Fate, destiny, fortune and determinism are four different ideas, not one
People use fate and destiny interchangeably, but philosophers pull them apart. Fate is a future no choice can change. Destiny looks at the present, the place your own decisions have brought you. Fortune is blind chance, and determinism, often confused with fate, is simply cause and effect with nothing sacred about it.
The idea is very old. The earliest known reference appears on a cuneiform document about the mythical Tablet of Destinies, probably describing a pact among three groups of Sumerian gods in which only their leader could undo what he had decreed. In Babylon the scribe god Nabu wrote down the fates the gods assigned to humans. Greek, Roman and Norse myth all imagined fate as thread spun by supernatural women: the Moirai, the Parcae and the Norns.
Chance got its own goddess when life felt most unpredictable. In the Hellenistic world Tyche, whose name means luck, grew in importance as the embodiment of a city's good fortune. The Roman Fortuna, blindly spinning her wheel, was kept alive by Christian writers such as Boethius and returned strongly in the Renaissance. Philosophers argued over how much room this left for choice. The Stoics held that everything unfolds according to a divine plan, free will notwithstanding, while the Epicureans denied divine fate and counted rational actions as voluntary. Determinism, by contrast, says each event follows from earlier ones, a caused chain rather than a decree, and is never a religious or astrological notion.
Other traditions blend the fixed and the open. The Chinese idea of ming yun pairs ming, life or destiny given by heaven, with yun, circumstance or individual choice, so destiny is at once set and flexible. In Islam fate is the decree of God, some Christians hold to free will and others to predestination, and Buddhism teaches that all phenomena arise dependently from what came before. Nietzsche answered with amor fati, the love of one's fate, turning acceptance into something close to a choice.
Storytellers keep testing the idea. Greek tragedy such as Oedipus Rex shows the futility of dodging a correctly predicted fate. Borges pictured destiny as a labyrinth of forking paths and as a secret lottery governing all of life, while Neil Gaiman made Destiny the oldest of the Endless, a blind man carrying a book holding all of past and future.
Source: Destiny
