Spinning occupies a rich and multi-layered position in the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously as a cosmological, mythological, and psychological image. Its most sustained treatment appears in Onians’s philological excavation of archaic Greek thought, where the verb ἐπέκλωσαν — ‘the gods spun’ — figures as the primary idiom for divine determination of human fate. Here spinning is inseparable from the figures of the Moirai: Klotho spins the allotted portion into thread, while Atropos binds or weaves it irreversibly into the fabric of a life. Onians demonstrates that this image underlies the Homeric concept of πείρατα (binding limits), Plato’s Ananke, and ultimately the Norse woof of war. Neumann extends the archetype into the Great Mother complex, reading the spinstress-goddesses as manifestations of feminine creative-destructive power rooted in the uroboric matrix. For von Franz’s analytical psychology, the spinning of fate connects to the alchemical weaving of psychic processes and to the therapeutic image of threads being drawn together in the transference relationship, an association Wiener develops explicitly via Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. A secondary, more behavioral register appears in Campbell’s citation of chimpanzee spinning-play, which he reads as a proto-ritualistic expression of joie de vivre. The image thus bridges cosmological necessity, archetypal feminine agency, and embodied instinct — making it a genuinely cross-domain concept within the library.
the assigning of the portion, the Λάχος or μοῖρα, by Λάχεσις with scales… then the spinning of it by Κλωθώ, and lastly the binding or weaving of it by Ἄτροπος.
Onians establishes the three-phase process of fate — allotment, spinning, and binding — as the original differentiated functions of the Moirai, grounding spinning as the central act of cosmic fate-making.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
ἐπέκλωσαντο θεοί, ‘the gods spun’, which with slight modifications occurs eight times in Homer… It is the same image that is used of Μοῖρα and Αἶσα, an image which seems to dominate ancient thought.
Onians documents the Homeric formula ‘the gods spun’ as the dominant archaic expression for divine causation of human destiny, establishing spinning as the master-image of fate in Greek cosmological thought.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The Aegean goddess of birth, Eileithyia, is a spinstress, as are the Moirai, the Greek goddesses of fate.
Neumann situates spinning within the Great Mother archetype, showing that birth-goddesses and fate-goddesses alike manifest as spinstresses, linking feminine creative power to the spinning of individual life-threads.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
What lies ‘upon the knees of the gods’ is the fate that the gods spin (θεοὶ ἐπέκλωσαν). Πείρατα should, we might now suspect, be related to the spinning.
Onians argues that the Homeric phrase ‘on the knees of the gods’ encodes the spinning image, connecting πείρατα (binding limits, woof-threads) structurally to the act of fate-spinning.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
the certum subtemen which the Fates have already woven, the last woof-thread bound about the warp that is his life… ‘Upon it (the loom) has been stretched a warp of human-beings, a warp grey with spears, which the valkyries are filling with weft of crimson’.
Onians extends the spinning-fate image into Roman and Norse sources, demonstrating that the woof-thread of individual destiny is a trans-cultural image of life bound and terminated by feminine fate-powers.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Plato would seem to be following him, save that he has substituted the Pythagorean Ἀνάγκη for the gods or Μοῖρα, retaining the latter as helping to spin.
Onians shows Plato philosophically reformulating the Homeric spinning-of-fate image by replacing the gods with Ananke (Necessity), while retaining the Moirai as subordinate spinners, thus transmitting the archaic image into systematic cosmology.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Instances of μίτος as the thread of fate after κλώθειν are given below. It can also be shown that πεῖραρ could mean a woof-thread.
Onians demonstrates that the Greek word for thread (μίτος) following spinning (κλώθειν) and the binding-limit term πεῖραρ are semantically intertwined, confirming that spinning generates the very substance of fate’s constraint.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The analyst brings two threads together, knowing that what is created is ultimately dependent on the hundred other threads of potential that are waiting to be interwoven… I am reminded of Schubert’s marvellously evocative piano accompaniment to his song Gretchen am Spinnrade. In this piece the spinning wheel
Wiener transposes the spinning image into the clinical setting, using the metaphor of thread-weaving to describe the transference matrix and invoking the spinning wheel as an image of the psyche’s restless, fate-driven creative process within the therapeutic relationship.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
pots and jars of various shapes have been used by various peoples for containing what is spun. The Homeric housewife spinning had what she wanted for the time being in a basket of silver or other material.
Onians contextualizes the material culture of spinning — the vessel containing spun wool — in relation to Homeric images of divine bounty and the fate-portions stored by Zeus, anchoring the cosmic image in domestic practice.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone… Down among his nerve cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Panksepp cites William James to apply the ancient fate-spinning metaphor to neurobiological habit-formation, suggesting that individual behavior continuously weaves the fabric of character at the cellular level.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Tschengo and another chimpanzee named Grande invented a game of spinning round and round like dervishes, which was then taken up by all the rest… appeared to express a climax of friendly and amicable joie de vivre.
Campbell records chimpanzee rotational spinning as a spontaneous proto-ritualistic social behavior, using it as evidence that spinning movement carries instinctual affective significance predating human symbolism.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Only by letting our imagination spin with the sphinx’s Wheel can we avoid getting caught in her web of circular thinking and free our energies.
Nichols uses spinning as a metaphor for the liberating movement of imaginative engagement with the Wheel of Fortune archetype, contrasting creative psychic rotation with entrapping circular thought.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
we presumably do want to say about a spinning top both that the whole of it, rather than specifically some part or other of it, is in motion (rotation, that is), and that the whole of it, rather than specifically some part or other, is at rest.
Lorenz invokes the spinning top as Plato’s chosen example for analyzing simultaneous opposition within a composite object, illustrating the philosophical problem of parts and wholes in Platonic psychology.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside