Homer Meets Chaos Theory

The next time you feel like chaos is invading your life, just be thankful that it is in the form of a demanding boss, an unwieldy schedule and too many responsibilities with too little time -- and not a watery demon trying to drown you. Of such are the tales depicted in "The Hero and the Sea: Patterns of Chaos in Ancient Myth," new from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

"These ancient narratives of heroic struggle uniquely transcend time and culture to speak to the universal human condition," says author Donald H. Mills, a professor of Classical Languages at Syracuse University. "They give expression to all those hopes, aspirations and fears that have defined, for ancient no less than modern thinkers, what it means to be human in a chaotic world."

To the ancients, myths meant true stories, explains Mills. "Not literally true, but true as to what they say about human nature and important issues." Many of these stories feature a hero who is wrestling with death. "Death and chaos are deeply connected. You might say that death is the ultimate expression of chaos," he adds.

Chaos is frequently expressed symbolically by water, as exemplified by Gilgamesh, Achilles and Odysseus; Mills examines all of these stories in his book. He also examines the themes of creation, flood and exodus in the Old Testament -- in all of which water is a medium of cosmic baptism, change, or rite of passage.

Water demons or water divinities often stand for primordial or precosmic chaos, and the hero’s victory over his watery adversary represents a cosmic creation or re-creation. For example, the hero of the Gilgamesh epic confronts the chaotic throughout the story, culminating in an inner spiritual struggle with death, exemplified in the story of Utnapishtim and the flood. In the Iliad, Achilles confronts the chaotic in his battle with the Scamander River. Similarly in the Odyssey, the battle with the chaotic comes to the fore in Odysseus’ encounter with Poseidon’s angry sea, his shipwreck and enforced stay with Calypso ‘the Concealer’. In the Old Testament, the patriarch Jacob meets potential annihilation at the river Jabbok, when he wrestles with God.

These mythic narratives give vivid expression to the terrifying experience of the chaotic while providing a framework for ancient poets to ritualize the hero’s movement from chaos to victory. "Because myth and ritual each serve to make intelligible social organization and to clarify a multitude of problematic human relationships, the riddle of the chaotic lies behind every ancient mythmaker’s struggle to express a sense of order in a world where chaos often seems to reign," says Mills.

The final chapter of the book explores the points of contact between the ancient mythic patterns and the discoveries of modern scholars engaged in the theoretical study of chaos. For example, there is the mythic story that tells how the abduction of one woman, the beautiful Helen, leads to a great war, the killing of countless thousands, and the complete annihilation of a great city; this story reflects the modern concept of the Butterfly Effect, which posits that a small event, when magnified in time and space, produces huge consequences incommensurate with the original cause. Similarly, the temple priestess of the goddess Ishtar in the Gilgamesh epic, whose seduction of Enkidu humanizes his wild, chaotic life in the dessert, functions in ways similar to the feedback mechanisms of modern chaotics. So also the modern study of fluid dynamics, which endeavors to model the transitions from order to chaos and chaos to order, parallels the efforts of ancient myth-makers to use stories of watery chaos to set forth a meaningful account of human endeavor in a chaotic world. Myth is truth which shall make us free. The challenge is to de-mythologize it in order to unravel its truth for us.

"The Hero and the Sea" is available through Amazon.com, or you can order it directly from the publisher by contacting Bolchazy-Carducci at www.bolchazy.com. Bolchazy publishes a wide variety of books on classical mythology and epics, including "Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic," "Art of the Odyssey," "The Epic of Gilgamesh," "Gilgamesh: A Reader," and more. Visit the company’s Web site for a complete listing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Review copies of "The Hero and the Sea" are available. Please contact Marie Bolchazy, publisher, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, at latin@bolchazy.com or (847) 526-4344, ext. 22.

Donald H. Mills has taught Classical Languages at Syracuse University since 1970. A graduate of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he earned his Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Iowa. He has served as vice president, president and treasurer of the Classical Association of the Empire State, and has published articles and reviews on Homer, Plato, Catullus, Tibullus and Vergil.