There is a reason why all religion begins in the desert. Deserts are harsh, inhospitable places, particularly dunes. The ecology of dunes is primarily influenced by the prevalence of high winds, which pick sand up from the windward side of the dune and deposit it on the leeward side in a shifting pattern of constant transformation. This makes it very difficult for any living thing to find a foothold, whether it be flora or fauna.
Sand dunes have a way of stripping organic life down to its bare essentials, allowing only the hardiest of organisms to survive. Once these take a foothold, however, it is very difficult to eradicate them. Thus, the desert acts as Tahaddi al-Burhan—the Challenge of the Proof—nature’s ultimate testing ground, where only the most resilient of species can thrive.
Because the simple act of survival in the desert requires a level of determination and resilience beyond the capabilities of most species, desert environments select for only the hardiest kinds of man and beast. The law of the desert is deprivation, and it will consume those who cannot go without. Arrakis is Arrakis, and the desert takes the weak.
Those familiar with my obsession with Frank Herbert’s Dune series probably already know where this reflection in headed. Dune: Part Two just rounded out its second weekend in theaters, smashing box office expectations, leaving viewers stunned and critics falling before director Denis Villeneuve’s feet in fawning praise.
The law of the desert is deprivation, and it will consume those who cannot go without.
I relished the release of Villeneuve’s second Dune film knowing it would be the perfect excuse to return to my favorite Science Fiction source material as a wellspring of reflection on the connections between desert ecology and the spiritual life.
This is not a review of the film—I have little to add to the ecstatic praise the film has already received—but rather a curious exploration of how the stark ecology of deserts reveals the ways in which physical environments sculpt spiritual practices.
Long before I ever read Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, I developed a belief that ancient wisdom—echoed in the traditions of desert hermits and stories like Dune—just might hold the secrets to solving a myriad of modern crises.
From solutions to environmental degradation to the search for meaning in a world governed by empty materialism, desert spirituality offers a blueprint for introspection, resilience, and the secrets to living in harmony with Ruh—our deepest Self—and with the natural world.
Spiritual Desert
Deserts provide a physical and metaphorical space where the seeker after truth must strip away the non-essential aspects of their life and turn inward, directing their focus toward the innermost core of their being. The desert's harsh conditions, its solitude, and its stark beauty make it a fitting backdrop and metaphor for the spiritual journey. After all, the spiritual life consists of stripping everything down to its bare essentials to get at the marrow and meaning of life. Only then can the spiritual seeker begin to see with what the Sufis called the Ayn al-Qalb, the Eye of the Heart.
From solutions to environmental degradation to the search for meaning in a world governed by empty materialism, desert spirituality offers a blueprint for living in harmony with the natural world.
The exploration of this real wilderness of the desert and the metaphorical wilderness of the heart is the subject of Professor Kim Haines-Eitzen’s wonderful new book The Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks–And What It Can Teach Us.
Haines-Eitzen chronicles the journeys and experiences of early Christian monks who sought spiritual enlightenment in the solitude of the desert. She delves into their practices of deep listening - an intentional and focused attentiveness to the world around them.
“I wanted to understand what it might mean to peel back the layers of history, and to hear the faintest echo of the sounding past” she writes.1
The desert provides an ecological substrate for profound spiritual illumination.
These monks listened not only to the silence but also to the subtle sounds of the desert - the wind, the shifting of the sands, the faint call of desert creatures. This they believed, brought them closer to an understanding of the divine.
In The Sonorous Desert, the author points out that desert landscapes and soundscapes, in their vast emptiness, are capable of providing a canvas for deep introspection and spiritual self-discovery. They are places where the distractions of the material world are muted, and the rich textures of the interior life are amplified. Perhaps this is why deserts have yielded so many religious and philosophical insights throughout history.
Whether Muhammad in the cave at Mount Hira, Moses and his burning bush, or Jesus in the Judean wilderness for forty days and forty nights, the desert provides an ecological substrate for profound spiritual illumination.
For best results, read this article while listening to my Wormposting playlist: Dreams of Arrakis
The Spiritual Ecology of Dune
In Dune, the desert planet Arrakis serves as a powerful metaphor for the spiritual landscape. Just as the unforgiving deserts of Palestine tested the resilience of early Christian Monks, Arrakis tests the mettle of its characters, forcing them to court catastrophe and confront destiny.
