Destiny versus fate

Although the words are used interchangeably in many cases, fate and destiny can be distinguished. Modern usage defines fate as a power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events. Fate defines events as ordered or "inevitable". Fate is used in regard to the finality of events as they have worked themselves out; and that same sense of finality, projected into the future to become the inevitability of events as they will work themselves out, is Destiny. In classical and European mythology, there are three goddesses dispensing fate, The "Fates" known as moirae in Greek mythology, as parcae in Roman mythology, and norns in Norse mythology; they determine the events of the world through the myistic spinning of thread that represent individual human destinies.

One word derivative of "fate" is "fatality", another "fatalism". Fate implies no choice, and ends fatally, with a death. Fate is an outcome determined by an outside agency acting upon a person or entity; but with destiny the entity is participating in achieving an outcome that is directly related to itself. participation happens willfully.

Used in the past tense, "destiny" and "fate" are both more interchangeable, both imply "one's lot" or fortunes, and include the sum of events leading up to a currently achieved outcome (e.g. "it was her destiny to be leader" and "it was her fate to be leader").

Fate can involve things which are bound within and subject to larger networks. A set of mathematical functions arranged in a grid and interacting in defined ways is Fatelike. Likewise the individual statues in a larger work of counterpoint art are aesthetically Fated within the work. In each case Fate is external to every individual component, but integral to the network. Every component acts as Fate for every other component. The entire world can be seen as existing within such a network, a kind of mythical spiderweb controlled by unseen forces.