Fate Vs. Free Will - Robert Ohotto

Fate vs. Free Will And Your Astrological Contract -Robert Ohotto Hello everyone at Myss.com…it’s been a while, eh? Good to be back with a new installment. For those of you who have already asked yourselves the questions, Why do things happen as they do? Is it Fate? Are we Fated or Free? As an Astrologer, I am constantly asked about Fate and Free Will, and have thought much about it over the years and how it has applied to my own life. In fact, many of you have sent me emails with questions like, “Do the planets and their transits dictate certain events, or can we influence the outcome via free will?” Better yet, “Can I transcend the parameters of my natal chart?” This is just the tip of the iceberg. Other profound Life questions surface, such as: Are our lives predetermined completely, or can we choose, at least in part, our destiny? If so, how much can we choose freely and how does one know? What is the difference, if any between Fate, Karma and Destiny? Can grace or the will of God (Divine intervention) overturn Fate? Before we dive into this deep, complex sea of mystery we need to discuss some navigational terms. Ready to take the plunge?! The word ‘Fate’ means ‘it has been written.’ The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Fate as ‘the cause or will that has determined events, destiny.’ Hmmm… but what is Destiny? Destiny means, something to which a person or thing is destined, fate. Are we dancing in circles, or is it just me? For now let’s settle on the word ‘Fate’ as meaning, that which has been predetermined and written into your life’s contract. I would define Destiny as what we decide to do with our Fate. The realization that came to me as I pondered the subject of Fate and Free Will was that I could not offer anything completely definitive in this area. Thus, that is not the intention of this article. Rather, my aim is to contribute something to the evolution of our concept of Fate and Free Will, of which I feel there is a definite need. In addition, I want to stimulate each of you to form your own concept around Fate and Free Will. With this new Aquarian Age, new perceptions have emerged into mass consciousness that many of you are familiar with, such as: we create our own reality; we have a ‘sacred/astrological contract’ that we agreed to prior to incarnation. How does that integrate with the ideas around Fate and Free Will? Are our contracts ‘chosen’ or ‘assigned’? How should we seek to use the Divinatory tools we have developed over the ages (Caroline’s Sacred Contracts-Archetypes, Astrology, Tarot, I Ching, Palmistry, Ouija Board… oops ok, let’s leave that one out! Ha!) to work with the Fate and Free Will dilemma? These are worthwhile and rich questions to ask, and I will address them all in due course. All the same, the issue of Fate vs. Free Will has been around since the Greek and Roman Gods ruled the earth, and continues to evolve in ways that mirror our own evolution in consciousness and the Gods we now worship. I would like to point out that the Gods we as a society now worship resonate with the Patriarchal lineage of our country. This is important to understand as it ties in with the current polarization against Fate that I have found prevalent in Western culture. I will expand on this concept later on, but for now I want to mention that historically - Christianity/the Papacy more or less did away with the concept of Fate completely, opting for salvation via God’s Providence and Sovereignty. To the Papacy, Fate was a pagan belief. At the same time, the concept of Free Will was also taken away being it that you could only be ‘saved’ by God through Jesus Christ, which really meant through the Church. As we are a country and society with a dominant Judaeo-Christian background, I feel our ideas of Fate and Free Will need to be nudged a bit both forward and backward because of this influence. Let’s go backward first, shall we? What is ordained is master of the gods and thee.

