Moirai

• 1. Introduction

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  The Moirai, the personifications of fate in ancient Greek religion, posed a question that troubled Greek thinkers for centuries. In the Iliad, Zeus raises a scale and weighs Hector's lot of death against that of Achilles. Hector's side sinks. The king of the gods cannot save him. Who were these three sisters? How did an archaic idea about one's share of battle plunder grow into a force that stood above even the Olympian gods? Why did their parentage appear differently in every major text? And why, across cultures from Scandinavia to Egypt, did the same figure of three women weaving fate keep appearing?

• 2. The Abhorred Shears

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  Clotho was the youngest of the three sisters, presiding over the moment of birth with a distaff in her hand. From it she spun the thread of each life onto her spindle. Lachesis, whose name means allotter, used a measuring rod to assign each person their span. Atropos, the eldest, bore the most feared name: it means literally the unturning, or the inevitable. She chose the manner of each person's death. When the moment came, she cut the life-thread with what one ancient source called her abhorred shears.

  Nona was Clotho's Roman counterpart, a goddess originally invoked in the ninth month of pregnancy. Lachesis corresponded to Decima, and Atropos to Morta, whose name means the dead one.

  Plato, in the Republic, described the three sisters singing in unison with the music of the Seirenes. In his telling, Lachesis sang of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the things yet to come. The poet Pindar, in his Hymn to the Fates, held them in high honor and called on them to send their companions, the Hours: Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene, meaning lawfulness, right, and peace.

  The Moirai were believed to appear three nights after a child's birth to determine the course of its life. In the story of Meleager, a firebrand from the hearth was tied to his fate. His mother removed it and preserved it, and his life lasted as long as the brand remained intact. The mythographer Bruce Karl Braswell linked this tradition to the ancient custom of waiting seven days after a birth before accepting the infant into the family and naming it. At Sparta, Pausanias noted that the temple to the Moirai stood near the communal hearth of the polis.

  The Erinyes, the chthonic goddesses of vengeance, served the Moirai as instruments, inflicting punishment for evil deeds and especially on those who tried to escape their rightful destiny. Ancient tradition credited the Moirai as the inventors of seven Greek letters: A, B, H, T, I, and Y.

• 3. From Booty to Destiny

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  The word moira traces back to a Greek root meaning lots, destinies, or apportioners. It shares ancestry with meros, meaning part or lot, and moros, meaning fate or doom. A possible Latin descendant, meritum, meaning reward, may lie behind the English word merit. Scholars trace the whole family back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *(s)mer, meaning to allot or assign.

  Apollo appears in the Iliad warning Patroclus three times to stop his assault on Troy. The god told him it would be over his portion to sack the city. This Greek phrase, hyper moiran, originally described taking more than one's rightful share of battle plunder. Exceeding that share brought severe consequences, because it violated the natural order.

  Moses I. Finley examined the 8th-century Homeric world and detected only a few authentic Mycenaean beliefs that had survived into classical Greece. One was the attribution of unexpected events to spirits called daemons, who appeared at special occurrences. Martin P. Nilsson associated these daemons with a hypothetical pre-Greek religion. The figure who eventually became Atropos had her origins in pre-Greek Mycenaean religion as a daemon called Aisa.

  Birth and death were the most important junctures of the natural order in Greek thought. A spirit, Aisa or Moira, came to be understood as determining the time of each person's death at the moment of their birth. In the Odyssey, Moira travels accompanied by unnamed figures called the Spinners, personifications of fate who had not yet acquired separate identities. Hesiod would give them names, moral purpose, and two entirely different sets of parents.

• 4. Night, Law, and Necessity

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  Hesiod, writing in the Theogony, placed the Moirai among the oldest powers in the universe. In his account they are daughters of Nyx, the primeval goddess of Night. Their sisters are the Keres, the black fates; Thanatos, death; and Nemesis, retribution. This lineage made the Moirai creatures of the primordial dark, older than the Olympian order.

  Zeus and the Titaness Themis appear as alternative parents in a second passage of the same poem. Themis was the embodiment of divine order and law. This placed the Moirai as sisters of Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene, within the structure of the Olympian court. Two accounts in a single poem; they cannot both be right.

  The 7th-century BC poet Alcman offered yet another account. He placed Thetis at the beginning of all things, followed simultaneously by Poros, meaning path, and Tekmor, meaning end post or ordinance. Poros governed all beginnings; Tekmor, all endings.

  In Orphic cosmogony, Ananke, the primeval goddess of inevitability, was entwined with Chronos, the time-god, at the very beginning of existence. The three Moirai were her daughters. Plato's Republic gave the same answer: the Fates are daughters of Ananke, not of Zeus.

  Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Plato all rejected the claim that Zeus fathered the Moirai. The Orphic view, placing them as daughters of Ananke, aligned with their understanding of how cosmic necessity worked. Simonides named this power Ananke, the mother of the Moirai, and said that even the gods do not fight against her.

• 5. Zeus at the Scales

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  A Mycenaean vase shows Zeus holding scales before two warriors, measuring their destinies before battle. This image long predates the written texts. In Homer's Iliad, Zeus knows his son Sarpedon will be killed by Patroclus. The king of the gods cannot prevent it.

  Herodotus wrote that not even a god could escape the Moirai. The Pythian priestess at Delphi admitted that Zeus himself was subject to their power, though no recorded classical writing says exactly to what degree. The relationship between Zeus and the Fates shifted over time as the religious tradition developed.

  Pausanias, in the 2nd century AD, found at Olympia an altar whose inscription he read as naming Zeus the Bringer of Fate. In his description, the title meant that Zeus knew all that the Fates give to men. It also covered all that lies outside their destiny.

  At the Temple of Zeus in Megara, he saw the Moirai carved above Zeus's head in the relief sculptures. He inferred from this that Zeus alone among the gods was obeyed by Moira. Scholars later noted that this inference was not supported by cult practice. Pausanias himself recorded that in Athens, Aphrodite Urania was called the eldest of the Fates. This label implied that the concept of the Moirai preceded the Olympian gods themselves.

• 6. Temples Without Images

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  Three temples dedicated to the Moirai are recorded from antiquity: one in Corinth, one in Sparta, and one in Thebes. The temple in Corinth held statues, but they were not exposed to public view. The temple in Thebes, standing alongside a sanctuary of Themis near a city gate, had no images at all. In Sparta, the Moirai's sanctuary stood next to the grave of Orestes.

  Pausanias left a detailed account of a grove of holm oaks on the road between Sicyon and Phlius. A temple of the Moirai stood in an open space within this grove. Once a year, worshippers brought sheep heavy with young as burnt offerings. They poured libations of honey and water and brought flowers instead of garlands.

  In Athens, brides offered locks of hair to the Moirai before their weddings, and women swore by them in oaths. At Delphi, they were depicted alongside both Zeus Moiragetes and Apollo Moiragetes, both named with the title Guide of Fate. On the island of Korkyra stood a shrine of Apollo that tradition connected to Medea. Worshippers brought offerings there to both the Moirai and the nymphs.

  In the Gigantomachy, the war between the Olympians and the Giants, the Moirai fought on the Olympian side. The mythographer Apollodorus recorded that they killed two Giants, Agrios and Thoon, with bronze clubs.

• 7. Across Cultures, the Same Thread

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  The Norns of Norse mythology were three female beings who ruled the destiny of both gods and men. They twined the thread of life and set the laws that decided the fate of the children of men. Their names were Urdr, Verdandi, and Skuld. Scholars have concluded from the sequence and etymology of the names that the three governed the past, present, and future respectively. Urdr's name is related to the Old English word wyrd, the origin of the modern word weird, meaning fate or luck.

  The Celtic Matres and Matrones, female deities almost always depicted in groups of three, have been proposed as connected to the Norns. In Baltic mythology, the goddess Laima was the personification of destiny, with a primary duty of prophesying the life of a newborn. With her sisters Karta and Dekla she formed a fate trinity similar to the Moirai. In Hurrian mythology, three goddesses called the Hutena dispensed good and evil, life and death.

  Asha, the central concept of Avestan religion and Zoroastrianism, is summarized as truth, righteousness, and order. Its Vedic equivalent, Rta, is an ontological principle governing the operation of the universe. Both words descend from the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning properly joined, right, true. In Vedic thought, individuals fulfill their true natures by acting in accordance with Rta, expressed through Dharma in the social and moral spheres.

  In Egyptian religion, Maat was the goddess of truth, balance, order, law, morality, and justice, depicted as a young woman. In the famous scene of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Anubis weighs a man's heart against the feather of Maat. If the heart is heavier, a monster devours the soul. In the Mandaean literature, an angelic being named Abatur performed the same role. He used a set of scales to weigh the souls of the deceased.

  Dante named the Fates in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio by their Greek names. Their traditional role in measuring out the length of human life runs through the narrator's account. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Three Witches, called the Weird Sisters, drew on both the legends of the Norns and the Moirai. Their overseer in the play, Hecate, was the Greek goddess of magic, witchcraft, and three-way crossroads.

  The asteroids (97) Klotho, (120) Lachesis, and (273) Atropos were named for the three sisters.