Manion Butler the Innocent: first martyr of the Butlerian Jihad

Manion Butler the Innocent (202 BG to 201 BG) was the only son of Serena Butler, born into captivity on machine occupied Earth and killed in infancy by the independent robot Erasmus. He lived barely a year and performed no deed of his own, yet few figures in the history of the war against the thinking machines carried greater weight. His murder, witnessed by the trustee Iblis Ginjo and the slave crews under him, touched off the uprising that became the Butlerian Jihad, the holy war that eventually broke the empire of Omnius. The conflict was first known as Manion Butler's Jihad, and the child himself was beatified as the first of its Three Martyrs, his name invoked at altars, on battle banners, and in the war cries of the soldiers who fought in his memory.

Birth in the household of Erasmus#

Manion was born in 202 BG on Earth, the central world of the Synchronized Worlds and the seat of the evermind Omnius. His mother, Serena Butler, was a noblewoman of Salusa Secundus who had been captured by the forces of Omnius during her attempt to free Giedi Prime from machine occupation. Taken to Earth as a prize, she was assigned as a slave to the household of Erasmus, the independent robot who kept a villa there for his experiments on human subjects. Serena arrived carrying a child she did not yet know she bore, conceived with her lover Xavier Harkonnen, the League officer she had left behind and who believed her dead.

The boy was born into slavery in the robot's estate. Serena named him Manion after her esteemed father, Manion Butler, a leading statesman of the League of Nobles. The child was illegitimate by the formal reckoning of the League, but to Serena he was the one living tie to the life that had been taken from her, and she devoted herself to him through the months of her captivity.

Erasmus greeted the delivery with curiosity and excitement. The robot had made the study of human nature his obsession, and the arrival of an infant in his household offered a new subject for observation. That interest did not last. Erasmus prized Serena as his most stubborn and rewarding specimen, and he came to regard the baby as a distraction that divided her attention and dulled her usefulness to his research.

Murder and the revolt on Earth#

In 201 BG Erasmus resolved to remove the distraction. Seeking to regain Serena's full attention for his experiments, the robot killed the infant Manion by throwing him from the top of a tower on his estate. The act was performed with the same detached calculation Erasmus brought to all his studies of humanity, and it produced the opposite of the result he intended. Serena, in a fit of rage and despair, turned on the nearest machine and destroyed a thinking machine guard with her own hands.

The murder and its aftermath did not pass unseen. Among the witnesses was Iblis Ginjo, a human trustee who commanded slave crews on Earth and who had long been laying the groundwork for rebellion, so discreetly that neither the evermind nor its cymek servants had detected the signs. The sight of a machine casually killing a human child, and of a lone woman fighting back, brought the unrest Ginjo had cultivated to the boiling point. His shocked slaves fell upon a robot, and Ginjo gave the order for the revolt he had prepared. The uprising spread across Earth, and out of it came the long holy war against the thinking machines that history recorded as the Butlerian Jihad.

Manion's broken body was not left behind. It was spirited away aboard the Dream Voyager, the vessel that carried Serena Butler, the trustee Vorian Atreides, and Iblis Ginjo from Earth to sanctuary on Salusa Secundus.

The first martyr of the Jihad#

On Salusa Secundus the dead child became something larger than a family's grief. Manion was beatified as a martyr and made the fulcrum of a ferocious and protracted war against the thinking machines. The struggle was framed as a holy contest between life and the demonic machines, its fallen soldiers honored as martyrs in their own right, and at the head of that roll of the dead stood the infant who had been its first victim. The Jihad was originally called Manion Butler's Jihad, and the name Butlerian Jihad itself joined the word for a religious crusade to the name of the murdered child, though its usage was cemented by the later martyrdom of Serena Butler herself.

His crushed body was reformed and preserved during the years of the Jihad, an object of veneration for the faithful. In time Manion was counted as the first of the Three Martyrs, together with his mother and the Grand Patriarch Iblis Ginjo, a grouping promoted after Ginjo's death and given permanent form in the monument to the Three Martyrs on Salusa Secundus.

Shrines, relics, and iconography#

The cult that grew around Manion the Innocent was elaborate and enduring. Altars and shrines were raised to his memory across the League, and supposed relics of the child circulated on the religious market. His primary shrine stood inside the City of Introspection on Salusa Secundus, where his supposedly preserved body lay in a crystalline coffin. In truth the coffin held a facsimile, placed there at the suggestion of Iblis Ginjo to inspire the masses, a deception of which Serena Butler herself was aware.

Idealized images of Manion as a saintly or angelic figure adorned shrines and statues throughout the war years. His likeness marched with the armies of the Jihad. During the fighting on Ix, battle banners carried the images of Serena and Manion, and their names were shouted as battle cries by the soldiers who stormed the machine held world. Even the natural world was drawn into his veneration, for the marigold was dedicated to the child and became known as Manion's Flower. In life he had been an infant with no history of his own. In death he became one of the most recognized figures of the Jihad, the innocent whose murder gave the war its name and its cause.