Rayna Butler: founder of the Cult of Serena

Rayna Butler was the founder and first leader of the Cult of Serena, the hyperfanatical anti machine movement that arose in the closing years of the Butlerian Jihad and outlived it by almost a century. She was the daughter of Rikov Butler, governor of Parmentier, and his wife Kohe Tantor, the niece of Faykan Butler, who became the first Padishah Emperor, and a great grand niece of the martyred Serena Butler. Orphaned at eleven by the Omnius Scourge, she emerged from the plague convinced that God himself had commanded humanity to destroy every thinking machine. In these books it is Rayna who preaches the commandment against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind, which Frank Herbert's Dune records as the Jihad's chief commandment in the Orange Catholic Bible. She is a character of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's expanded books. (Dune; Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

A governor's daughter in the Scourge#

Rayna grew up in the governor's estate on Parmentier with a proper political and historical education, as befitted the daughter of Rikov Butler. Her mother Kohe Tantor was a devout woman, and Rayna was indoctrinated religiously from childhood. That upbringing collided with catastrophe when Parmentier became the first target of the Omnius Scourge, the retrovirus plague that Omnius loosed on the League worlds. Rayna was eleven years old when the Scourge swept through the estate, killing the servants and most of the planet's population, her father and mother among them. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

Rayna herself was infected. She fell into a dark slumber, and in that fever she believed she saw visions of Saint Serena Butler. Days later she recovered, against all expectation. She woke to find her family dead, and her own body changed: she had lost all the hair on her body, and her skin seemed luminous and angelic. As the governor's surviving child she was accounted the temporary governor of Parmentier, but the pondering of her deathbed experience mattered far more to her than any office. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

The crowbar in Niubbe#

Soon after her recovery Rayna went to the city of Niubbe, which lay in turmoil and disarray. There she saw a devastated electronics shop and began to crush the abandoned merchandise with a crowbar, believing that all circuits and computerized technology were evil "cousins" of Omnius and had to be obliterated. The next day she was joined by Martyrists, the followers of the Three Martyrs who had been known to throw themselves at thinking machines armed with little more than rocks and clubs, and the mob continued her work. The destruction culminated at the Hospital for Incurable Diseases, whose machinery the crowd wrecked; its keepers, the physician Mohandas Suk and Raquella Berto-Anirul, barely escaped the planet. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

Rayna insisted that during her slumber she had heard a direct commandment from God: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind. Her model was Serena's example. When the robot Erasmus killed Serena's infant son Manion, Serena had thrown a sentinel robot off the high balcony, the first blow struck by a human against the thinking machines. In 108 BG, at the end of the Butlerian Jihad, the mob that followed Rayna became the Cult of Serena, and the Martyrists were absorbed into it. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

Leader of the Cult of Serena#

In the aftermath of the Scourge her uncle Abulurd Harkonnen came to Parmentier, ordered by his father Quentin Butler to investigate whether the virus had run its complete course. After giving proper burial to the decaying bodies of his brother Rikov and Rikov's wife, Abulurd met his niece in her new condition, and at her request brought her to Salusa Secundus. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

From Salusa, Rayna led a movement that in time caused more mayhem for humans than the thinking machines themselves. After the Jihad ended, machine destruction spread across the inhabited planets in renewed waves, wiping out most machine based technology. Yet the woman at the center of that fury refused every honor her followers offered. Although a charismatic leader, she did not want to be seen as a distinguished figure or a prophet, and she never accepted comparison to Serena. She protested when the Cult elevated her and declared her the greatest human since Serena Butler. Once, when she noticed to her shame that such worship gave her an unexpected thrill of pleasure, she stripped herself and sat naked all night on a cold rooftop, crouched against the biting wind, praying for forgiveness and guidance. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

The Cult's zeal did not spare machines that had served humanity. Shortly before the Battle of Corrin, the Cult lured the combat mek Chirox and the swordsman Istian Goss to Salusa Secundus, intending to destroy what it considered a sacrilegious machine. On arrival Chirox was forced to fight the mercenary Nar Trig, whom he killed before a crowd of cultists. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

The Battle of Corrin#

The fanaticism of the Cult of Serena fuelled the League's final assault on the machines. When the League launched the Battle of Corrin to destroy Omnius at last, its combined battle group was three times larger than the machine watchdog fleet, and alongside the great battleships, kindjal vessels, and conventional ground troops marched the fanatics of the Cult of Serena and mercenaries from Ginaz. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

Rayna's followers did not wait for the soldiers. In the heat of the battle, Rayna Butler and a body of Cultists descended prematurely to the surface of Corrin to fulfill their "mission" of destroying the Omnius incarnations, accompanied by mercenaries and Swordmasters including Istian Goss, while the orbital battle under Supreme Bashar Vorian Atreides opened the way. The Cult's assistance weighed heavily in the human victory. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

Law, death, and succession#

Rayna's uncle Faykan Butler, who had become Interim Viceroy, promised her that he would propose laws to advance her message and prohibit the manufacture of sophisticated hardware. (Expanded books: Dune: The Battle of Corrin)

The promise was kept in the empire he went on to found. The ban on thinking machines carried the death penalty, and decades later the Mentat school founder Gilbertus Albans had to hide the robot Erasmus in secret because of it. (Expanded books: Sisterhood of Dune)

Rayna led the Cult of Serena until a technology-loving protester threw a bomb at her feet. Mortally wounded, she used her last strength to bless Manford Torondo, who had lost both legs and most of his hip to the same explosion, to take her place before she died. Torondo, saved by the Suk doctors of the age, became the second leader of what was by then called the Butlerian movement, and carried her crusade into its most fanatical days. (Expanded books: Sisterhood of Dune)