Fate stands as one of the most contested and generative concepts in the depth-psychological corpus, drawing into its orbit questions of necessity, freedom, the unconscious, and the relationship between psyche and cosmos. Liz Greene’s extended meditation in The Astrology of Fate (1984) constitutes the most sustained treatment, tracing the concept from its Homeric and pre-Socratic roots—where Moira operates as blind, automatic natural law acknowledging no parochial human interest—through Neoplatonic attempts to exempt the soul from bodily determinism, into the Renaissance alchemical vision of Ficino, who proposed an active imaginative commerce between the self and the fated pattern. Walter F. Otto illuminates the Greek theological substrate: in Homer, fate is neither a person nor a providence but a structural limit, the inexorable boundary at which even the gods fall silent. James Hillman approaches fate through the acorn theory and the daimon, insisting on the distinction between fate—the soul’s inherent calling—and fatalism, which is its pathological misreading. The Stoic tradition, represented through Long and Sedley, engages fate as deterministic causal chain while preserving a space for assent and impulse. Running through all positions is a central tension: whether fate is an external compulsion to be endured or an internal necessity to be recognized and, in that recognition, partially transformed.
Novalis’ statement that fate and soul are two names for the same principle is, of course, incomprehensible in the face of such concretisation.
Greene invokes Novalis to establish the book’s central premise: that fate and psyche are not separate domains but two aspects of a single reality, a claim rendered unintelligible by literalist astrological practice.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
It sets a boundary to limit duration, catastrophe to limit prosperity, death to limit life. Catastrophe, cessation, limitation, all forms of ‘so far and no farther’, are forms of death. And death is itself the prime meaning of fate.
Drawing on Otto’s reading of Moira, Greene argues that fate’s essential character is negative and limiting, finding its deepest expression in mortality and in every form of irreversible ending.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
the daimon as an independent spirit-soul… in Greek psychology was also your personal fate. You carried your fate with you; it was your particular accompanying genius.
Hillman identifies the daimon with fate, arguing that one’s destiny is not imposed from without but is the soul’s own inherent image, carried as an inseparable companion throughout life.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
It is just these ‘incalculable consequences’ which appear to enter life as events fated from without. Here is the crippling illness, the strangely timed accident, the unexpected success, the compulsive love affair.
Greene, drawing on Jung, argues that archetype-driven events experienced as external fate originate from within the unconscious psyche, collapsing the boundary between inner pattern and outer occurrence.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
To see the Hand of Fate in these untoward events raises their importance and gives pause for reflection. To believe, however, that your market timing and the one-second loss are deciding your life for you—this is fatalism.
Hillman sharply distinguishes fate—a meaningful calling discerned in events—from fatalism, the passive surrender of agency to external circumstance.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Fale means: it has been written. For something to be written with such immovability by an utterly unseen hand is a terrifying thought. It implies not only powerlessness, but the dark machinery of some vast impersonal Wheel.
Greene confronts the phenomenological terror of fate’s etymology—the already-written—as the affective starting point for any serious psychological engagement with the concept.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
If you wish to free yourself from the fate which is written upon the physical form by the heavens (Heimarmene), then you must free your mind from the bondage of earthly things, for although Moira rules the world of the senses, she cannot rule what Plato called the ‘intelligible’ world.
Greene summarizes the Neoplatonic solution to fate: the body and its passions are fully subject to Moira, but the incorporeal intellect escapes her dominion, establishing free will only in the non-corporeal register.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
There is a fixed limit to their power, a basic ‘so far and no farther.’ That limit is death. No god can restore life to a man once dead, no will of the gods can reach into the shadowy realm of the departed.
Otto establishes that in Homeric theology fate is not a deity among others but the structural limit that defines the boundary of divine power itself, identified ultimately with irreversible death.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929thesis
Either we live in terror of fate because we have not yet found any sense of genuine individuality, or we repudiate the very idea of fate for precisely the same reason.
Greene diagnoses the two psychological poles of response to fate—anxious submission and rationalist denial—as symmetrical expressions of the same deficiency of individuation.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
It would seem that although fate may not alter in its intrinsic pattern or in its timing, it may alter in terms of its clothing, its level of expression.
