Fear Is The Little-Death

The Litany Against Fear is a fictional incantation spoken by characters in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, and its sequels, in order to focus their minds in times of peril. The Litany is as follows:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

This incantation originates from the Bene Gesserit. Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto Atreides, uses it when the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam compels him to put his right hand in a black box for the Death/Alternative test. The test uses extreme physical pain to produce evidence of his humanity. While doing so Mohiam holds a needle with deadly poison, known as the gom jabbar or “high-handed enemy,” to his neck. Paul must endure the agony as a demonstration of the strength of his mental willpower over his physical instincts.

The litany restores focus and relaxation to those who recite it. As calmness returns, Paul says “Get on with it, old woman.”

I too have been enduring a test of my own humanity over the past month, enduring emotional pain not physical; confronting my personal gom jabbar in the form of my wife’s declared soul connection with another Dom, my fear of her love for him held like a poison needle to my own neck.

And the agony of this has at times been unbearable; more painful and soul destroying than I ever thought possible, and the “high handed enemy” has come oh so very close to breaking me.

But it hasn’t and it won’t…

I will face my fear and where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

“Get on with it old woman.”

~ by Madron on May 20, 2008.