What Are the Fates? Figures Who Spin, Measure and Cut a Life

The pattern involves a small group, usually three, usually female, usually old, working collectively on something that represents a life or the world. The division of labour is standard: one produces the thread, one measures or allots its length, and one severs it. Their decisions bind, and in most traditions they bind the gods as well, which places them outside and above the ordinary divine hierarchy and makes them stranger and more frightening than any individual deity. They are generally not petitioned, since the point of the figure is that the outcome is fixed, and where petition is possible the tradition has usually softened the concept. They are associated with birth, since that is when a life is allotted, and appear at it. And they are frequently connected to water, to wells and to trees.

The figures recur with local names and nearly identical functions:

• •The Greek Moirai, three sisters who spin, allot and cut, whose decisions Zeus does not override
• •The Roman Parcae, essentially the same figures under other names
• •The Norse Norns, three women at a well beneath the world tree, shaping what will be
• •Baltic and Slavic figures with comparable roles and strong spinning associations
• •Comparable groups in Celtic and Germanic folklore, frequently three and frequently appearing at a birth
• •Figures elsewhere who allot destiny without the thread imagery, which is the more common arrangement worldwide

The connection between destiny and spinning is close enough to demand explanation, and several factors point the same way. Spinning produces a continuous thread from a shapeless mass, which is an exact image of a life emerging from nothing and continuing. The thread has a definite length that can be measured and an end that can be cut, so the metaphor covers duration and death without needing anything added. Weaving extends it, since individual threads combine into a fabric, which supplies an image of individual lives forming a larger pattern. Practically, spinning was universal, endlessly repetitive and overwhelmingly done by women, which explains both the gender of the figures and the availability of the image, since a metaphor drawn from work everyone watches daily requires no explanation. Shared inheritance accounts for the Greek, Roman, Norse and Baltic cases, which belong to related traditions.

Not every tradition personifies destiny as spinners, and the alternatives are worth noting because they carry different implications. Writing is the other common image, with a life or a year recorded in a book or on a tablet, which appears across Mesopotamian, Islamic and several other traditions and implies that what is fixed is a record rather than a physical length. That version permits the idea of a decree that might be revised, which a cut thread does not, and traditions using it frequently allow for intercession. A third image treats fate as a portion or allotment, a share given out rather than a thing made, which is the root sense of several of the words involved. A fourth treats it as impersonal law rather than any agent's decision, which is the picture in traditions built around karma and in later philosophical accounts of necessity.

Traditions holding that a life is allotted at birth face an obvious difficulty about whether anything a person does matters, and the ways they handle it are varied and revealing. Some accept the tension and treat the value of a life as lying in how it is lived rather than in altering its length, which is a recognisable and coherent position that appears in heroic literature where a character knowing their fate meets it well. Some distinguish the fixed from the alterable, so that the length of a life is set while its quality is not. Some allow that fate can be delayed but not avoided, which preserves both. Later philosophical traditions in the same cultures worked the problem explicitly and arrived at positions about necessity and responsibility that still organise the modern argument. The figures themselves rarely explain anything, which is part of their force.

Three old women producing, measuring and cutting a thread, binding the gods as well as people, appearing at births and rarely petitioned. Spinning supplies the image exactly, since a continuous thread emerges from a shapeless mass, has a measurable length and an end that can be cut. The work was universal and done by women, which accounts for both the imagery and the figures.