Through the case of King Henri II, Greene proposes that fate’s essential pattern is fixed but its mode of manifestation—literal or symbolic, bodily or psychic—depends on the degree of the individual’s psychological development.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
The ker is an eidolon [image], or winged sprite, which wears a sinister aspect—it is an object of fear. Considered as allotted to the individual at his birth, it is his moira—the span or limit of his vital force, the negative and repressive aspect of his fate.
Greene traces the Greek differentiation of fate into ker, moira, and daimon, distinguishing the limiting, death-bound aspect of personal fate from the beneficent, vitalizing dimension of the daimon.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
The more we learn of genetics, of sociobiology, the more we see the implacable gods at work, those whom we have grouped under the rubric of fate. What is fate, and why would we impute the gods at work?
Hollis locates fate at the intersection of biological determinism and transpersonal powers, framing modern scientific discoveries as corroborating evidence for what mythic traditions called the activity of the gods.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting
Work on this stuff in accordance with one’s natal pattern, suggests Ficino, and one builds the connecting link between God and his creation, between Ideas and corporeal reality, between archetype and instinct, between freedom and fate.
Drawing on Ficino and Jung’s anima mundi, Greene presents imaginal work with archetypal images as the Renaissance paradigm for a creative, transformative relationship with one’s fated pattern.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Such genuine religious feeling as is to be found in Homer is less concerned with the gods of Olympus than with more shadowy beings such as Fate or Necessity or Destiny, to whom even Zeus is subject.
Greene, citing Bertrand Russell, establishes that Homeric religion’s deepest piety is directed not at anthropomorphic Olympians but at impersonal Fate and Necessity, which she connects to the origins of natural law and science.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Athena here represents fate. In all of her action the sway of fate is reflected with frightening accuracy. After Hector, beguiled by the phantom, had entered upon his unhappy course, his initial success made him bold, but only paved the way for the great failure which leads to his destruction.
Otto demonstrates how, in Homer, a god’s personal agency and fate’s impersonal decree are identical in operation, with Athena serving as the embodied form of Hector’s doom.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
Here in his intricate web of connections we may begin to see where astrology itself—Heimarmene, the ‘planetary compulsion’ or natural law of heaven and earth—is part and parcel of the celestial body of the Great Mother.
Citing Bachofen, Greene argues that Heimarmene—astrological fate as planetary compulsion—is mythologically inseparable from the Great Mother and her cosmic web, linking fate to the primordial feminine.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Fatalism is the seductive other side to the heroic ego, which shoulders so much in a do-it-yourself, winner-take-all civilization. The bigger the load, the more you want to put it down or pass it off to a larger, stronger carrier, like Fate.
Hillman diagnoses fatalism as the psychological shadow of hypertrophied heroic ego, a compensatory surrender to determinism that mirrors and enables the very inflation it opposes.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Human existence is struck not only by bolts of fate which are unavoidable; there are also catastrophes which, by the judgment of ordinary experience, the victim might have avoided. They are no less necessary and fated than the others, once man has committed an act pregnant with consequences.
Otto distinguishes inevitable fate from self-incurred catastrophe in Homer, arguing that even avoidable disasters become fully fated once a freely chosen act sets their consequences in motion.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
Everything connected with the body therefore belongs to the world of the mother—our heredity, our experiences of physical pain and pleasure, and even our deaths.
Greene grounds bodily fate—heredity, physical limitation, and mortality—in the primordial mother-world, establishing the maternal-feminine as the psychological matrix from which the experience of fate originates.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
The Homeric Moira is by no means the same as that primeval figure which persisted in popular belief in post-Homeric times. First of all we must notice that a significant ancient aspect of Moira which linked her with a group of powers in primitive and popular religion is no longer present in the Homeric figure.
Otto differentiates the Homeric Moira—a purely limiting, death-oriented force without gift-giving or oracular function—from the more beneficent, oracular Moirai of popular and Hesiodic tradition.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
Family fate does indeed seem to be portrayed, in part as a synchronicity of repeated signs and aspects which form a kind of statistical pattern.
