Moirai

Summary

The Moirai are three women in Greek myth who allot each person a share of life on the day of birth: Klotho, who spins; Lachesis, who allots by lot; and Atropos, whose decision cannot be turned back. Their Greek name is Μοῖραι, Moirai, singular Μοῖρα, Moira. In Homer Moira is usually one, and she spins a person's thread in the cradle. Hecuba, mother of Hector, tells her husband Priam, who wants to go to the tent of Achilles to ransom their son's body: this is what mighty Moira spun for him with her thread on the day I bore him, that he should glut the dogs far from his parents. And the king of the Phaeacians says of his guest Odysseus: we will bring him home, and there he will suffer whatever fate and the heavy Spinners spun for him with their thread when his mother bore him.

Hesiod names them twice in the Theogony, with two different parents. In the first passage they are among the children of Night, who bore them without a husband; their names are Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos, "who give men at their birth both evil and good to have", and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods and never cease from their anger until the sinner pays a heavy penalty. In the second they are daughters of Zeus by Themis, goddess of order and right, sisters of the Hours, Order, Justice and Peace; "wise Zeus gave them the greatest honour", and they too give mortals evil and good. The parentage changes from one passage to the other; the work is the same: the allotment at birth.

The fullest picture of them is at the end of Plato's Republic. A soldier named Er was killed in battle and came back to life on the pyre on the twelfth day, and told what he had seen after death. He saw the souls reach the spindle of Necessity, which turned on her knees, and round it three women seated on thrones, the daughters of Necessity, in white robes with fillets on their heads: Lachesis, Klotho and Atropos, singing with the Sirens, Lachesis the things that were, Klotho the things that are, Atropos the things that are to be. Klotho turned the outer rim of the spindle with her right hand, Atropos the inner circles with her left, and Lachesis each in turn with either hand. The souls stood before Lachesis; a spokesman took lots and patterns of lives from her lap, went up on a high platform and said: "This is the word of Lachesis, the maiden daughter of Necessity: souls that live for a day, now begins another cycle of mortal generation. No divinity shall cast lots for you; you shall choose your own.. The blame is his who chooses; God is blameless." Then he threw the lots among them, each took up the one that fell beside him, and chose a life in the order of his lot. When the souls had chosen, they went before Lachesis again, and she sent with each the guardian spirit it had chosen, who led it first to Klotho, under her hand and the turning of her spindle, to ratify the lot it had chosen, then to the spinning of Atropos to make the threads irreversible; then it passed beneath the throne of Necessity without looking back.

The idea the stories of the Moirai turn on is that every person has a share allotted on the day of birth, and once it is spun it cannot be turned back. Hector's thread was spun in the cradle; Odysseus meets what was spun for him when his mother bore him; Hesiod has the Moirai share out good and evil among people; and Plato puts the lot first, then the choice, then the spinning that fixes what was chosen. The three names say the same in Greek itself: Klotho comes from a verb meaning to twist thread, to spin; Lachesis from a verb meaning to obtain one's share by lot; Atropos means the one who cannot be turned.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Μοῖρα, Moira, ends in the -a that marks the feminine in Greek, leaving mor-, with m and r. The project's Greek essay reads it as Arabic mīra and calls the Moirai "the owners of the shares, who divide the shares of fate". In Lane mīra is the corn or food a man brings to his family and lays up for them: māra ahlahu, yamīruhum, he brought his family provisions. The Greek word itself is used in Homer of the portion of meat handed out to each guest at a feast, and from there it became a person's share of life. On this reading the Moira is the portion a person lives on, as a household lives on the provisions brought to it, and the Greek -a at the end answers the feminine -a of mīra.

Linguistic Root

Moira and mīra

The Greek essay derives the name from mayyara or mīra and gives three readings: māra, "to flow", making the name the course of fate; mīra, "share, portion", making the Moirai the owners of the shares; and amr, "decree, command".

