Sacred Texts
Scripture for religions that were never practised.
9 volumes
The Sisterhood's private concordance of the world's faiths — the bibliographic marvel from which the Orange Catholic Bible was assembled, and with which the Bene Gesserit go on engineering religions after the assembly is finished.
Djelibeybi's guide to the afterlife, being a parody of the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, adjusted for a civilisation with a relaxed attitude to punctuality.
A Swedish theologian's masterpiece, in which Judas is not the betrayer of God but God — the Word made flesh as the worst of men.
A game, almost a liturgy, in which players make audible the correspondences between all the arts and sciences — the organ of a province that has withdrawn from history in order to play.
A poem Ivan made up and memorised, never wrote: Christ returns to Seville at the height of the Inquisition, is arrested, and listens in silence while a cardinal explains that the Church has corrected His work.
A Bengali merchant's tale — flight from the snake goddess Manasa, drought, ships, a land without serpents called Gun Island — that a sceptical bookseller is asked to treat as a document, and that the climate then starts to corroborate.
A novel of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri, burned by its author after a Soviet journal destroyed him, and given back by the Devil with the remark that manuscripts don't burn.
The composite scripture of the Imperium, assembled after the Butlerian Jihad from the surviving religions of humanity. Its central commandment is directed at machines.
The holy book of Omnia, assembled from the words of seven prophets, and enforced by an Inquisition. The god it describes has not been consulted about any of it.