The Weavers

The image of a woman or group of women holding the strand of destiny is a very ancient one. It has appeared in various cultures since the art of cloth making first appeared sometime in the Neolithic era. These haunting figures were known in western Europe as The Fates. In the universe of Greek myth they were older and more powerful than the gods. One could postpone but never completely cancel their edicts. (See "Meleager")

Our word for cloth and clothing derives from one of their names, Clothos, she who measured out the thread of life. Another of the Fates, Atropos or "the crone with the shears," cut the thread at life's ending. From this we derive 'atrophy', to wear out.

Associating spinning and weaving with fate was perhaps very natural since it was the hands of women that turned out the changing vestments of earthly life from swaddling cloth to death shroud. It was the woman's humble but holy art that turned man from a being, naked and vulnerable, into one connected by signs and symbols to the underlying forces of the created order.

A woman's hand wove patterns of colored thread, stretched over the invisible to which her mind had mysterious access. It is no accident that weaving has been so often connected with sorcery in folk tales. As men had once drawn animal figures in underground caverns to influence unseen powers in the world of flesh and blood, the art of cloth making also later drew on such forces, and so must have come to be associated with human destiny.

The image here was first inspired by the sight of afternoon sunlight pouring through a maze of tapestries in a friend's weaving studio just after the birth of a daughter.