The Mires at the Cradle: The Third Night and the Table Set for Fate

In a stone house in a Greek village, three nights after a baby is born, the women of the family are busy in a particular way. The floor is swept and the room put in order. The cradle is set where it can be seen. A small table is laid with bread, honey and perhaps sweets or almonds, with a glass of water or wine beside them. A lamp is left burning, the dog is tied up in the yard, and the door is left unbolted. Everyone knows who is expected: the Mires, the three women of fate, who come in the night to decide what kind of life the child will have.

Details vary from island to island and valley to valley, and in most places this is now a remembered custom rather than a living one. But its outline was recorded again and again by folklorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its roots reach back to the oldest Greek poetry.

Spinners from Homer and Hesiod

The Mires are the Moirai of ancient Greece, and their work has changed little in nearly three thousand years. Homer already imagines fate as thread. In the Iliad, Hecuba, grieving for Hector, says that mighty Moira spun his lot for him at the moment she gave birth to him. In the Odyssey, King Alcinous says Odysseus must bear whatever destiny and the grim Spinners spun for him when his mother bore him. The thread is laid down at birth. That is the heart of the village belief as well.

Hesiod gives the three their names: Klotho, the Spinner; Lachesis, the Allotter; and Atropos, She Who Cannot Be Turned. He also gives them two different family trees in the same poem, a sign of how old and unsettled the idea was.

Night bore the Moirai and the pitiless Keres: Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who give mortals at their birth both good and evil to hold.

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

Nearly seven hundred lines later, Hesiod makes them daughters of Zeus and Themis, the goddess of right order, and says Zeus gave them the greatest honour. Plato, at the end of the Republic, seats them around the spindle of Necessity, singing of past, present and future. Later tradition divided the work neatly: one spins the thread, one allots its length, one cuts it. That three-part picture is the one village tellers kept.

A guest the cradle waits for

The ancient Moirai already came to births. Pindar has Apollo send them, together with the birth goddess Eileithyia, to stand by a mother in labour. The closest ancient parallel to the village scene is the story of Meleager. Apollodorus says that when the boy was seven days old the Moirai appeared and declared that he would live only until a log then burning on the hearth was consumed. His mother, Althaea, snatched the log from the fire and hid it in a chest. Years later, in fury at her son, she threw it back into the flames, and he died. Ovid tells the same story at length.

Village tradition kept the visit and fixed its timing, most often on the third night, though some districts spoke of the fifth or the seventh. A cluster of customs grew up around it. The house had to be clean and calm, because the Mires were easily offended and a displeased Moira might hand out a hard lot. Food was set out to put them in a kindly mood. Doors were left unbolted so that they could come and go freely, and dogs were tied so that they would not bark at the visitors. Some folk tales turn on a stranger sleeping by the hearth who overhears the three pronouncing the baby’s future, and who then spends years trying in vain to prevent it.

What the Mires decide is often described as being written, sometimes on the child’s forehead. A saying heard across Greece holds that what is written cannot be unwritten, and when something happens that no one could have prevented, people still shrug and call it grafto, written.

Fate in songs, tales and laments

The Mires did not appear only at the cradle. In songs and stories a person’s moira is both their fate and something like a personal spirit, generous or cruel. A well-known Greek tale tells of a princess so unlucky that everything around her goes wrong, until she is sent to find her own Moira, an old woman living in a lonely place, and wins her over with patience and gifts of bread, after which her fortunes turn.

Even the Greek word for lament carries their name. The moirologi, the song women improvise over the dead, means roughly ‘words of fate’. The thread the Mires spin beside the cradle is the same one the mourners address at the grave.

The customs of the third night were part of a wider care for the first forty days, when mother and child were thought especially vulnerable and were seldom left alone. Leo Allatius, a Greek scholar from Chios writing in Rome in the seventeenth century, described the fear of the gello, a demon believed to harm infants. Later folklorists, among them N. G. Politis, the founder of folklore studies in Greece, and J. C. Lawson, a Cambridge scholar who had travelled widely in rural Greece, recorded beliefs about the Mires in detail, and Lawson argued that much of ancient religion lived on in such village practice. Not every scholar today would go so far, and the third-night table surely owes as much to the universal anxieties of childbirth as to Hesiod. Still, the overlap is striking: three women, a thread, and a lot given at birth that no one can turn aside.

Setting the table today

In most places the full table for the Mires now survives in grandmothers’ stories rather than in practice. Many households, though, keep habits that grew up beside it: a blue bead against the evil eye pinned to the cot, a coin or a banknote tucked into the baby’s hand by visitors, the forty days before mother and child go to church together. The Mires live on most clearly in language, in the way people speak of luck as something handed out.

If the custom seems quaint, it is worth remembering what it answered. A birth in a village house, far from any doctor, was the most dangerous moment in a family’s life. Setting a table for the Fates was a way of doing something when nothing more could be done: making the house welcoming, the night calm, and the child’s first guests well disposed. The myths on this site are full of lots and portions handed out by higher powers, from Persephone’s third of the year in Demeter’s story to the tasks set for Psyche. The village Mires simply bring that idea indoors, to the side of a cradle, and offer it bread and honey. Our Festival Calendar follows the rest of the village year.