Kaos reigns – and long may it do so!

‘The all-powerful yet insecure god Zeus starts to fear his end of reign when he spots a wrinkle on his forehead. He becomes increasingly paranoid and vindictive toward his followers.

At the same time, three humans start to discover their connections with each other and grand conspiracies involving the residents of Mount Olympus.’

 

That’s a version of the precis from Wikipedia of the eight-part Netflix series Kaos.

 

It’s a black comedy from British writer Charlie Covell that takes the myths and puts them in a modern setting. It’s brilliantly realised, with an excellent script, great design and a superb use of music.

 

I’d always found the Greek/Roman myths un-interesting – until reading Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, a very serious re-working of the myths of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, which I hugely appreciated (I read it because I hugely appreciate Tóibín’s work). This is helping me enjoy the myths even more. Funnily enough, I bought Tony, my late partner, a signed copy of Stephen Fry’s Mythos a few years ago and might well read that now.

 

And then there’s the cast. Jeff Goldblum is an absolute hoot as Zeus – staying JUST the right side of completely OTT. But there’s also the fabulous Janet McTeer as his wife Hera, Aurora Perrineau as Eurydice, David Thewlis as Hades, Rakie Ayola as Persephone, Nabhaan Rizwan as Dionysis, Stephen Dillane as Prometheus (who gets to do a lot of breaking the fourth wall, brilliantly well), Misia Butler as Caeneus and Suzy/Eddie Izzard as Lachy, one of The Fates. And that’s just to mention a few of a superb ensemble!

 

I love the diversity of it – and I have spent time Googling various characters to see how accurate these new versions are. So for instance, in the series, Caeneus is a trans man. I looked it up – and yes, born Caenis, they were transformed by “Poseidon into an invulnerable man”.

 

I mostly watch films and sport on TV and rarely get excited over anything else (Picard season 3 last year was the last time), but this has just blown me away. It’s absolutely set up for a second season (though still awaiting Netflix announcement on that) but this was/is brilliant fun and I will be watching again!

The denial of nature

Don't worry – this is entirely natural.

When I wrote at the weekend that sowing seeds allowed me to be “a god in my garden, granting the opportunity for life to grow from what seems, on the surface, like shriveled death,” it was within the context of a celebration of being in closer proximity to the natural world than those of us in vast urban conurbations often find ourselves.

So don’t fret – there are no delusions of divinity here!

However, it was also a reminder that my acting tutor at Leicester Polytechnic, the wonderful Tony Yates, once told us, his students, that we were gods too, for our ability to create; to breathe life into something as otherwise insubstantial as a dream.

But if my connection with nature, through the natural world, has such a simple meaning, ideas of nature can be far more complex.

Take religion.

The Catholic church in particular is fond of talking of the ‘nature’ of human beings. In particular, this tends to refer to the sexuality of human beings and the type of relationships that the church has decreed are ‘proper’ – ‘natural’; of nature.

Within this context, homosexuality itself and same-sex relationships are considered unnatural.

But this belief in such a simplistic idea of human ‘nature’ is both false and destructive, while the church’s continued promotion of such an idea is also inherently hypocritical.

At the weekend, having previously announced that he was taking legal advice over accusations of ‘improper’ sexual behaviour, the UK’s senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his behaviour had not been ‘as expected’.

In effectively saying that the accusations were true – or had a grain of truth in them – he basically outed himself.

If O’Brien had made sexual advances or suggestions to other clergy – themselves men – then he is either gay, bisexual, bi-curious or was simply downright frustrated sexually.

And whichever of those is or was the case, he was and presumably is denying his own nature.

The church’s very insistence on celibacy for clergy and nuns is a denial of nature – even masturbation is considered a sin (this is the same for Buddhist monks) – just as the church’s continued refutation of non-heterosexual sexualities as natural is itself a denial of nature.

It is both of nature and the norm to want sex. Indeed, male ejaculation has been shown to confer health benefits in reducing the risk of prostate cancer.

So if God says that this is bad – a situation that he created – then he is demanding that people behave in an unnatural manner and, indeed, open themselves up to health risk (also something that, to maintain the logic, he created).

Many outside the church of Rome – other religious groups and some outside any religion – continue to fall for the fallacy that homosexuality and bisexuality are not ‘natural’, often conflating this with their not being ‘normal’.