-Euripides The other night I had dinner with a friend of mine and we discussed her beliefs about Fate. I asked her, do you believe in Fate? She almost dropped her fork and with a panicked look in her eye, swallowed her food hard and said, “No! I believe in destiny, I just can’t believe that there are things in life that are predetermined.” I found her fear around the concept of Fate curious, but not surprising. In fact many people can’t go near the idea that we have a ’Sacred Contract’. Still I pressed her to define ‘destiny’. She gave some convoluted definition that further evinced her fear of being subject to a predetermined life in any shape or form. As previously mentioned, I have found this fear of Fate quite pervasive in our Western culture. So naturally I began to ask myself why… To understand our 21st century fear of Fate, I thought it helpful to look an ancient culture that not only embraced Fate, but thought that it dignified the human soul -- the Greeks. Greek consciousness and philosophy was saturated with Fate, which was symbolized richly through detailed mythological figures known as the ‘Three Fates’ and also through a supreme Goddess, Moira. The Greek word Moira means ‘allotment’. The Three Fates wore white gowns and were known as Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, and Atropos the Cutter. Even the Gods were subject to these three female deities or Moira, thus they were considered older than all the other Gods and reigned supreme...Zeus could not be Hades, he was fated as a sky god. Nor could Aphrodite be Uranus, it was not her ‘lot’. It was understood that these Fates or Moira designed one’s ‘contract’. Woven into that design were certain limitations, pre-scripted events serving as soul lessons, and the length of your mortal life. When it comes to boundaries and limitations, we can look to the Goddess Moira and find the origination of ‘Hubris’. Hubris is a word that implies an arrogance, exaggerated pride, or self-confidence that defies the Gods and one’s limitations. One way to think of Moira is that she symbolized the sum of the Three Fates and was considered a ‘minion of justice’. She was always ready to punish those who, through ‘hubris’, would overstep their ‘contract’ with the Gods by transgressing ‘natural law’. Thus, the Greeks felt it wise to understand natural law and embrace it. This idea of ‘natural law’ draws on connotations to the Feminine Archetypal Principle and ‘mother nature’. As we look at the Greek’s portrayal of Fate, we see that it has always been depicted through female images. So just how does the Feminine fit into all this and why are the Fates symbolized as women? Liz Greene, in her book ‘The Astrology of Fate’ (Samuel Weiser, 1984) sums this up very succinctly: “Perhaps one of the reasons why there is an inevitable association between fate and the feminine is the inexorable experience of our mortal bodies. The womb that bears us, and the mother upon whom we first open our eyes, is in the beginning the entire world, and the sole arbiter of life and death”. In many other wisdom traditions this same sentiment is echoed. For example, in the Qabbalah, the Sephira Binah is seen as the first idea of form and has associations with the first archetypal Feminine Principle, also known as the Great Mother. The primordial mystery of weaving and spinning has also been experienced in projection upon the Great Mother who weaves the web of life and spins the thread of fate, regardless whether she appears as one Great Spinstress or, as so frequently, in a lunar triad. It is not by accident that we speak of the body’s tissues, for the tissue woven by the Feminine in the cosmos and in the uterus of woman is life and destiny. And astrology, the study of a destiny governed by the stars, teaches that both begin at once, at the temporal moment of birth.1

In other words, it is through the mother that we first experience limitation via our corporeal existence. Our souls become boxed into a body that has its own DNA coding and laws, we could also call this ‘Physical Fate’. To illustrate this in another way; I am a white male, 6’1’’, 185 lbs. These are my fated parameters this lifetime that I feel I agreed to be ‘assigned’ prior to incarnation because they best serve the original intention of my Soul this lifetime. My physical body has given me limits of operation. Everything connected to the body falls under the rulership of the Feminine because it connects us to the mother who births the container of limitation for the Soul. We are born partnered with Fate from day one. I feel it stands to reason that before we came here, there were parameters that were scripted as our Fate in this lifetime for our Soul. Furthermore, these limitations are not just related to our bodies. Building from this idea of Fate and the Feminine, I would like to follow the next thread that is spun into the fabric of Fate: the idea of Fate relating to ‘natural law’. Hesiod, one of the first religious poets in Greece, felt that the law of nature was just and exact. He felt that it was humanity’s duty to understand, learn from, and honor this law because we are each a part of nature. He also felt that Death, being the final Fate, should be respected as a law that issues from a Divine Source. From the environmental destruction that we as a species are reaping on the planet daily, one can glean just how divorced we truly are from this concept of natural law. Not to mention, in our obituaries we seem to label the cause of one’s death as anything but ‘natural’ these days- opting instead for terms like ‘heart failure’, liver cancer, a stroke, etc. But I think the concept of ‘natural law’ goes even deeper than that. As an Astrologer, I have come to realize that, within my role of seership, part of my task is to help others understand their own inner ‘natural law’ as symbolized through the astrology chart. The natal chart shows to me the contract that was made with the Gods and Moira/Fate before birth. Using the birth chart as my guide, I feel I am reaching deep into the inner language of the Soul, which communicates to us via the archetypes that we used to call Gods. On that note, this is where I feel that tools of Divination, such as Astrology - or Caroline’s Sacred Contract work, become of the most value because they help you decode your own ‘natural law’ so that you can live in harmony with it, in harmony with Purpose. Your Life’s purpose is contained within this natural law. Divinatory tools help us to intuit and know our own inner Gods and their boundaries. They also aid us in interpreting Kairos, the ‘right moment’ or synchronicity in our lives, when Fate and Free Will seem to come together, joining time with the timeless in auspicious opportunity. We are now at a place in our evolution to embrace the deeper levels of these tools, rather than seeking their use to ‘divine the future’. Our ‘natural law’ speaks to us through archetypes, dreams, and intuition. What can impede the awareness of our inner natural law are ego attachments and ego based agendas, this is our modern day ‘hubris’. You can certainly apply this to our current model of world economics, summed up as ‘profit before conscience’. I also feel that one can see this mirrored strongly in the world of medicine. For example, the archetypal role of the doctor has its roots in shamanism as the archetype of the tribal healer. While in college, I worked in a hospital and research lab for five years and saw many, many doctors…but saw very few healers. Most of the doctors came into the world of medicine without a connection to the archetype of the healer, seeming to be more driven by the accolades that patenting a drug, or carrying the familial legacy of doctors would give them. And believe me, they were all a very unhappy lot!

