The Number Three

Three may be the most common sacred number of all. Prayers are repeated three times, gods appear in threes, and teachings are packed into threefold lists. But the triads of different religions are not the same idea in different clothes. Each grew from its own history and carries its own meaning.

The best known is the Christian Trinity. Christians hold that there is one God who exists as three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The New Testament does not use the word, but it contains threefold formulas, above all the command in Matthew’s Gospel to baptise ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. Over the next centuries theologians worked out how to reconcile this with the oneness of God. The Council of Nicaea in 325 declared that the Son is of one being with the Father, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Most Christian churches accept these definitions; a few groups, such as Unitarians, reject them.

Hinduism has the Trimurti, the ‘three forms’: Brahma who creates the world, Vishnu who preserves it and Shiva who destroys it at the end of each cycle so that it can begin again. The grouping is popular in art and in the Puranas, texts compiled over the first millennium CE. Yet it is not the centre of most Hindu worship. Devotees of Vishnu see him as the supreme God, devotees of Shiva see Shiva in the same way, and temples to Brahma are rare. The Trimurti is better understood as a way of fitting great gods into one scheme than as a doctrine of three persons in one being.

Buddhism speaks of the Three Jewels, or Three Refuges: the Buddha, the Dharma, which is his teaching, and the Sangha, the community that keeps it. To become a Buddhist is to ‘take refuge’ in all three, and the formula is traditionally recited three times. Buddhist teaching is full of threes: the three marks of existence (impermanence, suffering and non-self), the three poisons that keep beings bound (greed, hatred and delusion), and, in Mahayana thought, the three bodies of a Buddha.

In religious Daoism the highest gods are the Three Pure Ones. They are personifications of the Dao at different stages of the world’s unfolding, and the third is identified with Laozi, the legendary author of the Daodejing, as a god. The triad took shape in the early medieval centuries and their three statues now stand side by side in many Daoist temples. The Daodejing itself gives three a place in creation: two gives birth to three, and three to the ten thousand things.

Three appears so widely that no single origin explains it. One idea, already found in Aristotle’s report of the Pythagoreans, is that three is the first number with a beginning, a middle and an end, and so the first that feels complete. One is a point and two a line, but three can close a shape and tell a story. Folk tales use three brothers, three wishes and three trials for the same reason.

Families give another model. Ancient Egyptian temples often honoured a divine father, mother and child, such as Amun, Mut and Khonsu at Thebes or Osiris, Isis and Horus. Elsewhere three marks the layers of the cosmos, the heavens, the earth and the underworld, or the three stages of time, past, present and future. In ethics, three offers a simple scheme for the whole person: the Zoroastrian rule of good thoughts, good words and good deeds covers mind, speech and action.

It is tempting to line up all these triads and suggest a common source. Writers since the eighteenth century have argued that the Christian Trinity was borrowed from the Trimurti or from Egyptian triads. Historians do not accept this. The Christian doctrine grew out of Jewish belief in one God and the early Church’s worship of Jesus, and its key terms come from Greek philosophy. The resemblance lies mostly in the number.

The triple goddess is a good example of how a number can be given an ancient look. Antiquity did know goddesses in threes: the three Fates who spun, measured and cut the thread of life, the three Graces, the Celtic mother goddesses carved in groups of three, and Hecate, shown with three bodies at crossroads. But the image of one great goddess in three phases, maiden, mother and crone, matched to the waxing, full and waning moon, owes most to the poet Robert Graves and his book The White Goddess (1948). Modern Pagan movements such as Wicca took it up, and it is now part of their living practice, but historians treat it as a modern synthesis rather than a recovered ancient faith.

Elsewhere three remains part of daily religious life. Many Christians make the sign of the cross ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’. Buddhists bow three times before an image of the Buddha. Jews pray three times a day. In many Muslim traditions, the washing before prayer repeats each action three times, following the example attributed to the Prophet. Hindu rituals often end with a threefold call for peace, shanti, and Christian liturgy repeats the ‘Holy, holy, holy’ that the prophet Isaiah heard the angels sing. Few numbers are so easy to remember, and that alone may explain much of its success.