Part of the problem is in demanding black and white realities with no grey in the middle. Thus we have homosexuality in one corner, heterosexuality in the other and nothing between the two.

Kinsey’s idea of human sexuality being a scale – so as above, but with many different gradations in between – makes much more sense; it certainly explains bisexuality, for instance, and allows for the variations in the nature of bisexual desire Bisexuals don’t simply have equal proportions of attraction to either sex.

This obviously makes sexuality difficult to measure in terms of simple numbers. Estimates of the percentage of the population that is homosexual vary from between 2% to 10%.

So it’s quite clear from this that homosexuality is not ‘the norm’ – in other words, it’s not the majority situation.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t natural – ‘of nature’.

Homosexual behaviour has been observed in many, many species other than humans. In other words, it forms a part of nature. Thus, quite simply, it is natural.

Now from a religious point of view, if one believes that God created the world and everything in it, and nobody else has the power of creation (in Catholicism, to believe the latter would be heresy), then one is left with a reality, according to one’s own belief system, of God having created the full scale of sexuality, both in humans and the rest of life on Earth.

If, as Judeo-Christian tradition has it, Yahweh-Jehovah is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, then God created everything, in the full and certain knowledge of what would occur.

There’s no room for choice in this: if God knew what would happen, having himself created it, then choice does not exist.

So on that basis, one cannot choose one’s sexuality. Neither can one choose if one is to act in a way that the church regards as sinful – it was preordained.

Yet religious groups take the logic of their own beliefs and warp them to claim that some groups are un-natural, and that we can all choose whether, through acts or faith (and most often, a combination) we are to be saved from eternal damnation.

As it happens, there is no scientific evidence that sexuality is a choice.

But let’s take a slight diversion here.

Colm Tóibín’s new novella, The Testament of Mary, is an astonishing work, seeking to allow Christ’s mother the chance to tell her view of the story.

Mary is nothing more than a symbol in the Bible; a characterless, featureless piece of fleshly clay onto which assorted events are imprinted.

In the Bible, she has no choice in being ‘chosen’ by God to give birth to his son – rape, by anyone’s standards – and only accepts her situation meekly after being divinely impregnated.

Which, as only a very slight aside, might be at the root of why the Vatican does not see rape as a justification for abortion; it replicates the conception of Christ.

But in his book, this symbol of womanhood is torn to pieces by Toìbìn, who presents instead a complex, emotional human being; vulnerable and tenacious at the same time, angry with her son’s disciples and not believing in his divinity, and facing an indescribable grief and horror at what happens.

Written in deceptively simple language, it is an incredibly powerful and moving piece.

And it is a portrait that is far truer to anything in nature than the one in the Bible or the one-dimensional, hagiographical one that religion, and Catholicism in particular, has presented down the centuries as a template for real women.

The Catholic Church's specialisation of distorting the nature of things is widespread and deeply corrosive.

While far from new (Christopher Hitchens did a rather fine hatchet job some years ago), research has shown, once again, that Mother Teresa was far from the saintly figure conventionally portrayed.

In her ‘hospitals’, suffering became the norm, the natural; not to be alleviated, even when entirely possible, but to be maintained as some sort of recreation of Christ’s own suffering. Not that Mother Teresa herself held to the same standards when she was ill.

It was a warping of even the church’s own images of maternal love and care – as also happened in church orphanages and schools, and in the obscene collusion between Irish state and Catholic church that was the Magdalene Laundries.

For centuries, various religions and religious groups have taken the word, the idea of ‘nature’, and both distorted and denied it.

The Catholic church is just one that had or continues to have ‘issues’ with the theory of evolution – indeed, the pretence amongst fundamentalists that the word ‘theory’ does not mean what it does in a strictly scientific sense either shows a deep lack of understanding/education or is deliberately disingenuous.

But then again, evolution is the antithesis of what such religious groups claim – that there is a nature that is set in stone; that it is undeniable and unchanging; that we can trace it back X hundred or thousand years and say that it is the same now as it was then and for ever will be.

This is all an ongoing battle. A battle that pits knowledge against superstition, in just such a black v white manner. No grays. No grays ever.

Some years ago, I interviewed – for the Morning Star, just so you know – the late Lord Rev Dr Donald Soper.

It was in his house in Hampstead. We shared tea together. I remember it fondly. He was a charming host – and also a great intellect.