The desert-dwelling Fremen, the indigenous inhabitants of Arrakis, are the epitome of resilience and adaptability. They have evolved to perfectly conform to the harsh conditions of their desert homeworld.
Their entire culture, language, mythology, and religion is centered around the conservation of water, a scarce and precious resource on their arid planet. They adapt to the strictures of the desert, and accordingly are absorbed into its ecology. “Humans have always been a part of the desert environments, and part of the history of deserts is also the history of humans” writes Haines-Eitzen.
For the Fremen, religion, ecology, politics, and myth are inseparable. This is most obvious in their reverence for the giant sandworms that hide beneath the desert sands of Arrakis, but also in the sacred significance they bestow upon even the most mundane aspects of desert life.
This animist spiritual impulse among the fremen is a recognizable trait of religious societies, as Haines-Eitzen points out:
“In spite of arguments, to the contrary, the Bible, and the monastic texts, are replete with what we might call animism—the sense that the natural world is alive, that it is potent with divine presence, that mountains can burst into song, that they weep and wail with sorrow and shudder with terror.”
Much Ado About Melange
In the world of Herbert’s Dune, the Great Sandworm acts as the ultimate symbol of the power and danger of the desert, simultaneously feared and revered. Viciously attacking all life forms on Arrakis, they also act as an unlikely mode of transportation and are essential to the production of the Spice Melange, a substance that extends life, enhances mental abilities, and is necessary for space travel. Spice is used by the Fremen as a tool of spiritual development and communal group bonding.
The Spice itself is an important symbol within the world Dune. The insights it offers and its addictive quality represents the simultaneous allure and danger of material and spiritual power. In the novel, the Spice trade drives all commerce and politics within the known universe, and consumes the councils of the powerful and the wise.
Melange is created as a byproduct of the sandworms’ life cycle, so to harvest the spice in sufficient quantities, the powers that be must allow the vicious sandworms nearly unlimited dominion over the planet. Only in this way can Melange be produced at a rate capable of meeting the needs of the Imperium.
In Dune, the Spice trade drives all commerce and politics within the known universe, and consumes the councils of the powerful and the wise.
Psychedelic Spice
The Spice Melange in Dune has been interpreted as a metaphor for oil and the dependence upon it that afflicts modern industrial society, but it can also be interpreted as a metaphor for a variety of entheogenic plants that bloom in desert environments, like the Peyote cactus of Northern Mexico.
These plants contain Mescaline, and have been used for centuries in indigenous spiritual and religious practices to induce altered states of consciousness. Like the Spice, plants containing mescaline and other psychoactive compounds are believed to facilitate spiritual awakenings, provide divine prophetic insights, and and allow for deep introspection.
While Melange is central to the religious life of the Fremen, the Peyote cactus plays a significant role in the spiritual and cultural practices of the indigenous communities that utilize it. While there are dangers to consuming mescaline and other psychedelic compounds, those who utilize them recreationally or ceremonially believe the introspective and spiritual benefits outweigh the risks.2
While Melange is central to the religious life of the Fremen, the Peyote cactus plays a significant role in the spiritual and cultural practices of the indigenous communities that utilize it.
Reading an obvious psychedelic interpretation into Dune may not be as much of a reach as it seems. The prominent mycologist Paul Stamets, a personal friend of Frank Herbert’s, maintains that the universe of Dune was partially inspired during Herbert’s own experiments with psilocybe cubensis, the proverbial “Magic Mushroom.” He further claims that the whole complex life cycle of the desert sandworms is a metaphor for the life cycle of fungi.3
Power and Peril
Derived from the harsh desert environments of their disparate worlds, both the psychoactive plants of indigenous societies in our world and the Fremen Spice are integral to the spiritual practices–and some would argue the survival–of their respective cultures.
This tension reflects a paradoxical aspect of the desert: harsh and inhospitable, it can also provide the necessities for life as well as deep insights into spiritual growth. The indigenous Fremen exist within this paradox, and their religion reveres their natural environment as much as it warns about its lurking dangers.
In many ways, the Fremen embody the same lessons of deprivation and survival learned by the first Christian monks: just as the spiritual journey requires us to pare down to our essential soul, so too does life in the desert strip us down to our most fundamental, unadorned selves.
Harsh and inhospitable, the desert can also provide the necessities for life as well as deep insights into spiritual growth.
The desert can act both as a source of life and a place of death, and this duality was clear to the early hermits like Anthony the Great who founded the Christian monastic tradition.
