Moira as Thread

Onians recovers the archaic imagery of fate as a thread spun, woven, and cut. Moira governs battle as the “woof of war” (Onians 1951, index pp. 351, 355–6, 374); aion is the fluid of a man’s allotted life; Ananke, Necessity, holds the spindle on whose lap turn the planetary motions in the myth of Er. The Moirai — Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos — spin, measure, and sever; the thread is literal, not only metaphorical, in the archaic imagination.

The imagery is load-bearing for depth psychology’s reading of astrology as soul-mapping. james-hillman, in Mythic Figures, cites Onians directly: “For a rich discussion of ‘The Knees of the Gods’ and Ananke’s spindle, see Onians, 303–9. The myth of Er has provided a grounding image for Platonist fascination with astrology as a mode of psychology. The same Necessity governs the soul’s movements as well as the motions of the stars” (Hillman 2007). Hillman’s case that astrology is archetypal correspondence — planetary motion and soul-motion on the same web — rests explicitly on Onians’ philological recovery of the spindle-and-thread cosmology.

In the same Homeric passage cluster, the hero’s agency is “at every turn not free” but the work of other powers (Onians 1951, ch. I, “On the Knees of the Gods”). Fate as thread is the cosmic face of the same distributed self whose psychic face is the plural body-seated soul.

Relationships

• psyche-breath-soul
• daimon
• homeric-plural-self

Primary sources

• origins-of-european-thought (Onians 1951, ch. I; pp. 303–9, 351, 355–6, 374)
• hillman-mythic-figures (Hillman 2007)