Much of what he personally believed, I would not. But he had great honesty and enormous integrity – and he didn’t see his faith as an excuse to close down others and simply claim a divine right to be assumed correct.

Indeed, Soper was one of the very first clergy to stand on a platform calling for LGBT rights.

It might have appalled my father – a clergyman of the same denomination – but when I look back at it, at least I look at the Methodism I was brought up in and can think that it was not all reactionary and hate-filled.

And against nature itself.

There are other clerical figures I’d think similarly of, incidentally – Archbishop Trevor Huddlestone would be one; Archbishop Derek Worlock would be another (I can be quite ecumenical) – and there are more.

But here we are, watching as fundamentalists seek to fill the vacuum created as people of moderate faith (if you will) fall away from organised religion.

And so we see – increasingly in the mainstream – what was once the preserve of the far-flung fringes.

Nature changes. Nature is not set in stone. Nature grows.

That is the nature of nature.

That some religious people seek to pretend otherwise – and even, in attempting to do so – warp and betray the logic of their own faith – does not change this. Not one jot.

And what we are left with is human tragedy: that someone like O’Brien, having denied his own nature, must be in so much pain, and feeling so much self-loathing.

I’m not sure that I would wish that on anyone.

A cross to bear

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín, brought up a Catholic in Ireland, set out in this 1994 book to understand something of his own background. Having grown up in a family where relatives went on pilgrimages – including his terminally ill father to Lourdes when he was in his early teens – he has long ceased believing in the central tenets of Catholicism, but remains fascinated by the history of the church that he was baptised into and by people's links with it.

But as Tóibín discovers on his travels around Europe, Catholicism means different things to different people in different places.

In Seville, for instance, where Holy Week sees dozens of marches around the city with statues of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary, he discovers that many of the men who volunteer to carry the statues have no personal religion and do not even attend Mass during the rest of the year. For them, the marches are to do with local tradition and their cultural heritage.

But not all that Tóibín observes is like this. Medjugorje – a rocky, barren outcrop of Croatia – is the home to a shrine where six teenagers claim to have seen apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1981. They say that the Virgin has blue eyes and speaks Croation. And they continued to have apparitions and receive messages from her.

Tóibín, who visited during the Balkans conflict, never doubts the sincerity of the six – or of the pilgrims who have radically changed Medjugorie – but what he clearly finds discomforting is the link between Croation Catholicism and a nationalism that remains unapologetic for being a Nazi client state, for persecuting and exterminating Serbs (Orthodox Christians) and even retaining much of the symbolism etc of that era (the national football team's badge and shirts are based on the badge that was worn by Croation Nazis).

In Poland, Tóibín is uncomfortable at the presence, so near to the Auschwitz concentration camp, of a Catholic convent, given that country's long history of anti-Semitism and since the majority of those who were killed there were Jewish. Is it an appropriate place? It's an interesting question at a time when the issue of whether a mosque should be built a couple of blocks from the site in New York of the World Trade Towers that were attacked on 9/11 is causing such discussion.

In Slovenia, it is suggested that perhaps the reason that Croat and Polish Catholicism have become so intertwined with extreme nationalism, while Slovenian Catholicism has not, is that the latter country experienced the Reformation and rationalism.

Elsewhere on his travels, Tóibín is astonished to discover that there are no Scottish Catholic writers of note in that country – while his visit to Glasgow also reveals both sides of the sectarian divide spouting lies/myths about their neighbours or their own perceived victimhood.

In London, he finds then MP and Catholic convert Anne Widdicombe to be particularly English in her attitude and faith (she hadn't converted for "the smells or the bells or the saints", for instance), while he sees, in the 5 November celebrations in Lewes – known for their continuing anti-popery (but now apparently down to one, unnoticed banner) – nothing other than displays for the heritage industry, in a country that has lost any interest in such parts of its history.

In one chapter, which initially seems at odds with the rest, Tóibín describes his experiences as an adult at a retreat where people had gone to work through difficult issues with a psychiatrist who had developed new techniques for bringing out repressed memories. In the author's case, these were to do with the death of his father when he was 14. The retreat was not religious, but at the end of his own experiences, finally letting out the grief that had been bottled up for decades, Tóibín found himself wanting – needing – to make the sign of the cross in the air as a way of dealing with, of expressing that grief, and of bidding farewell to his father.