Haines-Eitzen writes that, for these monks, the desert represented “life on the edge of what is possible — the story of Antony speaks to fragility and strength, spiritual devotion, and the constant threat of imminent destruction. In this sense, the desert offered hermits the potent paradox of safety and danger.”
The monks of the Christian Near East grew familiar with the ecology of the their hermitages as a means of survival. One of the most important ways that hermits engaged with their environment was through sound.
The sounds of crashing thunder, wind, whistling, through reeds, the howls of wolves and hisses of snakes—these and many other sounds taught monks lessons about listening and about living in relationship. Monastic literatures suggest that the sounding environment shaped monks’ sense of both where they were and who they were.
Soundscapes also anchor the world of the desert Fremen on Arrakis. The sandworms hunt using sonic waves, so the Fremen devise clever ways to attract and repel the worms with sound. To avoid the worms, they practice the “sandwalk,” an elaborate dance designed to carry them across stretches of open desert without attracting the worms’ attention. Its complex pattern mimics the sounds of wind blowing across sand dunes.
Worms serve as the primary mode of transportation for the Fremen, so to attract them, they utilize the Thumper, an elaborate device that sends shockwaves through the sand and “calls” to the worms, bringing them in range of the Fremen Maker Hooks—tools designed for harnessing and riding the Great Worms. Both Thumper and sandwalk betray an intimate understanding of the desert soundscape that defines the Fremen attitude toward nature.
The Blooming Fullness of Quiet
Like the monks of ancient Palestine, the Fremen live in reverent harmony with their natural acoustic environment. The real deserts of Earth and the fictional desert of Arrakis are replete with a variety of sounds, but perhaps the most notable aspect of the desert soundscape is silence. Professor Haines-Eitzen remarks that “if there is an acoustical signature associated with the Desert—real and imagined—surely it must be its overwhelming silence.”
This silence is not defined merely by the lack of noise, but rather the presence of stillness. “Might we think of silence not as absence, but as the fullness of quiet, blooming attention, moments, where time slows?” questions the author of The Sonorous Desert. She draws an illustration from the Native American writer N. Scott Momaday who posits that “Silence… is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places.“
Like the monks of ancient Palestine, the Fremen live in reverent harmony with their natural acoustic environment.
It was in this “fullness of quiet” that the Christian monks of ancient Palestine sought to survey the innermost depths of spiritual inquiry. “In the same way, that no plant whatsoever grows upon a well-trodden highway, so it is with us” writes one desert elder. “Withdraw from all business into hesychia and you will see things growing that you did not know were in you, for you were walking on them.“
The Greek word hesychia here means “stillness” or “rest.” In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the word is used to convey a mystical concept of inner quietude, an essential spiritual state for ascertaining the presence of God, the true nature of sin, and the purpose of prayer. It stands in contrast with another Greek word: ktupon, meaning a crashing, thunderous, and dissonant sound. Such sounds intrude upon the inner quietude of the spiritual seeker, distracting him from his prayers.
The worms of Arrakis embody physical manifestations of spiritual forces in their various aspects and guises.
Even withdrawing to the silence of the desert could not spare ancient hermits from the intrusion of ktupon. The sounds that intrude upon the waking life of the monk were often given demonic aspects and origins. “The devil and demons were seen as adversaries that had the ability to interfere with your life negatively” writes Haines-Eitzen. “And the desert was their home.”
This notion of the desert being simultaneously a place for holy reflection and also the domain of devils is a theme that is likewise present in Dune. The worms of Arrakis embody physical manifestations of spiritual forces in their various aspects and guises. The spice-making sandworm is revered by the Fremen as the holy Shai Hulud, but when it ravages their dwellings and consumes planetary life, it is cursed as Shaitan–Satan, the Devil.
This duality serves as yet another reminder that the desert can take life just as easily as it can bring it forth, and understanding the ecology of deserts is essential to safely navigating them.
Listening to the Past to Inform the Present
The author of The Sonorous Desert concludes her work with a poignant reflection:
Can an acoustic ecology of belonging tend and cultivate an inclusive way to listen deeply in the present into the past, to the ways in which sounds shape, our inner sense of self, and the soundscapes around us?
Might the sounds of a place, flowing in and around and intermingling with other sounds, teach us about what it means to belong?
