Woof

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘woof’ — the cross-thread of the loom, the weft that binds the standing warp — operates as a concentrated symbol of fate’s active, completing moment. R. B. Onians provides the most sustained treatment, demonstrating across Greek, Latin, and Norse sources that the woof-thread (Greek *péirar*, Latin *subtemen*) does not merely describe textile craft but enacts the binding of destiny to the living body: the last woof-thread closed upon the warp of a life is the seal of death. The Horatian *certum subtemen* and the Norse ‘woof of war’ — wherein warriors form the warp and blood or death fills the weft — converge to reveal a shared Indo-European mythological grammar in which weaving is fate-making and the woof its irreversible consummation. This places woof in dynamic tension with warp: where warp-threads measure temporal extension (length of life, the vertical dimension), the woof is the cross-binding agent, the force that completes, closes, and determines. In Onians’s reading, the figures of Atropos and the Norns are woof-weavers in the deepest sense: they fill the loom, they cannot be turned back. The term thus sits at the intersection of several major depth-psychological themes — binding, fate, weaving as cosmogonic act, and the irreversibility of the destined moment.

In the library 11 passages

the certum subtemen which the Fates have already woven, the last woof-thread bound about the warp that is his life… ‘The woof of war’ of the Norse represents only one phase of life, though that perhaps the most significant, as fraught with the supreme fate.

Onians argues that both the Latin *subtemen* and the Norse ‘woof of war’ encode the same mythological principle: the woof-thread is the Fates’ final binding act, sealing the warp of a life with death.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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Not only do the Norns ‘spin’ and ‘bind’, they also weave. Their web hangs over every man. As ‘weird sisters’ or Disir, they weave the ‘woof of war’ and spread it over the field.

Onians demonstrates that in Norse mythology the Norns weave a literal ‘woof of war’ over the battlefield, with warriors as warp and wounds or death as weft, confirming the woof’s function as the instrument of destined death.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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it would appear that *peirar*, like Latin *licium*, is used as well of the woof-thread which binds the warp as of a bond about the body… ‘weaving’ of speech or song is a familiar image, old as Homer.

Onians establishes that *peirar* (rendered as woof-thread) functions simultaneously as a textile term and as a metaphor for binding fate to the body, extending the concept to the weaving of speech itself.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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It can also be shown that *peirar* could mean a woof-thread and at the same time a difficulty of interpretation is removed from a passage of Pindar.

Onians identifies the Greek term *peirar* as denoting the woof-thread in Pindar, resolving a long-standing philological crux by reading the word’s textile sense as primary.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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On the loom this would seem to mean the vertical, i.e. the warp-threads. In the web of the Norse fate-goddesses we shall see that from each of these was suspended, as loom-weight, a head.

Onians clarifies the structural relationship between warp (life’s temporal extent) and woof in Norse fate-weaving, where severed heads serve as loom-weights anchoring the warp across which the woof of death is woven.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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In the Agamemnon Aeschylus makes his chorus, foreboding, say of itself (the heart) … where *ektolupeuein* means something like ‘unwind off the spool’, as was done with the woof-thread in weaving.

Onians traces the woof-thread metaphor into Aeschylean tragic diction, where the heart’s foreboding is expressed through the image of the woof unwinding from the spool as fate completes itself.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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‘woof of war’, 351, 355–6, 374; use of magic in battle-rites, 361 and n. 3, 362–3; significance of trophies, 375; ‘coil of war’, 388–9.

The general index of Onians’s work clusters the ‘woof of war’ with binding magic, battle-rites, and the coil of war, confirming that woof belongs to a coherent symbolic complex of fate-binding in warfare.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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Their activities were originally, we may suggest, first the assigning of the portion… then the spinning of it by Klotho, and lastly the binding or weaving of it by Atropos.

Onians argues that Atropos’s office is specifically the binding or weaving act — the closing of the woof — making her function structurally equivalent to the final woof-thread that fixes fate irrevocably.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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What Lachesis thus gives we have seen to be the unspun wool with its dynamic counterpart; and Klotho spins it exactly as we have suggested.

Onians maps the three Moirai onto sequential stages of textile production — allotment, spinning, and weaving/binding — establishing the woof as the final, irreversible stage presided over by Atropos.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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The threads of the warp hung perpendicularly down, and were drawn tight by weights at their lower ends… In weaving, the weaver passed from one side to the other before the

The Homeric Dictionary describes the mechanics of the ancient upright loom, providing the material substrate — the perpendicular warp and the weaver’s lateral passage with the woof — that underlies the mythological symbolism.

G, Autenrieth, Homeric Dictionaryaside

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Moirai (Moirai): spin fates of men… weaving of the, 349–50; related to goddess of childbirth, 352 n. 7, to Zeus, 393–4; differentiated as Lachesis, Klotho, Atropos, 416–19.

The index entry for the Moirai cross-references the weaving of fate with childbirth, Zeus, and the differentiated functions of the three Fates, situating the woof symbolically within a broader cosmological network.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside

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