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A triple goddess is a term used to describe any goddess who appears as a triad. In ancient Indo-European mythologies, various goddesses or demi-goddesses appear as a triad, either as three separate beings who always appear as a group (the Greek Moirae, Charites, Erinyes and the Norse Norns) or as a single deity who is commonly depicted in three aspects (Greek Hecate and the cult image of Latin Diana Nemorensis, of whom Hecate is one part¹).

Often it is ambiguous whether a single being or three are represented, as is the case with the Irish Brighid and her two sisters, also called Brighid, or the Morrígan who is known by at least three or four different names. In most ancient portrayals of triple goddesses, the separate deities perform different yet related functions, and there is no obvious difference in their ages.

In Wicca and related Neopagan religions, the Triple Goddess is, along with the Horned God, held in particular reverence, and her three aspects are most often portrayed as being of different ages: Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Triadic goddesses in history

Throughout history, various female deities and mythological figures have appeared as triads. It has been suggested by some^who?, that these all had a common origin in the form of a deity from the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European religion^{citation needed}.

Greek paganism

In ancient Greece, the goddess Hekate, who was associated with witchcraft and crossroads, appeared in artistic representations as three maidens. She had initially appeared in Anatolia, where she was a great goddess who did not appear as a triad, but her role was adapted in Classical Greece.

Similarly, the goddess Diana was sometimes viewed in a triple form. For instance, she was worshipped as Diana Nemorensis at her sacred grove at Aricia, on the shores of Lake Nemi from the late sixth century BC. "The Latin Diana was conceived as a threefold unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess, and the goddess of the nether world, Hekate," Albert Alföldi interpreted the late Republican numismatic image,² noting that Diana montium custos nemoremque virgo ("keeper of the mountains and virgin of Nemi") is addressed by Horace as diva triformis ("three-form goddess").³ Diana is commonly addressed as Trivia by Virgil⁴ and Catullus.⁵

Celtic paganism

Amongst the Celts, triplism appeared in both goddesses and gods⁶. Male examples include the god Lugus.

The earliest appearence of triadic goddesses in Celtic paganism that we know about was that of the Matronae,⁷ three deities associated with motherhood. Inscriptions to these deities were found on continental Europe and dated to the 1st century⁸.

The goddess Brigit, worshipped in Ireland, was also depicted in a triple form as three sisters; Brigit the Poetess, Brigit the Smith and Brigit the Doctor⁹.

Norse paganism

In Norse paganism, a subset of Germanic paganism, the Norns are a triad of females who weave fate. Typically they are depicted as three elderly women.

Arabian paganism

In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was worshipped as a pagan deity with a family of deities around him. Among these was a triad of goddesses who were Allah's daughters; Allat, Al-Uzza and Manat.

Modern interpretations

The term Triple Goddess was popularised by poet and scholar Robert Graves, in his "work of poetic imagination," The White Goddess (1948). Graves believed that an archetypal goddess triad occurred throughout Indo-European mythology. He was not the originator of this theory; it appears as a recurrent theme in the "Myth and Ritual" school of classical archaeology at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, among scholars concerned with the ritual purposes of myths. The "Myth and Ritual" school is often associated with Cambridge University and with Oxford University in England.

One of the most recent of archaeologists to explore this theme was the late Professor Marija Gimbutas whose studies on the Chalcolithic period of Old Europe (6500-3500 B.C.E.) have opened up entirely new avenues of research.¹³ Gimbutas was a prominent supporter of the view that in ancient Europe, the Aegean and the Near East, a great Triple Goddess was worshipped, predating the patriarchal religions imported by nomadic speakers of Indo-European languages (later superseded by patriarchal monotheism). Gimbutas interpreted artefacts from neolithic (and earlier) Europe as evidence of worship of a triple goddess of (1) death (represented as a "stiff nude", bird of prey or poisonous snake), (2) birth and fertility (represented by a mother-figure) and of (3) regeneration (represented by a moth, butterfly or bee, or alternatively by a symbol of the uterus or fetus, such as a frog, hedgehog or bulls head.)¹⁴ This goddess persisted into Classical times as Gaia (the Greek Earth Mother), and the Roman Magna Mater, among others.¹⁵ That such a Great Goddess existed is disputed by authors such as Cynthia Eller¹⁶ and Philip G. Davis.

The first and third aspects of the goddess, according to Gimbutas, were frequently conflated to make a goddess of death-and-regeneration represented in folkore by such figures as Baba Yaga. Gimbutas regarded the Eleusinian Mysteries, with which this view is highly compatible, as a survival into classical antiquity of this ancient goddess worship ¹⁷

The publication of the complete texts of the magical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt¹⁸ provide exhaustive examples of the imagery usually wrongly ascribed to Graves' imagination. In one hymn, for instance, the "Three-faced Selene" is simultaneously identified as the three Charites, the three Moirae, and the three Erinyes; she is further addressed by the titles of several goddesses:

She is variously described within the one poem as young, bringing light to mortals ... Child of Morn, as Mother of All, before whom gods tremble, and as Goddess of Dark, Quiet and Frightful One who has her meal amid the graves. She is exalted as the supreme goddess of time and space,

The Greek Magical Papyri reveal elements of the culture of Greco-Roman Egypt that were drawn not only from Classical and Egyptian tradition but also from earlier cultures such as those of Mesopotamia and the Near East. The triplicity of the Goddess in these texts is a recurrent theme.

