce. This son, Paul Atreides, later proves to be the Kwisatz Haderach, born a generation early. Political intrigue affects Paul's rise to power as Emperor of the Known Universe, secured by his stranglehold on the melange supply. A decade later in Dune Messiah, the Bene Gesserit are frustrated to be at the mercy of their own creation, but a conspiracy to remove Paul from power fails. He realizes, however, that while prescience grants control, that control paradoxically traps the prescient in a foreseen future that they can not change. Despising the religion that has risen up around him and seeing where it will lead, Paul walks into the desert seeking death in hopes that he can change the course of the future. Paul's son Leto II (born of Chani, daughter of Liet-Kynes, and Paul) is also a Kwisatz Haderach; seeing the same future, Leto decides to do what his father could not. He takes control of both the empire and the Bene Gesserit breeding program in Children of Dune, and begins his own transformation into a sandworm to give himself the time he needs for his Golden Path to be fully realized. Thirty-five hundred years later, his breeding plan produces Siona Atreides, the first in a line of humans who are able to disappear from prescient sight. Leto dies 1,500 years before the events in Heretics of Dune. In Chapterhouse Dune, the Bene Gesserit have restored their breeding program. However, they are too terrified of the consequences of producing another Kwisatz Haderach, so instead breed for special individuals of great talent and usefulness in order to amplify certain human characteristics and preserve them. Now aware of Leto's Golden Path, the Bene Gesserit widen their goals of advancing mankind and saving it from extinction.

The behind-the-scenes intrigues of the breeding program are illuminated in the Prelude to Dune prequel trilogy (1999–2001) as the program nears fruition in the time immediately prior to the novel Dune. The origins of the program are explored in the Legends of Dune prequel series. Over 10,000 years before the events of Dune, the Sorceresses of Rossak had started keeping detailed breeding records circa 400 B.G., trying to improve the potency and prevalence of their telekinetic powers. In 108 B.G., the Sorceresses begin collecting genetic samples of various human bloodlines, which were in jeopardy from a catastrophic virus genetically engineered and unleashed by the thinking machines.