Historian Explains the Real Oracles that Inspired the Show Kaos

By Ellie Mackin Roberts/The Conversation

This article contains spoilers for series one of Kaos.

Central to the plot of Netflix’s new series, Kaos, are four prophecies. In the lore of the series, all humans are given a prophecy, and no two can be the same. There’s just one problem – all four important prophecies in the show are identical:

A line appears

The order wanes

The family falls

and Kaos reigns.

Each of the prophecy’s four recipients – Zeus (Jeff Goldblum), Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), Caeneus (Misia Butler) and Ari (Leila Farzad) – interprets, and therefore acts upon, the prophecy in a way that makes sense to their own lives. Their connected fates highlight the series’ theme of interconnected destinies and the inescapable nature of prophecy.

By the end of the first series, three of the four lines of the prophecy have come true. A vertical wrinkle appears on Zeus’s forehead, driving his obsession with instilling fear of the gods into mortals once more. A hierarchy shift ends the season with Prometheus sitting on Zeus’s throne, which exemplifies the order waning. The families of each of the three mortal recipients fall apart.

Watching the show, you may have understood the prophecies differently. After all, prophecy is open to interpretation. Or, is it?

Priestess of Delphi by John Collier (1891), depicting Pythia. (Art Gallery of South Australia)

In Kaos, the Fates (who the ancient Greeks called the  Moirai) are responsible for making prophecies about the gods and their followers. There’s Clotho (Ché), who spins the thread of life, Lachesis (Suzy Eddie Izzard), who measures out the thread and Atropos (Sam Buttery), who cuts it off, marking the end of life.

In ancient Greek mythology, the Moirai controlled the destiny of men and – in some instances – gods, but they were not responsible for making prophecies. This task fell to the gods, usually Apollo and Zeus, who made prophecies in response to questions people asked.

As real people couldn’t speak to the gods directly, they went to religious officials known as oracles. The Delphic Oracle, associated with Apollo, god of music and healing as well as prophecy, was the most famous and prestigious of these oracles.

Also known as the Pythia, she was Apollo’s high priestess and was the one who delivered the prophecies (numerous women fulfilled the role over the years). Ancient people believed the Pythia to be directly inspired by Apollo, and her words were taken to be coming from him.

We do not fully understand how this process worked, though there have been suggestions that the Pythia went into a trance through chewing laurel leaves, which were sacred to Apollo. Another theory suggests trances were induced through toxic gasses entering the room within the temple she worked in, through a natural fissure in the rock.

Prophecies in Kaos

It is from literary reports of oracles from Delphi that the format of Kaos’s prophecies derives.

Although historical oracles are usually not poetic, those from literary accounts of history, such as Herodotus’s The Histories, are often presented in hexameter (a kind of poetic metrical meter consisting of six parts per line).

One famous oracle was reportedly given to the Athenians when they were preparing to fight off the Persians:

But a wall made of wood does farsighted Zeus to Tritogenes grant

Alone and unravaged, to help you and your children.

The Athenians debated the meaning of these words, just as the characters in Kaos consider the interpretations of their own prophecies. They decided that it meant one of two things: that Athens would be fine because the Acropolis used to be surrounded by hedgerows, or that they should build a fleet of ships to be a “wooden wall” against the enemy.

Themistokles, the main proponent of the second reading, won out and the fleet was built. Athens faced the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis (an island off the coast of Athens) in 480BC and won, therefore, in their eyes, proving that this reading of the prophecy was correct.

Zeus, played by Jeff Goldblum, is one of the prophecy recipients. (Courtesy of Netflix)

Interpreting Prophecy

In Kaos, show creator Charlie Covell has presented something very true to the spirit of prophecy in ancient Greek history and mythology – even while subverting the form that prophecy takes.

In ancient Greece, Zeus couldn’t have received an oracular prophecy, as all prophecy was thought to originate from him. But he was subject to the destinies cast by the Moirai. For example, in the Iliad, Zeus is unable to save his mortal son, Sarpedon, from his fate (dying by the hand of Patroclus) – it is ultimately out of his control.

In Kaos, through misunderstanding, interpretation and reinterpretation, the four recipients of the Fates’ prophecy each play a crucial role in its fulfilment – but only when they (and we) read that prophecy in our own ways.

The prophecies of ancient Greece could later be revealed to be incorrectly interpreted. When Croesus, king of Lydia, was told that if he went to war he would destroy a great kingdom, he interpreted that as the Persian kingdom, but it turned out to be his own.

So too might our understanding of the prophecy in Kaos turn out to be a misinterpretation. By expertly weaving the Moirai and oracles into the narrative, Kaos emphasizes the crucial role of fate in reshaping the destinies of people and events, emphasizing their interconnectedness. In doing so, the show reflects the ancient Greek belief in the power and inescapable nature of prophecy.

Top image: The cast of Kaos.      Source: Courtesy of Netflix/The Conversation

This article was originally published under the title ‘Kaos hinges on prophecies – historian explains the real oracles that inspired the Netflix show’ by Ellie Mackin Roberts on The Conversation, and has been republished under a Creative Commons License.