In a pre-industrial environment, the folk general perceived the future as consisting of more of the same, except that some bad things will likely to happen. The idea of a steady decay of humanity and existence is present in the Bible where one finds the "fall of man," being a steady decline from Adam through the great figures of ancient times to the present from long to ever-shorter lives. The past was generally perceived as better than the present, and by implication, if the future were to vary at all from the present, it would be worse.

I just finished a draft on this topic from another point of view in my Introduction to Folklore, which I hope to e-publish later this year. Here is an excerpt:

There is a widespread European belief in supernatural women who determine the fate of humanity. Each had a name that referred to past, present, and future, and not surprisingly, it was the entity that governed the future that inspired the most interest. In English, they were called the weird sisters, using the word wyrd, the Old English future tense of the verb “to be,” the name for the entity in charge of the future being applied to all three collectively.

The Romans referred to each of these goddesses as Fata (plural Fatae) as derived from fatum, the word for fate. This root is often linked with the term fey, a word imported into English that presumably serves as the basis for “fairy,” although the exact etymology of the term is disputed.

For the ancient Greeks, the three fates were called Moirae, and Old Norse they were called Norns. Besides being the wardens of past, present, and future, they were also the goddesses of birth, life, and death. These entities did not survive in any clear way in the folklore of the nineteenth century, but there are clear indications of the tradition in pagan times and vestiges of the folklore survive to the present. These motifs, references that have lost their contextual meaning, are known as “blind motifs.”

The fates were the weavers of destiny. Icelandic sagas describe them literally as working looms, determining who will die and who will live, making a range of detailed choices as they wove their eerie cloth. Their loom was made of dead men’s bones. The fabric was made of intestines and the weights that kept the weave tight and orderly were skulls. This may be more of a literary device than reflecting actual belief, but there is no doubt that these creatures inspired fear and awe. It is no mistake that the three weird sisters of Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play” (in theatrical circles, it is regarded as bad luck to give voice to the name of the play “Macbeth”) spoke of the future. The fates toyed with humanity, laughing as foolish mortals struggled against the women’s inevitable design of the future.