Reverend Mother

A Reverend Mother is both a Bene Gesserit title and a class or level associated with fictional character from the ''Dune'' universe created by Frank Herbert. A Reverend Mother is generally a woman of the Bene Gesserit order who has completed her training. The Princess Irulan writes (via epigraph) in the original novel Dune: At the end of their training, the Bene Gesserit undergoes a ritual involving a significant amount of one of a class of awareness spectrum narcotics. The drug enters her body as a poison. If she survives this, by a conscious transformation of the drug on a molecular level to a non-poisonous substance, she gains the memories of all the preceding Reverend Mothers in her line, resulting in great knowledge and power. The particular narcotic used by the lines of Reverend Mothers on Arrakis is contained in the Water of Life, the liquid exhalation of a sandworm produced at the moment of its death by drowning. This ritual would be fatal for normal males. In an... full article at wikipedia