What Is The Golden Path In Dune?

This post contains spoilers for the Frank Herbert-written “Dune” books.

The “Dune” book series, which extends far past where the currently planned movie trilogy expects to end, veers off into strange territory. There are major cast shake-ups, significant shifts in thematic focus, and massive time jumps. By the time you get to the fourth book, “God Emperor of Dune,” nearly every character in the first book has been dead for almost 3,500 years. By the time you get to the fifth book, “Heretics of Dune,” nearly every character in the fourth book has also been dead for about 1,500 years. 

Despite all those shifts and changes, author Frank Hebert still gave the series a few constants to hold onto. The first was Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa in the movies), the only character to exist in all six books, albeit in clone form. The second and most important constant, however, was the idea of the Golden Path. It’s a concept that’s a little elusive and seldom defined with the clarity readers would want, but it’s the thing that subtly drives the protagonists from the first page of “Dune” to the final page of “Chapterhouse,” and continues even into many of the books written by Herbert’s son Brian after Frank’s death. 

At its core, the Golden Path is a vision of humanity’s future, spanning thousands of years, that could only be seen by someone highly trained and gifted in seeing the future. Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet in the recent films) only fully grapples with the Golden Path after ingesting the Water of Life, a very dangerous substance taken from the bile of a dying infant sandworm. 

This is the point in the book/movie where Paul concludes that his path to the throne is unavoidable, that his rise to power and the destruction that comes with it is a necessary price for the good of not just his family, but the universe overall. Paul is able to see that billions of people will die in a Fremen Holy War spreading throughout the universe as a direct result of his rise to power, and yet he chooses to go through with it anyway — in part because he thinks the alternative will be worse. 

So, what is the alternative? Well, stagnation. Humanity at the beginning of “Dune” had been stuck in a millennia-long rut; that’s part of why the world of the HBO series “Dune: Prophecy,” taking place a full ten thousand years before Paul’s rise to power, looks so similar to the world Paul’s grown up in. All of humanity is essentially ruled under a single government, the Imperium, and that lack of diversity (genetically, socially, politically, geographically) was a long-term existential threat. There are also hints that Paul and Chani’s eventual son, Leto II, fears an external threat; maybe he feared a return to hostile thinking machines (which had been banned during the Butlerian Jihad long before the series began), or perhaps he feared humanity’s first proper encounter with an intelligent alien species.

Either way, Paul and Leto II believed that humanity was not ready to face either of those external threats, and even without them they seemed doomed to internal collapse under the current trajectory. So, in order to protect humanity, they felt they needed to radically shake up this universe’s status quo. 

For a lot of reasons, perhaps the chief one being that Paul was born a generation earlier than expected and therefore was not quite the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach as predicted, Paul did not quite follow through on his quest to fulfill the Golden Path. The second book, “Dune: Messiah,” which focuses on Paul’s downfall, is a little vague about what Paul would need to do to achieve it, but it’s clear that the Golden Path would entail even more human suffering and for Paul to lose even more of his humanity. He decides to give up his power and wander off into the desert, never to retake the throne again. 

But although Paul gives up the Golden Path, his young prescient son Leto II (arguably the true Kwisatz Haderach) decides to follow through with it in his place. He does this knowing full well that the path requires him to turn into a giant immortal worm creature (yes, really) and rule over the universe with an iron fist. Hey, it’s a lonely life, but someone’s got to do it. 

Leto II takes over at the end of “Children of Dune” (the third book), and gives us an idea of what his rule will be like. Most notably, he plans to continue the de-desertification of Arrakis, slowly making the sandworms that produce the universe’s only spice supply extinct. In the meantime, he’d supply the shrinking spice supply largely to his close allies, while the rest of the universe would have to make do without it. This was a very tough change for a lot of people throughout the universe, many of whom relied on the spice to live unnaturally long lifespans, but Leto II believed it was necessary to wean humanity off its spice melange addiction in order to make it stronger and more self-reliant. 

The other important factor is that Leto II, by virtue of being essentially a giant sentient worm, was basically indestructible as well as immortal. Sci-fi writers have often grappled with the nature of absolute power, but rarely has a ruler given a character the sheer scale of power Leto II enjoys. He’s not just near-invincible, but he’s nearly all-knowing, too.

Leto II lets himself be slain at the end of “God Emperor of Dune,” after over 3,500 years of continuous rule. This was all part of the plan, however, as his death creates an intentional power vacuum that leads to the human race no longer being ruled by a singular, coherent empire. It helps that humanity’s spice addiction has been largely killed by this point; even if the Bene Tleilax (a major political faction responsible for all those Duncan Idaho clones) have finally learned to manufacture spice on their own, it’s still not enough to prevent the decentralization of humanity. So comes the Great Scattering, where humanity starts to traverse again through the stars to unknown areas of the universe, exactly as Leto II planned. 

Leto II’s rule had also led to a great period of technological innovation, not just because planets now needed to learn how to keep functioning without the spice but because factions opposed to Leto II’s rule knew that they’d need better technology in order to overthrow him. This also clearly benefitted society in “Heretics” and “Chapterhouse,” as the readers see with the invention of no-ships (star-ships that can’t be detected by someone with prescience) as well as the introduction of more advanced Face Dancers (spies who can change their appearance). Humanity in general really seems to have stepped up a notch since the start of Leto II’s rule, both physically and mentally. 

Tragically, Frank Herbert passed before he could finish the series, so it’s unclear what exactly he had in mind for the planned seventh and final book. All we have to work with are the books his son wrote, which are divisive to say the least. We’ll likely never get to see the exact end goal Leto II envisioned for humanity, assuming that was even what Herbert was planning for us to see at all. The Golden Path feels a lot like the answer to the meaning of life in that it’s hard to define, hard to picture, and we’re not sure we’d even like the answer if we got it. In a way, it feels fitting for the “Dune” series to spend so long traversing the Golden Path, only to never quite reach it in the end.