Russian keeps a proverb that every child learns and every adult, sooner or later, learns to mean: Ne budi likho, poka ono tikho. Do not wake Likho while it sleeps quiet. Foreigners translate it blandly — "let sleeping dogs lie" — and miss the shiver, because Likho is not a dog and not a figure of speech. In the old East Slavic imagination, Likho is a person : the personification of evil fortune itself — misfortune with a body, a dwelling, an appetite, and one terrible eye. Where the Greeks distributed fate among three spinning sisters and the Germans among the Norns at the world-tree's root, the Slavic village compressed all of bad luck into a single figure: a woman — gaunt beyond famine, tall as a doorway or a pine, wrapped in rags or in darkness — with a single eye in the middle of her forehead. Not blind chance: one-eyed chance. Misfortune, the image says with terrible precision, does see you. It just sees you flat — without depth, without mercy, without any secon...

A thread is almost nothing. Pinch a little fiber, twist it, and you have a line too thin to see across a room. Yet the human story is stitched together with it: cloth, rope, nets, sails, bandages and books all depend on thread. It is not surprising that peoples around the world looked at spinning and weaving and saw in them a picture of life itself, with its beginning, its length and its cut. Here we follow the thread through myth, scripture and philosophy. The Three Spinners of Greece In Greek tradition, the thread of each person's life is spun by three goddesses, the Moirai, called the Fates in English. Hesiod names them in his Theogony : Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, who gives each person their lot, and Atropos, whose name means "she who cannot be turned." Clotho draws out the thread, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos cuts it. Even the gods are said, in many versions, to be subject to them, though the poets are not consistent. In Plato's Republic , a...

The spindle is a stick with a weight on it, and for thousands of years it was in nearly every household on earth. A woman, or sometimes a man, would draw out a few fibers of wool or flax, twist them, give the stick a turn, and let it hang and spin as the thread grew longer. Archaeologists find the small stone or clay weights that sat on these spindles, called whorls, at Neolithic villages and at Roman forts and at medieval farmhouses alike. The tool was so common that it became a figure of speech for a woman's work and for time itself. Plato went further and put a giant spindle at the center of the universe. How a Spindle Works A drop spindle has two parts: a straight rod, the shaft, and a round weight called the whorl, which gives the shaft momentum as it turns. The spinner twists loose fibers into yarn, and the whorl keeps the rod spinning steadily while the thread lengthens. The thread is wound on the shaft, and when the spindle is full, a new length begins. The tool is am...