Rayna Butler: founder of the Cult of Serena

Rayna Butler (119 BG to 22 BG) 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. The commandment she preached, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind," was attributed directly to her in the Orange Catholic Bible, and the laws her movement demanded banned thinking machines in the Corrino Imperium under pain of death.

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.

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.

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.

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 inspiration was Serena's paradigm. 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 was transformed into the Cult of Serena, and the Martyrists were absorbed into it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. The promise was kept in the empire he went on to found: the strict rules banning all thinking machines under pain of death, and sometimes torture, in the Corrino Imperium were laws established through Rayna Butler, and decades later the Mentat school founder Gilbertus Albans had to hide the robot Erasmus in secret against them. The commandment she claimed to have received in her plague dream entered the Orange Catholic Bible as one of its primary injunctions. The Cult itself, in its hidden workings, planted the roots of the later galactic civil war.

Rayna led the Cult of Serena until 22 BG, when 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.