Kaos shows why we might think twice before inviting the old gods back

The illusory glamour of Olympian gods titillates us once more.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

A mock classical ceiling painting depicts modern version of the classical gods.

Ye gods above.

Netflix.

The old gods are making a comeback all across Western culture. This is a conclusion increasingly reached by a spectrum of culture-watchers; some religious, some not at all. But, if true, the boldest and brashest example of this comeback may well be the new Netflix series KAOS, starring Jeff Goldblum, released last month.

Kaos is a genre-busting mythological dark comedy-drama. One might say a modern re-summoning of the pagan gods.

Charlie Covell, the writer and mastermind behind the show, and a self-confessed mythology geek, has created a colourful, high production, and often funny depiction of what the world might be like if the gods of Olympus still ruled over us. The plot follows several different strands taken from Greek mythology - most obviously Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice - and weaves them together into a larger narrative, retelling the downfall of the gods.

As the show opens, Zeus reigns as king of the gods from his fantastically kitsch mansion atop of Mount Olympus. So long as the sacrifices and adulation of humankind keep rolling in, he is happy. But when he wakes one day to discover a new wrinkle on his forehead, this triggers not only a kind of mid-life crisis, but also possibly - so he fears - the end of the world as he knows it.

Goldblum plays Zeus as, well, Jeff Goldblum: quirky, nervy, paranoid, and not a little menacing in an understated way. In other words, perhaps more “Jeff Goldblum” than you’ve ever seen him on screen before. It is certainly a compelling and sometimes hilarious portrayal.

“A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and Kaos reigns.”

This is the prophecy that has haunted Zeus for aeons. What he doesn’t know is that he shares this personalised prophesy with three other mortals in the story - Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), Caneus (Misia Butler), and Ariadne (Leila Farzad) - all of whom will play an unwitting role in bringing about the overthrow of the world order under the Olympian gods (hence: KAOS). The early episodes establish who these mortals are and begin to draw their disparate stories together.

Counterpoint to Zeus is his brother, Hades, ruler of a literally black-and-white underworld, with David Thewlis brilliantly cast in the role as the world-weary and ailing keeper of the realm of the dead. Something is amiss down there which threatens the whole system of human souls and what happens to them. When he tries to warn his brother, Zeus’s disdain for Hades and his problems only makes matters worse. Also in the frame of this dysfunctional family are Hera (Janet McTeer) and Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) - brother and sister (and wife in Hera’s case) to Zeus, as well as being lovers behind his back, who are poised to put into effect their own betrayals, if Zeus goes too far off the rails.

Last, but not least, since he proves the bridge between the gods and humans is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), one of Zeus’s many children. (But the only one who comes to visit.) A hedonistic agent of chaos from the outset, Dionysus seems to be the only one of the gods with any genuine interest or admiration for humans. Impressed by rock-star Orpheus’s passionate love for his wife, Eurydice (“Riddy”), it is Dionysus who helps Orpheus break into the Underworld to get her back when she dies, thus triggering the series of events that could let to the fulfilment of the prophesy.

The illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same.

Smart, stylish, twisty and certainly original - (the entrance to the Underworld is through a dumpster bin around the back of a bar) - Kaos is an ambitious multi-stranded epic about power, fate, love, and family. But perhaps above all, it is saying something about the relationship between humanity and the divine. At one point, one mortal tells another that the only good things in life are human. This feels like a statement of underlying intent. And the way the gods (especially Zeus) become more capricious, more sadistic, more vengeful as the story unfolds, the more it feels like we’re encouraged to agree. Defiance of the gods is the real mark of virtue here. Rebellion against the gods, the natural outworking of that defiance.

The irony is that whatever distaste which Kaos succeeds in cultivating in us, the viewer, for pagan forms of the divine may help explain why, historically, Christianity swept aside all the pantheons of pagan worship of the first millennium in the wholesale way that it did. Jesus Christ literally incarnates that bridge between the divine and the human. And what’s more, the message he preached claimed that, far from disdaining humanity, God loves them so much that he was willing to be the sacrifice for their good. And not the other way round, demanding incessant and capricious sacrifice by humans instead.

Now, centuries later, in Western culture, familiarity seems to have bred contempt with that far more hopeful story. Instead, the illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same. And storytellers like Charlie Covell are only too willing to give the public what they want. If the old gods are indeed trying to make a comeback, Kaos shows us why we might think twice before inviting them in.

Does Kaos succeed? It certainly makes a valiant attempt to marshal a large number of plot lines involving a huge cast of characters, unfortunately not all of whom are interesting enough to keep you coming back for more. And an awful lot is riding on there being a Season 2 - that is, if the threads we have followed so far are to lead on into a satisfying and meaningful conclusion.

