Dune: Cultures: Fremen

The Fremen are the desert nomads of Dune.The Fremen are the desert nomads of Dune. They’re known for their glowing blue eyes, xenophobia and total aptitude for fighting skills.

If you were to see some Fremen in a pub, you’d know that you are in the wrong pub. It’d be a gang members only establishment, and trespassers will be removed by force and/or death. The first and last thing you’d see before having your ass throw out of a window is the house beer, a black-as-oblivion Scottish heavy that all the patrons would be drinking.

The Fremen started almost 11,000 years before the time of Muad’Dib. The Fremen people began as refuges from the League Worlds and the local Arrakis cast outs. They made their reputation as riders of the mighty sand worms, and of those who loot those trying to take its spice. Until the coming of Muad’Dib, only the Fremen knew the secrets behind spice.

The Fremen lived under the most inhospitable environments known to man. And they evolved to survive. The Fremen are extreme Darwinists. A Fremen male can only marry if he acquires water rings. And the only way to get those is to kill a fellow tribe member! This insures that the weak will be removed from the tribe, allowing the ribe to become stronger. Like almost every other culture the Bene Gesserit infiltrated their culture and planted myths part of their Missionaria Protectiva program. The Bene Gesserit placed a prophecy among the Fremen that an outsider would come to their world and become their messiah. This outsider would have the mother who was part of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. This messiah or Kwisatz Haderach who take the water of life and survive, granting him super human powers.

Little did the Bene Gesserit realize that this prophecy would come true. Paul Muad’Dib Atriedes became the Fremen messiah. And the universe never recovered. Paul in an effort to rid Dune of the Harkonnen rulers (and get his revenge) trained a special group of Fremen known as the Fedaykin. These elite warriors had the same masterful war skills as their Fremen brethren, and they were trained in the weirding way of the Bene Gesserit.  Muad’Dib used this army to take over Arrakis, and with it force Emperor Shaddam to abdicate the throne to the imperium.

Muad’Dib continued his Jihad against the rest of universe until he was the clear leader of all humanity. While Paul was the savior of the Fremen, bringing water to the world of Dune, he was also the force that destroyed them. By making the planet more hospitable to human life, and by taming the wild Fremen enough to fight in an army, he softened up the culture. Within three generations, almost all the Fremen were gone.

The Fremen are obssessed with water. And have been known to kill a man just to get to an eigth of the water in his body. The fremen have special death still used to extract the moisture from any object, usually a human corpse. The rest of their technology is also keen to preserving and capturing moisture.

These include still suits to keep the bodies loss of water to under 15 cc/day. Most rituals are also based around water worship, despite their zen-sunni background. The most populer ritual is the tau orgy which is held when a reverend mother convers the water of life to something non lethal.