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Page 6.

Fate and Sator

The Sator Square is an ironic aphorism, similar to the old Russian saying, "Cut once, but measure nine times."

A modern equivalent might be: "Ford makes the auto, but the wheel is in your hands." This would make a powerful slogan for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The Sator aphorism marks an important turning point along the way from animism and polytheism to philosophical and Judeo-Christian polytheism. To drive toward an understanding of Fate in its earlier context as well as the more rigorous sense of later monotheism, it is good to sketch a brief outline of spiritual evolution here.

Archaic Roman religion was animistic at its core. As a relevant aside: In my article The God Page*, I have divided history's religions into three great modalities: animism, polytheism, and monotheism. I will have much more to say on this topic in other writings to come.

Most of us understand monotheism because we were generally raised exclusively in it, and taught to abhor (and misunderstand) the other modalities. There is one God, with a capital G, who possesses all the will power or command power. He is served or opposed by mortals (ourselves) and myriad unnamed spirits who have no divine nature of their own: saints, angels, devils, the ordinary dead, etc. but most relevantly the numina (unnamed spirits who are silent but communicate through nods or gestures or augural signs if at all).

Monotheism became a permanent and important fixture on the world stage when emperors from Constantine (Council of Nicea, 324 CE) to Theodosius (who in 393 issued a decree outlawing all but the Nicene Christian religion) made Nicene Christianity the official and only state religion of the Roman empire.

What Nicene Christianity replaced as the official state religion was not just (more proximately) the polytheist (many gods) belief system of the late Republic and the Empire, but in fact, in the larger framework, a ritualistic state religion founded on archaic animism. We've all heard of Jupiter and the rest of the named gods. In polytheism, one sees many named gods with elaborate mythologies or stories. Animism is distinguished by a number of features, which I discuss in separate articles (e.g. The God Page*). Among those features is the absence of all or most named deities, which leaves hosts of unnamed spirits in place to serve our spiritual ideations.

With those many things said, what role does the Sator Square play in all of this?

The point is that when we say "God holds the plow, but you turn the furrows," we are making a transition from animist and even polytheist religion to a new religion that embraces absolute values, salvation, and a new definition of fate.

Under animism, and to a great extent polytheism, we are dealing with spirits (mostly not named deities) who are not grounded in moral absolutes. Classical philosophy was naturally evolving toward a kind of monotheism of its own, independent of Christianity and Judaism. Classical philosophy also constantly dealt in absolutes, whether in a theory of forms, in aesthetics, or morality. Philosophy asked the tough questions that mythology avoided. The demise of an amoral, conveniently anthropomorphic Zeus (Theos) was only a matter of time.

So here's the key. Under animism, you are not seeking salvation. You are seeking survival. Capricious spirits want to kill you if you wander into their territory. They want to drown your child if he or she fetches water from the river. This is not a universe of good and evil. This is a universe like an arbitrary nightmare. You have to negotiate with all these crazy spirits who are often less rational than the average human being.

With the Sator Square, we see the emergence of a new vision of fate. God holds the plow: we can't control certain aspects of our fate, like birth and death. I can't control if a piano falls on me as I leave my apartment building. That is Sator fate.

To put a fine point on it, the ancients were not always sanguine about the interaction of gods and fate. There are many moments in Classical mythology when it appears that even the father of gods (bawdy Zeus or the more reserved Roman thunderer and lightning bolt hurler Jupiter) has no control over fate itself. Fate and Fates are in themselves mythological figures (to be discussed in another article some day). With sufficiency and imprecision, however, we can assign to God the Father, the Seeder or Begetter, a much greater knowledge of things to come (in a free will universe) than that of humans who can only control their own moral and practical decision making (Rotas fate).

I can’t control falling pianos, but I can control the daily decisions that shape my life and my fate. I can choose to do the right things that keep me in the good graces of the divine, of society, and of the law. That's Rotas fate.

That understanding marks a transition from the fearful, capricious world of animism, to the moral absolutes of the monotheistic world. Of course, the drawback is, in reality, that the same human predators rule the new world as ruled the old animist world.

But that is not our most immediate moral problem or opportunity. We replace the spirit world of animism with an afterlife in which we are rewarded in accord with absolute moral principles. It is the merger of philosophy and theology. It is a triumph of logic.

And it makes sense: knowing that Sator Fate and Rotas Fate both exist, and that there is a boundary between them, takes us from a simple, rustic country aphorism to a sophisticated modern philosophical world view.

Surviving ancient times into the European Medieval and later, this concept references the Free Will doctrine of Christianity. The idea is that we cannot sin unless we have free will, which gives us the ability to choose between right and wrong. That is the Rotas choice, the part we can control by our moral decisions.

For the direct line between "God holds the plow, but you turn the furrows" to "Ford builds the car, but you hold the wheel," we have the underlying logic of the Sator Square to thank. And this thoroughly modern aphorism has further implications.

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