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Destiny is the irresistible power or agency that is conceived of as determining the future, whether in general or of an individual. The remorseless goddess Nemesis for early Greeks like Homer personified the pitiless distribution of fortune, neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to his deserts. In the time of the Hellenistic monarchies, after the death of Alexander the Great, the image of Tyche, crowned with a mural crown of city walls, embodied the fortunes of a city, which struggled to keep afloat in the chaotic violence among the Successors, as Alexander's heirs were called.

On an individual or even a national level, destiny is a predetermined state or condition foreordained by the Divine (see Predestination) or by human will (for example, in Manifest Destiny). Destiny is the human lot in life. It has taken the function of its Old English counterpart " doomThe word doom can refer to: DOOM a first-person shooter computer game. Doom metal a subgenre of heavy metal. Doom a band from West Yorkshire credited with founding the subgenre of punk called " Crust". Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a movie directed", as in the Domesday BookThis article is about the 11th century census. See BBC Domesday Project for the multimedia project. Domesday Book (also known as Domesday or Book of Winchester , was the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William the Con that took a census of England for the Normans in 1086, "doom" having taken on foreboding ominous connotations of the universal cataclysmThe cataclysm is the Greek expression for the Biblical Great Flood of Noah, from the Greek kataklysmos to "wash down. Erudite Bible studies drew it into the English language in 1633. A cataclysm is merely one kind of catastrophe best used when confined to at the end of time (see DoomsdayDoomsday is a Christian term for the end of the world. The Domesday Book is a census of England taken in the 11th century. The BBC Domesday Project was an attempt to create an equivalent of the Domesday book for the late 20th century. Doomsday is an alien, Doomsday machine).

Destiny is a source of ironyAdolf Hitler an example of visual irony Irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. Irony involves the perception that things are not what they are said to be or what they seem. Dramatic irony lies i in Greek tragedy, as it is in the Schiller play that VerdiGiovanni Boldini, 1886 (National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome) Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi ( October 10, 1813 January 27, 1901) was one of the great composers of Italian opera. His work was already very popular during his lifetime and remains so tod transformed into La Forza del Destino ("The Force of Destiny") or Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or MacBeth's knowledge of his own destiny does not preclude a horrible fate. The common theme is: try as the protagonists might to change the patterns, they cannot escape a destiny if your fate has been sealed.

A sense of destiny in its oldest human sense is in the soldier's fatalistic image of the "bullet that has your name on it" or the moment when your number "comes up." The human sense that there must be a hidden purpose in the random lottery governs the selection of Theseus to be among the youths to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Many Greek legends and tales teach the futility of trying to outmaneuver an inexorable fate that has been correctly predicted.

Reading the inscrutable Will of Destiny is the job of the shaman, the prophet, the sibyl and the seer. In Shang dynasty China, turtle bones were thrown ages before the I Ching was codified. Arrows were tossed to read Destiny, from Thrace to pagan Mecca.