We weigh the three against the evidence. LSJ derives μοῖρα from μείρομαι, "to receive as one's portion", and gives its first sense as a part as opposed to the whole, then the share that falls to someone of booty and of food, citing the Odyssey for the serving out of portions at a meal, then one's lot and fate. It also cites Hesiod saying that Zeus gave Hecate a "portion" of the earth and the sea. So the fixed letters are m and r, and the final -a is the feminine ending. M is m and r is r, and the ī of mīra is a long vowel answering the vowel of the Greek. In Lane mīra is corn or food that a man brings for himself or his family, māra ahlahu is to bring one's family provisions, and one says "he has neither wealth nor mayr", neither property nor food. The Arabic word is the share of food a household lives on; the Greek word is the share of food at a feast and then the share of one's life. In every story the Moirai's work is dividing: they share out good and evil at birth as food is shared among a household.

Māra in Lane means to move from side to side, to come and go, and māra al-dam, the blood flowed on the ground, as in "the day the sky shall heave" in the Sura of the Mount; it has no sense of sharing, which the Greek word has. In amr the initial hamza drops in Greek as gutturals do, and its sense, decree, suits the Moirai's work, but the Greek word means portion, not command, so amr stays an echo of the meaning. The reading we settle on is mīra.

The three names

The essay does not read the three names, so their readings here are proposed on the method.

Klotho: LSJ gives κλώθω as "twist by spinning, spin", and of the goddesses of fate, "spin a man his thread of life or of fate". In Lane qalada al-ḥabla is to twist a rope, a qild is a single strand of a rope, and maqlūd is a twisted rope. Q becomes k because Greek has no q, l stays l, and d becomes th, one of the dental sounds that interchange under the Juthoor laws. The norns page sets the same word beside shakala in the norn Skuld's name, since there the s belongs to the root and the d is a suffix; in Klotho every letter is in place, and the weak point is the Greek th where d would be expected.

Lachesis: LSJ calls her the "Disposer of lots", from λαχεῖν, to obtain by lot or as one's portion. In Lane khalāq is a share or portion, as in the Qurʾān, "he will have no share in the hereafter", and the primary sense of khalaqa is taqdīr, measuring a thing out, giving it its proportion. Kh is the Greek ch and l is l, but the two letters stand in reverse order in Greek, and the q of khalāq has nothing to answer it in the Greek word, so the reading is weak and stands until a better one appears.

Atropos: LSJ gives ἄτροπος as "not to be turned, unchangeable", and as the name of one of the Moirai in Hesiod and Plato. The initial a- is the Greek negative, and the rest is the verb for turning. In Lane ṭarafahu ʿanhu is "he turned him, or it, away, or back, from him, or it", and ṭaraftu al-baṣar "I turned away the sight". Ṭ becomes t, r stays r, and f becomes p, as it does in the Juthoor tables. On this reading Atropos is "she who is not turned back", whose decision cannot be reversed, which is what Plato makes her: the soul passes her spinning, its thread becomes irreversible, and it goes on without looking back.

The Parcae at Rome

At Rome the goddesses of fate are the Parcae, singular Parca. Aulus Gellius reports Varro's view that the Romans named them from birth and from the ninth and tenth months, since a woman was thought to be delivered in one or the other: Parca from partus, birth, "with the change of one letter", and Nona and Decima from the time of delivery. He adds from Caesellius Vindex that their names are three, Nona, Decuma and Morta, citing a line of Livius Andronicus's Latin Odyssey: "When will the day be present that Morta has predicted?" Gellius, Attic Nights 3.16.9–11.

We read Parca, as a proposal on the method, with Arabic faraqa: in Lane a firq is a portion of anything when it is separated, farraqahu is to divide a thing into portions, and in the Sura of the Smoke "therein every firm decree is made distinct", that is, decided (Q 44:4). F becomes p, r stays r, and q becomes c. On this reading the Parca is the one who divides, who shares out the portions and decides the matter, which is the sense of Moira itself. Varro's explanation needs a letter changed, as he says; faraqa does not.

Shifts used: m = m, r = r, and the feminine ending answered by Greek -a in mīra; q > k, l = l, d > th in qalada; kh = ch with the order reversed in khalāq; ṭ > t, f > p in ṭarafa; f > p, q > c in faraqa.

