The three Fates, Moirai. The three Fates, Moirai.
combs the wool and spins the thread of life.
I am not a classicist, so I encourage those of you who are to
point out errors or controversies
! In the following quotes, I
have inserted several of my own threads and transliterated the
Greek
in preference to
Latinizing it.
The three Moirai were Klotho, Atropos, and Lachesis. They
were variously
called
As goddesses of fate the Moirai necessarily knew the future and therefore were
regarded as prophetic deities. Thus their ministers were all the soothsayers
and oracles. Then as now the concept of
predestination
For all the claims made for the immutability of fate, there were a few
questionable instances in which destinies appeared to be altered. Apollo
induced the Moirai to grant Admetus delivery from death, if at the hour of his
death his father, mother, or wife would die for him. Some said he made the
Moirai drunk in order to accomplish this. The Moirai also joined Eileithyia
in trying to delay the birth of Herakles.
They were identified with the somewhat obscure Heimarmene and Pepromene.
Tyche, the goddess of luck, was by some considered one of the Moirai, as was
Aphrodite Urania. They had sanctuaries in many parts of Greece, such as
Corinth, Sparta, Olympia, and Thebes
(classical references)
Moirai
Moirai were the Fates, personfication of the inescapable destiny of man. The
Moirai assigned to every person his or her share in the scheme of things.
Originally only one Moira was conceived, and
not
necessarily in a personified sense
Robert E. Bell,
Women of Classical Mythology , p. 310.
Oxford University Press, 1991
.
Zeus, as father of gods and men, weighed out the "fate" of
individuals, as he did in the case of Achilleus and Memnon
[but even in Homer things are more complicated! --- TK]
.
Later there were two Fates,
one at either pole of a
person's life. Finally, the familiar
trio of Fates
came
to be accepted, each
with a specific function.
daughters of Zeus, Nyx alone, Erebus and Nyx,
Kronus and Nyx, Oceanus
and Gaea, or Ananke (Necessity) alone. Depending on the identity
of their parents, they were
variously called sisters of the Horai, the Keres, or Erinyes. They were
described sometimes as aged and formidable women, often lame to indicate the
slow march of fate. Klotho spun the thread at the begining of one's life,
Atropos wove the thread into the fabric of one's actions, and Lachesis snipped
the thread at the conclusion of one's
life
. The process
was absolutely
unalterable, and gods as well as men and women had to submit to it.
presented the usual
paradoxes, since if from one's birth he or she was destined to commit a crime,
then punishment for the crime, itself preordained, place good and evil beyond
human control. Yet the
Erinyes
unfailingly fulfilled their
function in a kind
of obbligato to the inexorable hum of the spindle and thwack of the loom.
.
.
Klotho . . . spun the thread of one's life. She was involved in only one story that
did not include her sisters. When Tantalus, the favorite of the gods, served
the flesh of his son Pelops to the gods, they knew what he had done and
refused to eat. In her grief over Persephone, Demeter consumed the shoulder.
The gods ordered Hermes to put the limbs in a cauldron and restore life and
former appearance to Pelops. When this was done, Klotho took him out of the
cauldron; seeing the shoulder was missing, Demeter replace it with one of
ivory. The descendants of Pelops were believed to have a shoulder as white as
ivory
(more classical references)
Klotho
Robert E. Bell, Women of Classical Mythology , p. 131.
Oxford University Press, 1991.
.