Ananke

Ananke is Necessity itself made a goddess — the primordial, inexorable power of compulsion that binds gods and mortals alike, against which not even Zeus can prevail. In the Orphic cosmogony she appears at the very beginning, coiled together with Time about the cosmic egg, and she is named the mother of the Fates, who spin out what must be.

The philosophers gave her a central place. In Plato's Timaeus she is the 'errant cause', the brute resistance of matter that the Demiurge must persuade as best he can, so that the world is the work of Reason and Necessity together. And in the Myth of Er that closes the Republic, the whole heaven turns upon the spindle of Necessity, held on the knees of the goddess, while her daughters the Fates sing of what was, what is, and what shall be — a sublime image of the cosmic order within which fate and the soul's own choices are bound.