Ananke: Primordial Goddess of Necessity

The Story of Ananke

Ananke was the primordial goddess of necessity and inevitability. She stood for the unbreakable force that makes things happen as they must. The Greeks believed her power was so absolute that not even the gods could resist it.

In Orphic tradition, Ananke was one of the oldest powers in the universe. She was paired with Chronos, the god of time, and the two were said to coil around the world like serpents. Together they set the order of the cosmos in motion.

Ananke appears most memorably in Plato's Republic, in the story of Er, a soldier who saw the afterlife and returned. Er describes the whole universe turning on a great spindle that rests on Ananke's knees. Her daughters, the three Fates, sit around her and sing of the past, the present and the future as they help it turn.

Greek poets often spoke of her with awe. The poet Simonides wrote that not even the gods fight against necessity, a saying repeated by later writers. In tragedy, characters bowed to Ananke when they faced a fate they could not escape.

Ananke had very little worship. The traveler Pausanias mentions a shrine at Corinth that she shared with Bia, the goddess of force, which no one was allowed to enter. For the Greeks, she was less a goddess to pray to than a hard truth about the world.