Children of Fate

* The first Moirai goddesses, Clotho, meaning spinner, spun the thread of life. She is depicted as a maiden and is often seen carrying a spindle or a roll (the book of Fate). Lachesis, meaning unbending, measured the thread of life which determined how long one would live. She appeared as a matron with a staff with which she points to the horoscope on a globe. Atropos meaning “inexorable” or “inevitable” was the cutter of the thread of life and appeared as a crone. She chose the manner of each person’s death and when their time was up, cut their life-thread with shears. The smallest of the three, she is also characterized as the most terrible.
* **As goddesses of birth**, who spill the thread of beginning life, and even prophesy the fate of the newly born, they are mentioned along with Eileithyia, who is called their companion and paredros.
* The Fates laid out a plan for each person at birth that was fixed and unchangeable. **The Fates carried out the divine plan of Zeus** by drawing lots and tying the **resulting allotments into threads of life for each mortal born.** These threads are woven together, actually knotted at different points and in different ways. Then the fabric of life is cut off at death and the end of life for that mortal.
* A lottery is supposed to be a way a group of people have an equal chance to gain something valuable. The Fates use a lottery to distribute the goods and bads of the world to every mortal born. In a bag are placed tokens of these goods and bads. Before a person is born a number of these tokens are drawn out. **In a normal lottery this would be a random event. But in the case of the Fates their knowledge of the future and the past allow them to draw tokens that suit the divine plan of Zeus.**
* The only exception to this is when the mortal has obtained the favor of some deity. Then the deity has the power to cause the tokens to be drawn in a way that reveals true prophesy. Many priests and others have claimed to be able to secure the favor of a deity and obtain a true prophesy. Persons in ancient Greek literature who have been described as having this power inlude: Calchas son of Thestor, Cassandra, Chryses, Iamus, Idmon, Lampon, Melampus, Mopsus, Tiresias, and Melampus. **The literature about ancient Greece refer to these as seers. They are essentially prophets.**
* One of the unusual aspects of Greek religion is that the deities could know what the fates had determined, but they were powerless to change it. But the thread of life seems to be woven with several alternate paths and it seems that the deities could switch the path of a mortal to a different path without conflicting the Fates.
* Hesiod presents the **Moirai as the daughters of Zeus and the goddess Themis.** They are imagined as working the womanly task of spinning - drawing out a thread of yarn that represents each person's life. Into the thread may be woven sorrow, wealth, travel and the like. It is uncertain who the parents of the Morai were. **In some myths, they were the daughters of Zeus and the Titan goddess Themis, the goddess of divine order. Some say they were the daughters of Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (or of Zeus and Themis). In some instances, they were related to Ananke, the personification of necessity.**

Child of Clotho -

Child of Lachesis -

Child of Atropes - vic

* the fates informed zeus of a prophesied threat/troubling times for demigods and demititans alike (potentially tie into the idea of heinrich's death and stuff with bc, CoO vs. Camp, Akela getting attacked and potentially kidnapped, etc)
* they carried out the divine plan of zeus to entwine their own threads into that of a mortal man (of his choosing) to bare three prophets (or oracles maybe? I see lots of reserves and no actual characters being madeee) or that could be apprentices of the fates
* the three were born from fate itself

* the fates threaded their essence into the fate of a mortal man and the children were created rather than born

* the children have the same father, different mothers (if only one had a kid, the others would be jealous)