It does indeed seem to me that when you live outside of your own natural law, you step out of the flow of Spirit and conscious creation, into the shadow of unconscious creation. Many times I have seen clients manifest ‘hubris’ through a lack of awareness in regards to their inner Gods. It then seems that Moira seeks her retribution through seemingly ‘fated’ events, in an effort to raise the awareness of the Gods within. Now we are moving more into the territory of the ‘psychology of Fate’ where Astrology walks hand in hand with archetypes and Jungian Psychology. Carl Jung felt that if you weren’t in touch with an inner archetype, that archetype could externally manifest on some level and show up in your life externally as Fate in an effort to render you conscious of its creative voice. I have definitely seen this numerous times in the lives of friends and clients. Thus, Fate may also be experienced as an inner psychological pattern projected outward to manifest in the environment, in as much as a Soul scripted, predetermined event. Liz Greene shares in my experiences with clients. …..there is certainly something, whether one calls it fate, Providence, natural law, karma or the unconscious, that retaliates when its boundaries are transgressed or when it receives no respect or effort at relationship, and which seems to possess a kind of ‘absolute knowledge’ not only of what the individual needs, but of what he is going to need for his unfolding in life. It appears to make arrangements of the most particular and astonishing kind, bringing a person together with another person or an external situation at precisely the right moment, and it appears to be as much part of the inner man as the outer. It appears both psychic and physical, personal and collective, ‘higher’ and ‘lower’…I am unashamedly prepared to call it fate. In our current 21st century, some may say that the Greeks were somewhat primitive in their philosophy about Fate, believing in Gods and Moira. It is my perception that the Greeks had a very keen intuitive sense of Fate. I feel is serves us immensely to embrace Moira and her natural laws, to seek and know the Gods in us intimately, using our intuition and the Divinatory Arts, so that we might abide by their laws...even as we reach toward Free Will…yes folks, Free Will, I didn’t forget about that! Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do. -C.G. Jung So what is ‘Free Will’? After we go through various definitions of it, essentially it comes down to our capacity to choose how we create our lives, our capacity to be self-determined. Do we have Free Will?...well, obviously we do to some degree. I can decide to write this article or not. You can decide to read it or not. The real question most people really want to know is how much Free Will do we really have? And that is the question I will seek to address, but before we go further into that, let me offer you my conception of Free Will. I believe that our whole lives are based on Free Will, but it’s how it’s qualified and mapped out. In my work as an Astrologer and Intuitive there is an undeniable sense that everything in one’s life was chosen on some level or another, and if not chosen, that it was at least agreed to. So, for example, I believe that the Gods approached each of you before you incarnated and said something like this, “Listen, we’ve got this fabulous lifetime coming up that we’d like to

assign to you. We’ll help you create it and script it based on what you’d like and need to learn. What do you say? Wanna help us draw up the blueprints?” Next, I feel that you go with them to the ‘scripting room’ and review you past lives and look at the core beliefs you developed around creation that you’d like to challenge this next lifetime so you can create anew, et voila! Before you know it, the Fates are measurin’, cuttin’, and spinnin’ their little hearts out and you’re getting ready to jump into ‘Lethe’ (the River of Forgetfulness), that’s a requirement so that you won’t feel too miserable with the memory of paradise in your head while your being battered by the hard knocks of earth school! Next thing you know, you’re coming down the birth canal, getting ready to take your next breath in the new body that you agreed to be in. Thus, my friends, you being here on this planet was an act of Free Will, even the Fate/Limitation in your life your Soul agreed to, though in a pre-carnate state. It’s important to understand that your personality didn’t choose this Lifetime, when you chose to come here; you didn’t even have a personality! Now, I don’t claim to have complete knowledge of just what the ‘Soul’ is, but I do believe that it’s an