Ananke (mythology)

Ananke (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Ananke, also spelled Anangke, Anance, or Anagke (Ancient Greek: Ἀνάγκη, from the common noun ἀνάγκη, "urge, constraint, necessity"), was a primordial ancient Greek goddess of inevitability, the personification of destiny, necessity and fate. She appears as a serpentine being, and marks the beginning of the cosmos, along with Chronos, in the Orphic cosmogony. Together they surrounded the primal egg of solid matter and so brought about the creation of the ordered universe. The ancient representation of the goddess, is perhaps a torch-bearing figure, but she was also depicted holding a spindle, as the representation of Moira (fate).

Ananke may be related with the Homeric Moira and with Tekmor, the primeval goddess of ordinance in the cosmogony of Alcman (7th century BC). It seems that she represented a universal principle of natural order, which controlled all fate and circumstance of mortals, and was far beyond the reach of the younger gods whose fates she was sometimes said to control. The Greek writers named this power Moira, or Ananke, and even the gods could not alter what was ordained.

According to the ancient Greek traveller Pausanias, there was a temple in ancient Corinth where the goddesses Ananke and Bia (meaning violence or violent haste) were worshipped together in the same shrine.

In Roman mythology, she was called Necessitas ("necessity").