Why Did Paul Atreides Blind Himself?

Paul Atreides didn't blind himself. In Dune Messiah, the conspirators plotting against him set off a stone burner, an atomic weapon that destroys the eyes of anyone who looks at it. Paul had foreseen the trap and walked into it anyway. What he did choose came later: once he was truly blind, he walked into the desert alone, as Fremen law asks of the blind. (Dune Messiah)

The trap at Otheym's house#

By Dune Messiah, Paul is surrounded by enemies: the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Tleilax and his own wife, Princess Irulan. The Face Dancer Scytale takes the face of Lichna, daughter of Paul's old Fedaykin Otheym, and brings Paul a message asking him to come to her father's house. (Dune Messiah)

Paul knows it's a trap. He goes anyway, because his visions show him no other path that keeps Chani's unborn child alive. That is the closest Paul comes to choosing his blindness: he accepts it as the price of the future he wants. (Dune Messiah)

The stone burner#

When Paul's troops move in on the conspirators gathered nearby, the plotters set off a stone burner. The weapon floods the area with radiation that dissolves eye tissue. Paul is blinded, along with many of his men. (Dune Messiah)

Then something frightening happens. Paul carries on walking, giving orders and recognising people as if nothing had changed. His prescience shows him every moment so precisely that he doesn't need eyes. He offers the soldiers who lost their sight Tleilaxu artificial eyes. (Dune Messiah)

The Fremen custom for the blind#

Fremen law is harsh about blindness: the blind are left to the desert. (Dune Messiah)

Paul's sight without eyes lets him stay on the throne, but it makes the Fremen more afraid of him, not less. A blind man who can see is one more sign that he is something other than human. (Dune Messiah)

When his visions ended#

Chani goes to Sietch Tabr to give birth and dies in labour, bearing twins. Paul's visions had shown him only a daughter. With Chani's death his prescience ends, and for the first time he is properly blind. (Dune Messiah)

He still kills Scytale, who is holding a knife over the newborns, by seeing through the eyes of his infant son. Then he names the twins Leto and Ghanima. (Dune Messiah)

Walking into the desert#

Now Paul does choose. He follows Fremen law for the blind, leaves the sietch and walks alone into the desert, giving himself to Shai-Hulud. The act shows that even Muad'Dib isn't above the law of the people who made him a god. The Fremen believe he has died. (Dune Messiah)

He hasn't. Nine years later a blind man led by a young guide is preaching against the priesthood in Arrakeen. He is Paul, now the Preacher, and he is killed on the temple steps. That story is on how Paul Atreides dies. (Children of Dune)

Why people think he blinded himself#

Our reading, and it's an interpretation, is that the question comes from how much of it Paul chose. He saw the stone burner coming and didn't avoid it, and he walked into the desert by his own decision. So the blinding wasn't his act, but almost everything around it was. Herbert's point is that a man who sees the future so clearly becomes its prisoner, and that losing the visions is the first time Paul is free. (Dune Messiah)

None of this has been filmed yet. Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two ends with Paul taking the throne, years before the stone burner. (Dune: Part Two)