I was left in a similarly reflective mood after concluding the first four books of Herbert’s Dune series. “On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power” posits Duke Leto Atreides to his son Paul, upon arriving to the planet Arrakis. "Here, we must learn to cultivate desert power.”
This notion of Desert Power leaps from the pages of Dune as a motif that encapsulates the hidden might of the Fremen, the majesty of Shai Hulud, and the “treasures hid in the sand” of Arrakis.4
I found myself returning to a lurking question: what lessons does this rich, textured story of power, religion, ecology, and farsighted future predictions hold for a culture grappling with existential emptiness and ecological destruction?
Water scarcity, extreme heat, the desolation of green spaces. All of these familiar harbingers of climate change are found in the pages of Dune. As our changing climate shifts the ecology of our planet, we will have to adapt in order to survive.
Water scarcity, extreme heat, the desolation of green spaces. All of these familiar harbingers of climate change are found in the pages of Dune.
Deserts and their inhabitants, be they early Christian monks or the fictional Fremen of Dune, demonstrate an intimate knowledge of their environment, living in a delicate balance with the harsh conditions that surround them. Their survival strategies—ranging from water conservation, manipulation of sound, and the spiritual practice of introspective solitude—highlight an essential harmony with the natural world, born out of necessity but rich with relevant lessons on sustainability and mindfulness.
For modern readers, the ancient wisdom of desert spirituality can offer valuable insights into addressing contemporary environmental and spiritual challenges. In an age marked by a pervasive sense of disconnection from the natural world, the principles of conscious conservation, mindful consumption, and a truly reverent respect for nature that underpin these stories of desert survival can guide us toward a critical harmony with the natural world.
The ancient wisdom of desert spirituality can offer valuable insights into addressing contemporary environmental and spiritual challenges
Moreover, the emphasis on solitude and inward reflection in desert spiritual traditions provides a counterpoint to the prevailing ktupon, the noisome materialistic intrusions of modern life. Stories like those found in the pages of Sonorous Desert and Dune invite us to explore the depths of our own consciousness, find harmony with the life-giving earth, and discover meaning beyond the superficial.
Taken together, they act as voice crying out in the wilderness, calling us back to the ancient paths, and showing us the way to cultivate desert power.
Haines-Eitzen, Kim. The Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.
Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2005.
“They shall call the people unto the mountain; there they shall offer sacrifices of righteousness: for they shall suck of the abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand.” Deuteronomy 33:19, King James Version
All world religions share their common experiences with the biological divine, the scientific spiritual reality of our earth.
Different cultures channel their own beliefs…they share a common ground however.
Silence, survival, and spice.
The Zoroastrian faith used homa a substance made from psychoactive plants, it was used in ceremonial rituals. Norse, fly amaninta, Aztec payote, Inca ayawuasca, so on and so on. It’s everywhere.
We know today that all Greek religions came from Persian and Babylonian traditions, we also know that even brtitonic Celtic traditions including their star system came from Sumerian cultures who had a tracking of the stars long before even kuniform language existed.
They are the fathers of Hindu, Abrahamic religions in their ancient form, Celtic, Roman and Greek…human beliefs move and revolve like languages. They also sadly are subject to fallow the human rules.
Being hierarchies, group phycology, and the human shadows of conflict and control. Succeeding wealth, military control, and social dogma.
It is in silence and in survival that we are best able to speak with spirit. Something that is more easily done in poverty.
In silence of the desert, in vapasana, on a vision quest…we find space from our thoughts and spirit can creep in…in starvation from a fast, no food or water, spirit can creep in.
We know that when spirit speaks, it whispers and it’s begs humans to disobey their rules and shadows…to stop the chaos and create order and peace.
The biological spirit is a collective force and evolves us towards harmony and unity, humanitarian movements and social progress…
But to overcome the noise of wealth and power and human dignity is not possible, because it is material wealth and power that writes and distributes the book, so we will see how human rules will bend and change who has access to the divine so they can to weaponize even the breath of silence and spirituality.
Humans are also barely able to understand what they are channeling, and are often incorrect…but if there is one thing a wealthy military lord hates doing, it’s admitting him or his people are wrong…something that we can see quite clearly humans are all over the planet often are. Or we would have one coherent story across nations…there are similar concepts…but spirit is hazy…and most viable to those who have the least amount of power or voice.
How/why would a war lord be interested in a religion that would forbid their military efforts? Why would he want religious leaders who speak against their war activities? We also know that the most successful religion are those upheld and distributed by military forces…