Once upon a time in ancient Greece there were three “ladies” who led a very busy life with their tasks at hand: to carefully spin the lines of people’s destinies.
Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible). Atropos had the delicate mission of making the decisions of her two sisters irrevocable, immutable, namely that of “cutting” the thread of human destiny to which each of her decisions concerned. It was up to her to decide when the person in question should die, that is, the span of their lives.
The three sisters were goddesses known in the Greek and Roman mythology by the general name of ‘Moirai’ (in Greek) and ‘Parcae’ (in Latin).
The belief in the existence of an immutable “destiny”, either by means of the will of God or the existence of a fixed “natural order” of the universe, was very common until the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East.
By then, the concrete knowledge about the world around us was much more limited than it is nowadays, namely when it comes to geography and the mapping of the world, among other fields, including, of course, astronomy.
The sky and the lights moving out there with a mathematical accuracy were a complete mystery. Ancient scientists believed that the heavens were a separate realm governed by their own rules, different from those of the “sublunary” world, that is, the word just below the sphere of the Moon, where we live, that is, the centre of the Universe.
Contrary to the “sublunary word”, in the heaven all was made of a fifth substance, the ether, that was not under the laws of the “generation” and the “corruption” world (using Aristotle’s own terminology).
Nowadays we know that this is not true. The world “out there” is composed by the same substances or elements “our word” is made of, and subject to the same laws of generation and corruption.
Even so, concerning human “destinies”, is there an immutable “destiny” which the Greek ‘Moirai’ goddesses were so busy working on?
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions, and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd, and when I turned, I saw it was Death that had jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me”.
The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop, he went.
Then, the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw Death disguised as a women standing in the crowd, and he came to her and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when he saw him this morning?”. “That was not a threatening”, the women said. “It was only an expression of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
This text is the famous Epigraph, written by the well-known British author W. Somerset Maugham, for the 1934 John O’Hara Appointment in Samarra.
The moral of this story is that when we are convinced that we are escaping from Destiny, making use of our free will, in fact, we may just be fulfilling what was already “written” (maktub) for us.
This is a very interesting paradigm, which originated several speculations and interesting efforts trying to trace its origins.
Some see traces of the same paradigm in the Jewish Talmud, written more than 1500 years ago. However, a much interesting source, and much closer to Maugham’s version, is the 8th century Muslim Sufi author Al-Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad’s “When Death Came to Baghdad”.
An English version of the latter source appears in Idries Shah’s ‘Tales of the Dervishes”. Al-Fudayl’s story is basically the same as the one of Maugham’s epigraph, however, the city mentioned in the story is Samarkand instead of Samarra.
Probably Samarkand appears in Al-Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad’s tale because of the magic aura that always involved the city, one of the oldest in Central Asia.
Didn’t the Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam (1040-1131) write “Samarkand, the most beautiful face / The Earth has ever turned towards the sun”?!
Nowadays Samarkand is part Uzbekistan and, in 2001, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Leaving aside the details of the tale, the main question here is: is there an immutable personal “destiny”, over which the Greek Morai ladies were so busy working on? Or, on the contrary, what happens to us is a consequence of the intelligent (or not so intelligent) use of our free will?
Both options are wrong, a good friend of mine, a very rational minded person, would reply.
On one hand, he would say, there is no immutable “destiny” because life is made of change, one’s “destiny” changes every second because the universe itself is made of a continuous change.
On the other hand, he would add, free will and intelligence (talent, competence, etc), although being a very important component in the making of a person’s “destiny” are not enough since there is another very important factor to consider, which is sometimes decisive and beyond the scope of a person’s free will and intelligence. This is commonly known as “luck” (good or bad), something that cannot be ignored: that is, the circumstances that we face in life and, which sometimes are helpful and, sometimes, detrimental to our personal success and happiness.
It is easy to realize that our 21st century minds are not ready to deal with this imponderable and uncontrollable side of life. If something happens, it is someone or something’s fault! Because of that, we tend to deny of ignore that side of life. However, ignoring this doesn’t stop it of existing…
Going back to Al-Fudayl’s tale. Maybe you’ve been trying to follow a certain direction in your life, hoping to finally run away from an undesirable situation that you are stuck in. You were sure that this would be the biggest opportunity of your life, everything was pointing in that direction. However, you didn’t get it! Unexpected obstacles definitely prevented you to reach that “big opportunity” of your life. “Bad luck!” – you would have exclaimed.
“Are you sure?”, my rational friend would reply, surprised after knowing of your story. “That’s because I just met the Angel of Good Luck and told him about your friend’s unlucky failed plan. The Angel was surprised, not understanding why your friend was insisting in going in that direction. Because, he added, ‘I have an appointment with your friend in a place in the opposite direction, I think nowadays it is called something like Samarkand…’”