Key Mythic Narratives

Zeus and the fate of Sarpedon

When Sarpedon, son of Zeus and king of Lycia, advances against Patroclus, Zeus says to Hera: "Woe is me, for it is fated that Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, be slain by Patroclus", and hesitates whether to snatch him alive out of the war and set him down in Lycia, or let him be killed. Hera answers: would you deliver from death a mortal long since doomed? Do it, but the other gods will not approve, and each of them will want to save his own son. Send Death and Sleep to carry him to Lycia once he is killed, and his kin will bury him. Zeus obeyed her, but shed bloody raindrops on the earth in honour of his son. The allotment holds even for the son of the king of the gods.

Apollo tricks the Moirai

At the opening of Euripides' Alcestis, Apollo says that Zeus compelled him to serve a mortal, so he herded the cattle of Admetus, king of Pherae, found him a godly man, and saved him from death "by tricking the Fates". The goddesses promised that Admetus could escape an immediate death by giving the powers below another corpse in exchange; he asked all his kin, his aged father and mother, and found no one willing to die for him but his wife Alcestis. The allotment itself cannot be undone, but the share can be exchanged.

Meleager's brand

The Library attributed to Apollodorus tells that when Meleager, son of Althaea and Oeneus, was seven days old, the Moirai came and declared that he would die when the brand burning on the hearth was burnt out. His mother snatched the brand from the fire and kept it in a chest. Meleager grew up and killed the Calydonian boar, then killed his mother's brothers in a quarrel over its skin, and Althaea, grieving for her brothers, kindled the brand, and her son died at once. In this story his life is a thing that can be seen and held, like the thread in Homer.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Norse essay sets the fate of the North beside naṣīb and qisma, share and allotment, in Arabic tradition, and beside the Greek Moira. The Babylonian essay compares Namtar, the messenger of the queen of the underworld and the bearer of fate and disease, with Klotho and Atropos, "the spinners of fate", and lists the Moirai among his likenesses.

The stories of the Moirai hold two household tasks. Spinning is women's daily work; in the Odyssey the queen of the Phaeacians herself sits at the hearth with her handmaidens spinning purple yarn. Odyssey 6.48–53. Dividing is the work of the feast, where each guest is given his portion of meat. The thread measures the length of a life, the portion what good and evil it holds. The proposed Arabic readings stay in the house too: mīra is the household's food, a qild a strand of twisted rope, khalāq a share.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest likeness to the Moirai in the North are the norns. Völuspá says three maidens come from the lake beneath the tree, Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, who carved on slips of wood, laid down laws and chose lives for the children of men. Snorri adds that other norns come to every child that is born to shape its life, and that a good life comes from good norns and misfortune from evil ones. So the norns are like Hesiod's Moirai: three, present at birth, sharing out good and evil. Falk and Torp think the spinning norns may be modelled on the Roman Parcae. And the Arabic readings meet again: qalada reads Skuld's name there and Klotho's here.

In Babylon fate is a written tablet. Tiamat fastens the "Tablet of Destinies" to the breast of Kingu and says: "Your order may not be changed; let the utterance of your mouth be firm", and he decrees destinies for her followers; then Marduk takes it from him, "which was not properly his", seals it and fastens it to his own breast. Before the battle the gods tell Marduk "your destiny is unequalled", and he commands and a constellation disappears, commands again and it returns. In Babylon fate is a tablet a ruler owns and can lose in war; the Moirai spin and allot it, and Zeus himself does not own it, as Sarpedon's story shows. The two texts agree that what has been decreed cannot be changed, the sense of Atropos. In Sumerian the decreeing of fate is nam-tar, where tar means to cut and then to decide, the name of Namtar, the vizier of the queen of the underworld who carries fate to people, and the figure the Babylonian essay compares with Klotho and Atropos.

Plato's story of Er belongs to a judgment of the dead: the souls are judged first, then come back to choose their lives by lot before Lachesis. On the judgment of the dead page the Anunnaki of Babylon assemble with Mammitum, maker of destinies, and decree death and life.