energy that can’t necessarily be grasped via the mind as it is transcendent of mind - in the same way it’s transcendent of gender. My point here is that we cannot apply humanistic reasoning to the Soul’s will, nor to God’s will for that matter. Look at the trials of Job from the Old Testament! The book of Job brings up a difficult question: do we ‘choose’ our lifetime, or is it ‘assigned’ to us? Let’s look a bit deeper... Events do not happen to us, we happen to them. Free will is the will not to conform to the past, and is the measure of a man’s capacity to act as an individual. -Dane Rudhyar If you do comparative reading on the ‘Near Death Experience’ phenomenon, you will find many common themes across the accounts given by those who have had a NDE. Most people who have had a NDE are shown via guides, angels, or whatever suits their particular associations with the afterlife, that they chose almost all the experiences and lessons in their life as part of a necessity for their Soul’s growth. Betty J. Eadie gave a full detailed account of her NDE in her book ‘Embraced by the Light’ (Bantam Books, 1994), in which she dedicated a whole chapter to this concept, titled ‘Selecting a body.’ As we selected a body for incarnation and a family, she states, “We understood the physical and behavioral attributes we would receive from our families. We were aware of the genetic coding of mortal bodies and the particular physical features we would have. We wanted and needed these…and were confident in accepting these circumstances.” It seems to me that we don’t create our parents; we leave that up to God and the Three Fates. Rather, we decide to agree to their assignment to us. Thus, we still exercise our Free Will through the agreement. Yet I still also sense that the more advanced one’s Soul is, the more it tends to be in harmony with Divine Will that Soul becomes. Therefore, Thy will becomes ‘My Will’, and with no concept of separation between the two, what’s there to choose?! So do we choose our lifetime, or is it assigned? It seems to me that both could be true.

Every time I work with a client, I assume that they agreed to be ‘assigned’ their parents and the family dynamics that they incarnated into for many, many reasons. I approach the chart from that perspective as I seek to intuit the dynamics experienced at home. For example, I want to know, did they experience a sexually abusive, controlling, Plutonian father? Or did they contract to experience the loving and nurturing energy of a Cancerian Mother?... Or did their Soul choose to take on familial inherited patterns which they absorbed and shifted as an individual because their Spirit was strong enough - like a Bodhisattva coming back to earth to help liberate others by carrying their suffering, though they’ve already achieved their own liberation? In my practice, I still find that some clients can’t accept the concept that they would agree to such terrible and difficult situations, especially clients that have gone through severe abuse, loss, or illness as children. Perhaps many of you feel or have felt this too. Let me share a story to illustrate my belief that our Souls do indeed agree to the assignment our parents, their genetics, and their wonderfully dysfunctional patterns. Years ago, I did a reading on a gay man who had his Sun in Libra. He was in his early forties and been sexually abused by his father when he was a young boy. The abuse was so traumatic that he couldn’t consciously remember what had happened to him, yet, as an adult he encountered periods of time during which he had no libido. He and his doctor couldn’t attribute it to anything physical, so he knew something wasn’t right. Eventually, through hypnosis he uncovered the trauma. Shortly after that he sought out my services to help him understand his life more deeply. After sensing that he’d been abused, I decided to test the waters and see if he’d be open to speaking about it. So, like I do with most of my clients, I said, “Astrology has taught me that we bring with us into life our own Soul’s history and patterns, but we also step into generational family patterns that are relative to the family psyche we have incarnated into, which may or may not be relative to our Soul’s patterns. Therefore, I feel that our Souls actually agree to the assignment of our parents.” That man’s personality looked at me like, “you have got to be #!*!ing kidding!” He and his personality then said, “I don’t believe that at all, I was sexually abused by my father, why would ‘I’ agree to that?” (As an aside, one of the main lessons I’ve mapped out for Libra is to embrace a sense of justice that is transcendent of victim consciousness; I could see that lesson alive and well in him.) Still, I felt his Soul had chosen to experience the abusive pattern because it knew it was strong enough to absorb and transform it...and if you think that isn’t a HUGE contribution to this planet, think again. As the Buddhists say, it takes one drop of water to help create an ocean. To continue, my client had come out as a gay man just before the AIDS crisis hit in the early 80s, but because of his abuse, he had no libido and consequently was abstinent for 5 years, this period of time encompassed the formative years of the AIDS epidemic. He confided in me that he might have otherwise been very sexually active during that time and would have most likely, like so many others in that first wave of the epidemic, died of AIDS. Later in the reading, I looked at him and said, “Did it ever occur to you that perhaps your father’s abuse in some way saved your life?” In that moment, tears ran down his face, and I saw years of anger and his inner victim washing away in the energy of forgiveness and acceptance. He then said, he believed it had. It was my perception that what occurred in that moment was his own coming to terms with a level of his Soul’s Libran agreement and contract. He had broken through to his Soul’s

intention and Free Will which allowed him to see a deeper connection and meaning to his past suffering. I then shared with him my perceptions of the abuse has having been assigned to his Soul to keep his siblings from it because he could heal the pattern. I will never forget that moment and what it taught me about the different levels of choice we have, from our Soul to our Ego, is it not all Free Will in the end, depending on the perception you choose? Now, as a bit of a disclaimer, I need to add here that I’m not implying that what seemed to apply to him, applies to all. Why we incarnate into the family situations we do is not black or white and is very complex and to some degree perhaps unknowable. This is just an example to open your perceptual field to the possibility that perhaps our Fate was Free Will to our Soul prior to incarnation. Furthermore, perhaps one of our greatest acts of Free Will while here in earth school is in the found in the choice of perception itself. So what about Karma? Fate is past Karma - Free Will is present Karma. The statement above implies that our Fate this lifetime is a result of our past lifetimes and that we are creating Karma in the present based on what we do with our Free Will today. I am going to use this idea and expand on it within the concept we call ‘Karma’. Karma via Merriam-Webster is defined as: the force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate reincarnation and to determine the nature of the person’s next existence. In addition, we have all heard of Karma described as a ‘cause and effect’ cycle that embraces all that we think, say, and do. Any of you ever had a Karma accident, also known as instant Karma?!! You know, when your conscious or unconscious actions bite you in the butt! I am sure we all have and on some level we knew that our karma brought us to the experience. Most people do indeed think of Karma as some sort of Universal punitive system in which we somehow ‘pay’ for our sins. Hmmm…to me the only difference between this concept and Hell seems to be the location! There is no doubt a cause and effect law in motion in this Universe. However, when it comes to Karma, Fate, and Free Will...we must go deeper than the basic notion that what we did in a past lifetime equates to this life’s suffering or pleasure, this is too myopic. As I have already shown you, it’s possible that we sometimes choose lifetimes that include absorbing someone else’s ‘karma’. The other day a friend of mine told me over dinner that someone said her motivations as an environmentalist were the result of being so destructive to the environment in another life...what’s that about?!! I countered and told her that perhaps she was a Native American in a past life and loved the land, thus bringing that with her this lifetime. When it comes to Karma and the way it weaves into Fate and Free Will, what I sense is this: whatever we did in a past life was an act of creation based on beliefs we held about ourselves, the Universe, and God. One of the many reasons we are here is to create again in this lifetime. And yes, perhaps some of our past life creations weren’t too pretty. So let’s imagine that we have chosen to challenge the core beliefs that led to those past life choices and creations. In addition, let’s define ‘beliefs’ as thought forms that we engage in over and over again until they become patterns.

