On Reweaving Fate

Fate sucks, but fate isn’t the final answer

I mentioned towards the end of my last essay the matter of fate, specifically in the context of men “fated” to be trapped into the economic and societal category of “surplus.” In fact, no one should ever be surplus, nor need anyone ever be stuck in such a situation. It’s often just dumb luck that causes one to be forced into the role of surplus, just as it’s dumb luck that some of us start out with inherited wealth and stable families while others get nothing.

Dumb luck could also be renamed “fate,” a concept mostly abandoned in modern secular thinking. When we do think of fate, we often conflate it with destiny, as in “he was fated to die young,” “that was fated to go wrong,” or “that mistake was fatal.” But that’s neither a historically accurate nor even useful way of understanding fate.

Much of our misunderstanding of fate comes from the Protestants, particularly the Calvinists, through the doctrine of predestination. In that belief, some people were predestined to receive God’s grace and salvation, while all the rest of us poor saps were predestined to eternities of eternal torment. And it wasn’t just a religious belief; in fact, predestination became an incredibly useful political and moral argument when it came to justifying one’s own extravagant wealth in relation to the abject poverty that wealth created. God had “predestined” some people (the good Protestant elite) to lives of comfort and ease, and thus they were just living out God’s plan for their lives.

It’s pretty easy to see how Calvinist beliefs in predestination persist in politics and economics now, especially when you remember that Progress is also a Calvinist invention. The “titan of industry” and the “great man of history” are obvious examples of this. God, in his infinite wisdom, predestined people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Sam Altman with extraordinary wealth and power in order to move humanity forward, to unleash the forces of progress upon the earth and usher in a new world; essentially, the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Calvinist belief in predestination is also why we see so much moral judgment regarding poverty within capitalist societies. The poor are doing something wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be poor. Were they not so frivolous, so wasteful, so lazy, so envious, and so undisciplined, they wouldn’t be poor. Thus, physical poverty is an outward sign of poverty of soul, corrupted roots that can never grow fruitful branches. And it was because God has already seen the nature of their impoverished souls that there was no chance for a better life for the poor. Nothing could change their fate.

The unchangeable nature of fate is a particular problem with our modern understanding of fate that’s tied to the nature of monotheism itself. In both the Christian and the Pagan conception, fate is a divine decree. But in polytheism, a god’s declaration of fate for a human isn’t the final verdict. You can always get a second opinion, since there are plenty of other gods that might intervene on your behalf.

Greek myth in particular is full of stories where one god undoes or circumvents the fate declared by another, often by trickery. A few gods in particular were quite fond of undermining other gods, particularly Artemis and Apollo. Notably, Apollo once got the Fates drunk on behalf of a mortal, convincing them in their inebriated state to allow a volunteer to receive that fate instead. The man’s wife, Alcestis, takes his place, and is even herself saved when the hero Heracles wrestles the god of death at her grave.

In pagan myths, the fate declared by a god can be changed, but never without some kind of intervention. Someone pleads on his or her own behalf, or on the behalf of another. Some action is taken, often a kind of trickery or cunning strategy that rewrites or re-interprets the original fate into a new destiny.

Fate’s like gravity, like inertia. It’s like a heavy weight dragging you down, an anchor around your neck. It’s the rut in the track, the path you follow because it’s easy and already set out for you. Fate is a series of repetitions we whisper to ourselves like a self-laid curse. “I cannot,” we say, and so we cannot: cannot have more, cannot be more, cannot change what’s fated to be our lot.

In my own life, fate was the impoverished circumstances of my early life, a violently abusive father, a schizophrenic and intellectually-stunted mother. Later, it was all the negative beliefs about what was possible, the self-loathing for being gay, the fear of conflict, the certainty I would always be an overweight, unlovable wretch. It was the dumb luck of having no resources and no one to help me; starting work at 14 to pay rent and buy groceries while trying to care for younger siblings and a mother who kept trying to kill herself (and sometimes us). It was the absence of health care, the inability to pay for a dentist, the months of homelessness on the streets of Seattle, the being drugged and raped, the lack of university degree shunting me into menial jobs. And it was especially all the defense mechanisms and strategies I developed to survive that kind of life which helped enough to make things tolerable but blocked me every time I tried to have more.

Fate sucks, but fate isn’t the final answer. My own fate was rewoven in a process that I can only accurately describe in mythic terms. There was a god there, and a tree, and something buried, and stars through branches, and a demand for a payment I convinced the fates into accepting as already paid. But what’s more important than the ritual process was the desire to do it the first place, the recognition I wanted more than what I was fated to have, the belief that what was already written need not be the final word, and most importantly, the supplication for intervention.

Becoming a Jungian coach was the absolute greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I say that without any hyperbole. I get to be part of that reweaving, get to watch it occur in the lives of the people who’ve come to me. By the time they arrive, that intervention has already started. Some divine process has already begun, sometimes even shepherded by gods whose names you’d recognize. What was and is stops being the final answer to the question of life, and what can be begins to reveal itself within the soul (or unconscious, as Jung would call it).

Because of what I’ve seen, I’ve become more convinced of something I’ve known for a very long time. Gods didn’t go away just because we stopped believing in them. They still do their things, reweaving fates for us even if we don’t acknowledge them. In fact, I’ve also come to understand they really don’t seem to care if the mortals they aid even know who’s helping them. Working anonymously has probably been safest for them for now, occulted forces slipping through the unseen realms of dreams and subtle senses. By naming them as archetypes, Jung gave them a useful cover story and a way to slip back into our lives without us really noticing. And when they appear, the fates have gotten drunk and are about to change their minds.

I’m now offering free 20-minute discovery sessions for coaching, so if you’re curious, want to know more about what coaching is like, have questions, or just want to talk, you can sign up for that here.