In Dune, what were the benefits of becoming a Guild Navigator?

Question

The Spacing Guild plays a pivotal role in Dune media. Their monopoly on space travel makes them a rich and powerful part of the Known Universe.

They use so-called Navigators as pilots for their starships who use prescience to "fold space", an ability which transports ships over massive distances.

To gain these abilities the Navigators depend heavily on the substance Spice, also known as Melange. This drug, while beneficial, has the major drawbacks that it is addictive and that withdrawal is lethal.

A Navigator needs to be kept in a special tank containing gaseous Spice at all times. This severe exposure mutates the Navigator over a period of time up to the point that the person no longer looks fully human.

Scytale looked at the Guild envoy. Edric swam in a container of orange gas only a few paces away. His container sat in the center of the transparent dome which the Bene Gesserit had built for this meeting. The Guildsman was an elongated figure, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands—a fish in a strange sea. His tank's vents emitted a pale orange cloud rich with the smell of the geriatric spice, melange.

From Dune Messiah - 1969

The question: A Navigator sacrifices a lot to become one, but what do they gain from it?

Answer 1

If we take the Dune Encyclopedia as a source of information, then we learn that the reality is that Navigators (and their accompanying Steersmen) are bred by the Spacing Guild solely for the purpose of navigating ships. They serve their culture because that's literally the reason for their existence.

DNA recombination produced Guildsmen who were transferred directly from the axolotl tank to the prescience-chamber filled with a liquid enriched with oxygen and melange gas. These members of the Fraternity were produced with fish-like gills, in addition to lungs, to aid in respiration. The oxygen-melange mixture in the prescience-chambers was extremely heavy, and the Guildsmen were further equipped with webbed hands similar to those of a frog to maintain their equilibrium. The result was both effective and grotesque,

As to what the benefits are to the individual navigator, there's a brief description of their existence, which seems to suggest that their lives were pretty good.

Whatever faults the Spacing Guild may have had, when the day of the Steersman ended, a real beauty passed from the universe. The experience of the Steersmen, breathing and drinking melange, rocking to the beat of space and time, swaying with the music of the spheres, led in their dance by the pulse of life around them, alive to every note in the pavane both composed and played by their quartet, is beyond the power of words to describe or the imagination to conceive.

Answer 2

The question: A Navigator sacrifices a lot to become one, but what do they gain from it?

The issue I see with this question is that it implies that individuals have the freedom of choice to pick their own career trajectory. That, however, is strongly not the case in the Dune Universe. The Faufreluches class system's mantra is "A place for every man and every man in his place.". This system keeps a strict social hierarchy in the empire and severely limits (upward) mobility.

So in addition to Valorum's answer that navigators are "bred by the Spacing Guild solely for the purpose of navigating ships." I would argue that in general you simply do not pick your profession. You do not chose to become a Sardaukar or a Guild Navigator, your status is determined by the rank of your family at your birth - even more so if you're breed for this purpose alone.

Answer 3

The infamous prequel (I believe it was the "House Atreides") provides a slightly different answer:

In the book two twin brothers (normal humans) from a middle class family are trying to join the Guild and become the navigators. They are expecting a difficult exam (for which they have been studying for years), but instead they are simply submerged in the spice gas, in hope to start developing the mutation.

The point here is - they don't seem to know that navigators are mutants. They are simply looking for a chance to get an amazing job: see the universe, get rich, get all the girls, bring honour to their parents. For them it is not much different than trying to get any other difficult job.

Once one of the brothers started turning into the navigator he didn't look back - he entered completely different level of perception and intelligence and nothing in his old life was comparable to his current state.

---

tl;dr Candidates might not know about about the mutation. Being navigator is awesome.

Answer 4

Here we have an actual inconsistency. Valorum's answer is most likely correct as far as it goes; however in the end of the original Dune there are navigators on the surface of Arrakis. It's pretty obvious the navigators are playing for power as well, yet at the same time trying to hide their identity. But they did not expect another preescent as preescents can't see each other in the future.

Their immediate goal is fulfilling their spice addiction. The obvious benefit of that level of spice intake is extreme long life (while this would not be mentioned until a later book, this follows absolutely from the total metabolic control exhibited quite a few times). It gives the appearance that their culture is so other than the rest of human culture that they have as little to do with other humans as practical.

Here's your quote. On finding the actual words, finding a linkable source was easy. Varolum had uploaded it for me. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/84684