Through comparative family horoscopes, Greene argues for a transgenerational dimension of fate, visible as synchronistic repetition of astrological patterns across family members.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
the mythic and undifferentiated consciousness of our ancestors, which animated the natural world with images of gods and daimones, does not belong to chronological history alone. It also belongs to the psyche of modern man, and represents a stratum which, although layered over by increasing consciousness and the hyper-rationality of the last two centuries, is as potent as it was two millennia ago.
Greene draws on depth psychology to argue that archaic mythic consciousness, including its perception of fate as divine agency, persists as a living psychic stratum in modern individuals regardless of rational sophistication.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
if He was omniscient, then He knew what sins a man would commit in the future, which meant that sin, salvation and damnation were already predestined. But that smacked too much of the old pagan concept of fate.
Greene traces the theological embarrassment of divine omniscience as a Christian reformulation of the pagan fate problem, showing how Providence was constructed precisely to avoid the deterministic implications of Moira.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
This idea posits two realms, which are alien to one another: a realm of life, of development, of affirmation, and a realm of death, severance, and denial. Only the former is configured, active, personal; the realm of negation has neither figure nor personality; it only sets limits.
Otto articulates the structural dualism underlying Homeric fate: the gods embody the positive, configured realm of life, while fate belongs to the structureless realm of negation, limit, and death.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
If all things come about through fate, it does follow that all things come about by prior causes—not however by primary and complete causes, but by auxiliary and proximate causes.
Chrysippus, as reported by Cicero, preserves human agency within a fully deterministic fate by distinguishing complete and primary causes from the proximate causes through which impulse and assent operate.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
It seems to be fate, rather than accident, which accomplishes the strange transformations in fairy tales, and it is a fate which above all else resents being unrecognised or treated without humility.
Reading fairy tales as mythic evidence, Greene argues that fate in narrative operates as natural law that demands recognition and respect, punishing not moral transgression but ontological disavowal.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
The predictions of the soothsayers could not be true, he says, if all things were not embraced by fate.
Chrysippus grounds the validity of divination in universal fate, arguing that prophecy is intelligible only within a thoroughgoing causal determinism that leaves nothing outside fate’s embrace.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
Moira is the blind, automatic force which leaves their subordinate purposes and wills free play within their own legitimate spheres, but recoils in certain ways.
Greene characterizes Moira in the Ionian philosophical tradition as impersonal, purposeless natural law—neither malevolent nor benevolent—that accommodates but ultimately overrides individual will and divine intention.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
the protest to fate or lament for oneself, elaborated in drama to the highest point of tragic art, continued to flourish in popular tradition.
Alexiou documents how the direct address and reproach of Moira, traceable from Homer through funerary inscriptions and the moirológema, constitutes a continuous popular tradition of ritually confronting fate as a personal, accusable power.
, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974supporting
It was ‘the great god and mighty Moira’ who brought about his fall. It has been alleged that Apollo appears here as a god of death. But the intention of the poet was different.
Otto uses the death of Achilles to demonstrate that divine agency and Moira are not rival explanations but cooperative expressions of a single fated necessity in Homeric poetics.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
The particular phase of fortune had duration, was time experienced. The most natural unit is the day. Homer identifies the ‘day’ with the fate experienced, speaks of the fate as the morasimon hēmar.
Onians traces the etymology linking Homeric fate to time as lived duration—morasimon hēmar, the fated day—establishing that fate in archaic Greek thought was not abstract destiny but the concrete temporal span of a life or its ending.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Then if the Fates cannot be avoided, they are foreseen and foretold to no purpose. Yet if they can be avoided by some method, the inevitability of Fate is falsely maintained by astrologers.
Greene cites Ficino’s own acknowledgment of the classical paradox of fate and divination: if fate is truly inevitable, foreknowledge serves no purpose; if it can be modified, astrologers’ claims of inevitability are false.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside
the compatibility of fate and free will display a disregard for the difference between human and animal action similar to that shown in the arguments against apraxia.
Inwood examines Stoic defenses of compatibilism, noting that critics of the fate-free will reconciliation exploit the blurring of human and animal action to undermine the Chrysippean argument.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985aside
a mortal man long doomed to fate dost thou desire to deliver again from death of evil name?
Onians examines the Greek verbal formula pepromenos to trace the conceptual and linguistic roots of fate as something allotted or apportioned to the individual, noting the inadequacy of standard translations.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside