What Is a Fate Figure? The Beings Who Decide and Cannot Be Argued With

The recurring picture is textile work, with a thread spun, measured and cut, and the correspondence between that image and a lifespan is direct enough to explain why it recurs. Spinning produces something continuous from raw material, which maps onto a life being made. Measuring assigns a length, which maps onto a lifespan. Cutting ends it. Weaving adds the idea that individual lives are threads in a larger fabric, so the pattern of the whole is determined while each thread is only a part of it. The work is also traditionally women's work, domestic, continuous and largely invisible, which fits figures who operate constantly in the background rather than intervening dramatically. The Greek Moirai and the Norse Norns both appear as groups of three associated with this imagery, and comparable figures appear across a range of European traditions, which has been taken as evidence of a shared Indo-European inheritance and is regarded as one of the more plausible such claims while remaining an inference.

The pattern varies and several elements recur:

• •The Moirai in Greek tradition, three sisters spinning, allotting and cutting, whose decisions even Zeus is generally represented as unable to reverse
• •The Parcae in Rome, closely equivalent and giving several modern words for fate and fairies
• •The Norns in Norse tradition, associated with the world tree and with a well, shaping what will come
• •The Fates and fairy figures of later European folklore who attend a birth and pronounce a child's future, which is the direct ancestor of the story pattern in which an uninvited guest curses an infant
• •Personified fate and destiny in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hindu, Chinese and Islamic traditions, with quite different relationships to divine will in each
• •Concepts rather than persons in several traditions, where the ordering principle is a law, a balance or a decree rather than a being with intentions

The recurring claim that fate binds even the gods is theologically striking and does specific work. It supplies a reason why powerful beings do not simply arrange everything conveniently, which is a problem for any tradition with anthropomorphic deities, since unlimited divine power makes narrative and worship both awkward. It explains why gods can be defeated, grieve and fail, which they do frequently in the traditions that have fate figures. It creates a structure in which even the gods are subject to something, which makes the universe orderly rather than arbitrary. And it distributes responsibility, since a deity who could not have prevented an outcome is not culpable for it. Monotheistic traditions face the same problem differently, since a single omnipotent deity cannot be subordinate to anything, and the resulting questions about predestination, foreknowledge and human freedom have generated some of the most intricate argument in theology precisely because the convenient device of an external fate is unavailable.

A determined future produces a recognisable narrative shape in which attempts to avoid it bring it about, which is among the most durable plot structures in existence. The prophecy that a child will kill his father leads to the child being sent away and therefore not recognising his father when they meet. The attempt to prevent a predicted death places the victim exactly where the prediction requires. That structure is satisfying because it lets a story dramatise inevitability through action rather than asserting it, and because it suggests that the attempt to escape was itself part of what was determined. It also supplies a distinctive kind of irony, since the audience knows what the character does not. The pattern appears in Greek tragedy, in Norse and Irish material, in folk tales worldwide and in modern fiction, and the question it leaves open is the same one philosophy asks, which is whether a determined outcome leaves any room for the choices that appear to bring it about.

Spinning, measuring and cutting a thread maps so directly onto making, allotting and ending a life that the image recurs across traditions, frequently carried by three women working in the background. The claim that fate binds even the gods explains why powerful beings fail and grieve, and monotheistic traditions cannot use that device, which is why predestination became so intricate a problem for them.