If we are scripting a life with the Fates to challenge those beliefs, then we are going to ask them to appoint situations in our upcoming life that will force on us the consequences of those beliefs so that they can be dismantled, this I feel is our Past Karma that shows up as Fate. How it is scripted is really irrelevant, per se. Once we have faced the consequences of that belief, then we can choose what we want to do about it. Hopefully we choose to dump that belief and create a new belief that better serves our Soul’s evolution and desire to create - this is our Free Will and Present Karma. Thus, it’s the belief that is the issue, not necessarily what we did because of it. To illustrate this: let’s say you were put into a position of power your last lifetime and you abused that power through controlling, lying, manipulating the public, and by killing those who threatened your power. What’s at issue then is the core belief and perception that you were powerless and that real power came from control. That’s what motivated your choices and created the consequences of that lifetime. So you die and gasp during your past life review on the other side and thus beg to be given a chance to try again and get it right. The Universe, being the compassionate force that It is, has the Fates assign to you a life in which you have to come to terms with the belief of being powerless. How that is scripted only the Fates can tell because there are so many other threads to consider as you are connected to EVERYTHING in the Universe! Every level of existence connects through you somehow. All is indeed One. Can one really figure out why things happen as they do with some simplistic notion of Karma? If there is one thing I have learned through Astrology, it’s that the Gods do not think like we do...that is why it feels like we often have our own ‘Trials of Job’ during the planetary transits to our charts. This leads me to the next topic under the umbrella of Fate and Free Will…can the grace of Heaven intervene and save one from their Fate? Death is certain, and when a man’s fate has come, not even the gods can save him, no matter how they love him. -Homer When I chart the planetary transits for clients, it’s like watching a little piece of a theatrical play being performed at a cosmic level of display. I am watching Divine Choreography at Its best. Saturn, as well as the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto come on stage and begin to change the story of our lives. They symbolize the dismantlement of old belief systems and ways of creating, in favor of something new, within the connection of this whole solar system, each planet with its own particular methodology and intensity. This process often feels like a crisis and can affect every aspect of your life...from inner to outer, as well as personal to collective - and usually all of the above. One of the reasons that I personally love astrology so much is because it truly is a way of perceiving universally and personally, simultaneously!! One can grasp some hint of the ‘bigger picture’ and how one fits into the frame. Even so, I have found that we cannot escape our transits and their intentions, nor can we transcend the parameters of the birth chart. If you are a Sun in Taurus, you can’t just decide that you’d prefer to be a Sun in Leo!! It just ain’t gonna happen, talk about two very different archetypal energies! But when it comes to planetary transits, I have sensed that there are three factors that can change the way one experiences the transit and perhaps even in some cases, the way it manifests: prayer, surrender, and awareness. These three ingredients seem to blend together in such a way as to produce a sense of ‘cooperation’ with one’s contract and inner/outer timing. Prayer and surrender are of the

utmost importance because they seem to cast a vote toward constructive transformation found through letting go and aligning to the Gods. It’s like shifting one circuit in favor of the intentions of Heaven and the deeper Self. This then leads the way toward awareness. In the life of many clients, I have seen that after helping them achieve awareness, on some level, of that which is trying to shift via a transit, they themselves shift to accommodate the change via that awareness, often times, to such an extent that most of the outer planetary transit seems to be experienced as an internal state of transformation, consciously directed outward. In other words, the Universe didn’t have to hurl a brick at them to wake them up to a need for change! Having said that, I must also add that I have also seen the outer planetary transits symbolize events that were fated and unavoidable-events that had absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s choice to ‘cooperate’. Rather, they were predetermined by Fate as part of one’s contract in such a way, that not even the Gods or Grace of Heaven could intervene. Once again, here we find ourselves in the middle. Fate on one side, Free will on the other! Hopefully you can now see my dilemma in offering something absolutely definitive on the subject. In the end, what it comes down to is learning to know your own Fate and Free Will by being able to discern the difference. I sincerely hope that this article has helped you in that journey by stimulating questions and thoughts on the subject. There are obviously many other topics found within this subject that I cannot get to in this article, heck I am already on page ten! But I would like to leave you with a story that embodies the paradox of Fate and Free Will: The Appointment in Samara. The Appointment in Samara Once upon a time, it is said, there lived in Isfahan a young man who spent his days as servant to a wealthy merchant. On a fine morning, the young man rode to market, carefree and with his purse jingling with coins from the merchant’s coffers to buy meat and fruit and wine; and there in the market-place he saw Death, who beckoned to him as though about to speak. In terror the young man turned his horse about and fled, taking the road that led to Samara. By nightfall, filthy and exhausted, he had reached an inn there, and with the merchant’s money procured a room, and collapsed upon the bed with mingled fatigue and relief, for it seemed he had outwitted Death. But in the middle of the night there came a knock at the chamber door, and in the doorway stood Death, smiling affably. “How come you to be here?” demanded the young man, whitefaced and trembling; “Why I have come to collect you, as it is written. For when I saw you this morning in the market-place in Isfahan, I tried to say that you and I had an appointment tonight in Samara. But you would not let me speak, and only ran away.” Now...what would have happened had he let Death speak? Could he have used his Free Will and avoided his Fate?...