Who Are the Fates? The Spinners Even the Gods Could Not Argue With
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Three women with spinning equipment outrank Zeus. One draws the thread of a life from the wool, one measures its length, and one cuts it, and when a Greek god wants to save a favourite from death the answer is that it is not permitted, because the length was assigned. The image of a life as a thread being spun and cut recurs across Greek, Roman, Norse, Baltic and other traditions with a consistency that has interested comparative mythologists for a century.
The three of them
The Greek Moirai, whose name means something like allotted portions, are usually given as three sisters with a division of labour that is itself the metaphor:
- •Clotho, the spinner, who draws the thread of a life from the distaff at birth
- •Lachesis, the allotter, who measures out its length and assigns what will happen in it
- •Atropos, the inflexible or unturning, who cuts it with shears at the moment of death and whose name is a statement about negotiation
- •Their parentage varies between sources, in some accounts daughters of Night and in others of Zeus and Themis, which is itself a theological argument about whether fate is subordinate to the gods or prior to them
- •The Roman Parcae are the same figures, and the word fate derives from their Latin name
The problem they create
Greek literature is preoccupied with the relationship between assigned destiny and personal choice, and it never resolves it, which is one reason the material remains readable. Zeus is repeatedly shown as unable or unwilling to overrule the allotment, most pointedly in the Iliad when he considers saving his own son Sarpedon and is told that the other gods will not approve and that the death is assigned; he weighs the fates in golden scales and lets it happen, sending a rain of blood instead. Herodotus records the Delphic oracle stating that not even a god can escape appointed fate. At the same time, characters are held responsible for their actions and punished for them, and the tragedies are built on decisions that matter. Oedipus is the extreme case: everything he does to avoid the prophecy is what brings it about, so the story functions simultaneously as a demonstration that fate cannot be evaded and as a portrait of a man whose specific character, his refusal to stop investigating, produces the catastrophe.
The same figures elsewhere
The parallel that interests scholars most is the Norse Norns, three figures who sit by a well at the roots of the world tree and shape the destinies of people, with names usually rendered as roughly what has become, what is becoming and what should become, so that the division is temporal rather than mechanical. They too are beyond the reach of the gods, and Norse literature is unusually explicit that even Odin cannot escape his appointed end. Baltic and Slavic traditions have comparable spinning or weaving figures. The recurrence has two standard explanations: shared inheritance from a Proto-Indo-European tradition, supported by linguistic work on the vocabulary of weaving and destiny, or independent development from the same obvious metaphor, since spinning is an activity in which a continuous thread of determinate length is produced from formless material and can be cut, and it was women's work in every one of these societies. Neither explanation excludes the other.
Fate against character
The philosophical treatment of the problem runs directly out of the mythology. The Stoics developed a systematic determinism in which everything follows necessarily from prior causes and the wise response is to align one's will with what will happen anyway, which is the position behind the image of a dog tied to a cart, able to walk along willingly or be dragged. Aristotle distinguished between what is necessary and what is merely likely, and treated tragedy as depending on a character's own error rather than on arbitrary doom, which is the reading that makes the plays about people rather than about machinery. Later Christian theology transposed the question into debates about divine foreknowledge and free will that ran for more than a millennium, and the modern version, about whether physical determinism leaves room for responsibility, is recognisably the same argument with different vocabulary. The Greek formulation has an advantage that later versions lost, which is that it does not require fate to be good or just, only fixed.
Where they still appear
The imagery has stayed in circulation for two and a half thousand years. Shakespeare's three witches in Macbeth are the weird sisters, the word deriving from an Old English term for fate, and they deliver a prophecy whose fulfilment depends entirely on the hearer acting on it, which is the Oedipus structure applied to ambition rather than to ignorance. The thread of life appears throughout European literature and in ordinary speech, in spinning a yarn, in the thread of a story and in a life cut short. The three-figure arrangement recurs in fantasy fiction and film often enough to be a stock element. And the underlying question has not become less interesting, since the mythology supplies a compact way of asking whether a person's course is determined in advance, whether knowing it would change anything, and whether being unable to alter an outcome removes responsibility for how one meets it, which is the question the Greeks left open on purpose.
The takeaway
The Greek Moirai spin, measure and cut the thread of each life, and the gods including Zeus are shown as unable to overrule the allotment, which is why he lets his own son die in the Iliad. The same structure appears as the Roman Parcae and the Norse Norns, who sit by a well and whose names divide time rather than tasks, a recurrence explained either by shared Indo-European inheritance or by the obviousness of the spinning metaphor. Greek literature never reconciles assigned destiny with responsibility, and the Oedipus story works as both at once.