I Dreamt Last Night of the Three Weird Sisters: Fate as Depicted Through Textiles

Abstract

Fate has long occupied a central role in humanity’s imagination, belief, and sense of self. It is fascinating, mystifying, and often frustrating. Fate, fortune, destiny: all seem to be apportioned arbitrarily, sometimes unfairly. To many Indo-European cultures, this pointed to a divine agency predetermining their longevity and prosperity. Specifically, they pointed to supernatural women meting out fate at the birth of every child, often determined through spinning and weaving. This tripartite imagery—that of otherworldly women controlling the destiny of Man through the production of textiles—has worked its way into the imaginations of the general population as well as those in academia. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that there is a vast amount of textual references representing these three core images, however there is only a small body of evidence linking all three. Simply because there is an absence of historical evidence for it in no way means that it is absent from history. The persistence of this metaphor alone merits its consideration, and the imagery of textile arts is so well suited to the metaphysical idea of fate that it is no large logical leap to connect all three.