The non-believer needed the rituals of his childhood; the rituals that bored him as a child (and leave him feeling similarly blank when he experiences masses across Europe, including in St Peter's in Rome) as a way of dealing with his own life. The book itself, then, is partly an extension of that: an excavation of memory. And he went on to further explore his father's death in the 1999 novel, The Blackwater Lightship.

It is a fascinating book, one that in places is very funny and also one that, in places, is deeply disquieting.

Tóibín is an excellent writer of both fiction and non-fiction. That was partly why I read it. But also too, I have been intrigued by European Catholicism since an Easter visit to Perpignan some four years ago when we witnessed the sanche on Good Friday: the 'march of the penitents', the like of which is described in this book.

But I also read it because it seemed a natural step after Wolf Hall, with that book's fictionalised examination of the English Reformation.

Catholicism, I think, has understood human nature far more than Protestantism: it has catered for a need for drama and emotion more; the ritual of confession seems to comprehend more and provide for human 'failings' in a way that a personal relationship with God, with no intercessors, cannot. Catholicism can be seen as a polytheistic religion rather and a monotheistic one – with its pantheon of saints and a goddess in Mary.

Protestantism is less poetic, more serious. 'The Protestant Work Ethic', for goodness sake. As someone tells the author in Glasgow, you want the Calvinist as your accountant, while the Catholic will be the romantic, the dreamer. Could a Protestant really have created the word – and the concept – of Utopia, even if Thomas More's book was light years removed from his own attitudes and behaviour?

Yet as Tóibín puts it: "Protestants one Catholics nil" on the music front, after hearing a Bach's St John's Passion in a Protestant church in Regensburg one Good Friday. Later, he feels disappointment that none of the great classical settings are used for the service at St Peter's: it's the same rather drab and uninspiring music as at home in the Enniscorthy cathedral of his childhood. Yay! We can create great art too.

What is extraordinary is how much one's own religious heritage clings, as Tóibín found as he dealt with the loss of his father. Wolf Hall makes quite clear the issues of the democratisation of religion – of thought – that were part of the Reformation across Europe, and a direct result of the invention of the printing press. But I cannot help wondering why – apart from it being interesting in an anthropological and historical sense – religion still seems so important to me, even though, like Tóibín, I no longer have the actual beliefs. Those simply drifted away from my shoulders a decade ago, without a shred of pain or any sense of loss.

Has anything else from my childhood left such an imprint, to the effect that even now, I seem to feel a need to point out the theological fallacies of Catholicism? That has no relevance to the other, current issue, of religion in general and the public sphere.

Perhaps it's simply inherited hatreds? But then why do I not have the same attitudes as my parents – and my father in particular – other, related things, such as Ireland and Celtic FC?

My sympathies, since 'O' Level history taught me the phrase, "too little, too late", have always been with the Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland.

In that peculiar way that so many English football fans also have a Scottish team that they sympathise with (it doesn't work the other way around!), my father has always considered Rangers – one half of the passionate football rivalry in Glasgow – to be infinitely superior, as they are Protestant. I've long sympathised with Celtic: the club might be Catholic, but it dumped sectarianism (if indeed it ever had it) decades ago.

Why is it that religion exerts such a pull on us; leaves such marks on us, even when we think that we have "put away childish things"? It's not difficult to understand why Richard Dawkins rails against such a mark being put on a child: no child is described as 'a socialist child' or 'a Conservative child'. Whatever one's parents' political beliefs, everyone accepts that you'll choose your own later. But religion is different: religion can be used to label an infant from birth.

Yet my father, oddly, always got on better with the local parish priest than he ever did with assorted Anglican clerics. Partly, I imagine, because they shared a love of whisky. Perhaps he felt an empathy on screwed-up ideas of sex. Sometimes, it was if his bigotry was merely for show.

The memories don't fit together into a coherent picture. And there's no box to see what it should look like.

But perhaps that's it. Religion as part of a rootedness – part of a picture of home and family and community. Not a singular thing, but merely one aspect, reflecting and part of a range of others, that present a whole, as the men in Seville appear to feel.

There are no roots or much of a family in my background. Perhaps that is why religion has loomed so large and still puzzles.

But Tóibín's book has perhaps offered some understanding of what the picture on the box might look like.