Without that, I’m afraid the whole thing may be left standing alone as a work of, well… chaos.

Article

Culture

Re-enchanting

14 April 2023

4 min read

A prophet in springtime

A visit to a spring, surrounded by marks of belonging, prompts Andrew Rumsey to consider the purpose of property.

Andrew Rumsey

Andrew Rumsey is the Bishop of Ramsbury. He is also an author whose writing centres on themes of place and local identity.

An oak tree stands over a field and fence, behind which, in the distance, rises a man made hill with a flat top.

Swallowhead Spring with Silbury Hill in the distance.

Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

After weeks of winter the land awaits its consolation. Unfurling woes roll out so regularly that media feeds read like lament, a psalmody of untethered sorrow. The temptation is to withdraw into immediacy, of course, and purely field the incoming as if sat in a gaming chair of perpetual reaction, spotting and batting away the next insurgent.

When we cry for strategy perhaps what we really mean is prophecy – strategy being inorganic, mechanistic, hardly adequate for the times. After all, how do you map a scene that is constantly changing? Our present panic seeks good words from the world to come, where no one but God has been. But in an age that sniggers away divine possibility the Lord is afforded the past tense alone. We shall, I suspect, come to regret being so confident of our own purposelessness.

What if our absent-minded land were a place of promise, and we had simply forgotten?

What characterizes this world is a kind of dogged amnesia: collapsing past and future into a monotonous present. ‘There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after’. Like the rivers, he suggests, that run into the sea before their ascension and condensation start the cycle again. But what if repetition is not our destiny, and we inhabit instead an ecology that is radically open? What if our absent-minded land were a place of promise, and we had simply forgotten?

What is clear, however, is the enduring need to mark territories where meaning or identity has been found: our arrow-hearted initials notched into the bark.

Prophecy returns to the origins of things in order to seek and sketch what is to come. So, after its overflow last week, I am drawn to revisit Swallowhead Spring, near Avebury in Wiltshire, where the River Kennet rises and begins to drain down into the Thames. Like many such sites round here, the signage indicates conflicting claims on this landscape. A ‘Pagan Britain’ sticker has been slapped upon an anti-littering notice and the trees are frilly with ribbons and dangling dream catchers, the symbolism of which escapes me. What is clear, however, is the enduring need to mark territories where meaning or identity has been found: our arrow-hearted initials notched into the bark. Lovers and villagers would apparently come to Swallowhead Spring for Good Friday picnics, before shinning up the then-accessible Silbury Hill. When I last visited in October, it was just a dry basin with a slightly sludgy brook, but now I can hardly approach for the cataract.

Back home, a bubble-wrapped book has arrived, being the proceedings of the 1941 Malvern Conference: a source I am exploring for clues to the current and future condition of the beleaguered English Church. Under the shroud of total war, Archbishop William Temple gathered an eclectic range of prelates, poets and politicians to devise a route by which the Church might offer a lead to society in the new world that would, at some point, emerge. It is immediately striking in its erudition and reach, addressing the fundamental concern that ‘the true end of man’ had lately been obscured by the pursuit of wealth.

The purpose of work, and education, therefore, needed recovering – but with personality, not product, at its heart. Progress was, however, almost derailed by a Christian Socialist attack on private property, which T. S. Eliot, among other conservative delegates, rebuffed. Hard, perhaps, to imagine the same debate stirring such feeling today, although any consideration of social justice surely must. As H. G. Wells once observed, from the earliest times society was a mitigation of ownership – the mutual recognition that co-operation needed to override competitive possession if humanity was to flourish. The matter was finessed at Malvern in fine Anglican style, with the following resolution:

It is a traditional doctrine of Christendom that property is necessary to fulness of personal life; all citizens should be enabled to hold such property as contributes to moral independence and spiritual freedom without impairing that of others; but where the rights of property conflict with the establishment of social justice or the general social welfare, those rights should be overridden, modified, or, if need be, abolished.

This was synthesis, not fudge, I choose to think – and helpful in reaching a similar conclusion lately, while trying to locate my true north, politically speaking. The conservative in me tends towards continuity, local institutions and the Parable of the Talents, in its acknowledgement of unequal gift and yield; the radical abhors squandered privilege and exploitation of the poor for personal gain. Naboth’s vineyard may be the place, therefore, given that I am firmly in favour of covenantal ownership, which either serves the common good or is reckoned to be in deficit.

The conservative fallacy is to recycle the sins and sinecures of our forebears and call it tradition; the equivalent on the Left is to be perpetually uprooting and call it liberty. Amid their own peculiar failings, the Christian has – somehow – both to belong and not belong, to possess all and yet nothing, in search of a country that is forever ahead.