This imagery was well-known to those with a Classical education and continued in poetry throughout English history. A case in point is the Garland of Laurell by the English poet, John Skelton (c. 1460 - June 21, 1529):

The Goddess triad is an essential feature of the Shakti forms of Hinduism and a distinction is made between the separate goddesses Sarasvati, Lakshmi and Kali and their manifestation as three aspects of MahaDevi ("The Great Goddess") when they are named MahaSarasvati, MahaLaksmi, and MahaKali. In the annual festival of Navaratri images of the Triple Goddess are carried in procession throughout India and in Hindu communities worldwide.¹⁹²⁰

An archetypal Goddess triad is not limited to Indo-European cultures, and can also be found in some mythologies of Africa and Asia. The triadic theme also appears in medieval Christian folk traditions — notably with The Three Marys.

Images of Goddess triads are well attested from both inscriptions and sculptural sources from the time of the Upper Palaeolithic. The shrine rooms of Catal Huyuk which dated from 7500 B.C.E. contain bas-relief images of a Goddess in three forms.

While there is no controversy about the fact that a wide variety of ancient cultures worshipped some types of Goddesses who at times were seen as threefold, many scholars consider Graves' statements that they fit a "universal" pattern to be highly speculative, and his lumping together of diverse cultures in the quest for this universal pattern to be inappropriate. Graves attempted to apply his theory of "Maiden, Mother, Crone" to Goddesses who do not fit that pattern, such as the triple goddesses of Celtic Mythology, whose triple aspects are based on function, not age. The Celtic Goddesses also cannot be said to fulfil roles that are static or well-divided. The three aspects of Celtic Triple Goddesses may all be Goddesses of war (such as in the case of the Morrígan) or manifestations of different types of creativity (such as with Brighid). The existence of triple goddesses in a variety of cultures does not mean that those cultures experienced these goddesses in the same way, or that there were universal religious patterns that could be applied to all these diverse cultures.

Descriptions of the relation between Greek Mythology and the Triple Goddess can be found in many of the myths translated in Robert Graves' anthology The Greek Myths and more cryptically and poetically in his book The White Goddess and his book of essays entitled Mammon and the Black Goddess. In his novel Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) Graves extrapolated this further into a future world where the present Monotheistic religions are discarded and the Triple Goddess once again rules supreme (one of the Goddess' manifestations is called "Mari", implying the Mary of Christianity is a disguised form of the same Goddess) (see [1]).

In his introduction The Sufis, a book he co-wrote with Idries Shah, Graves translates a poem of the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) which illustrates a triple goddess as a theme among medieval Sufis:

In this book, Robert Graves and Idries Shah explore the influences that medieval Kabbalah and pre-Islamic Sufi beliefs had on surviving pre-Christian folk-traditions in Europe.

Moon imagery

This relates the three life-thresholds of birth, procreation and death with phases of the moon. The term "new moon" is used by Graves in its original sense, as the first visible crescent after the luni-solar conjunction (which has traditionally been used as the starting point of lunar calendars), rather than the luni-solar conjunction itself.

Persian goddesses

In pre-Islamic Arabia and Nabataea the goddess triad were called "the three daughters of Allah": al-Lat ("the Goddess"), Uzza ("Power") the youngest, and Manat ("Fate") the crone, "the third, the other".²¹²² They were known collectively as the three cranes.²² The name al-Lat is known from the time of the histories of Herodotus in which she is named Alilat, meaning "The Goddess".²³²⁴ It is these goddesses who were said to have been briefly interpolated into an early version of the Qur'an in the apocryphal Satanic Verses.²²

The Triple Goddess in Neopaganism

Many followers of Neopagan religions subscribe to the theory that an ancient Triple Goddess was worshipped across Europe, the Aegean and the Near East, and indeed, see this Goddess as universal to all peoples. Some identify her with Gaia or nature.

Some Wiccans and Neopagans honour their Goddess in the triple aspects of Maiden, Mother and Crone. Some also syncretise goddesses who do not historically fit this pattern. Such goddesses include Hecate, who when in triplicate was historically depicted as three young women, and Celtic goddesses who sometimes appear in triple form, but for whom there are no clear age patterns.

Fates

Another cross-cultural archetype is the three goddesses of fate. In Greek Mythology there are the Moirae; in Norse mythology there are the Norns. The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Wyrd Sisters of Terry Pratchett's novel of the same name are most definitely inspired by these deities. (In Pratchett's work, they are referred to as "the maiden, the mother, and... the other one", as everyone is quite afraid of calling Granny Weatherwax a "crone".) The three supernatural female figures called variously the Ladies, Mother of the Camenae, the Kindly Ones, and a number of other different names in The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman play self-consciously on both the triple Fates and the Maiden-Mother-Crone goddess archetypes, suggesting that they are, in fact, all the various interpretations of the motif recorded through history. The manifestation of a Fate goddess in multiple forms in also attested from ancient Egypt papyri in which the birth of a child is greeted by the appearance of the Seven (or in some writings Nine) Hathors.

The earthly representatives of the Fates may have been travelling bands of women in the role of priestesses, seers and celebrants, evident from the Norse sagas (cf. Egils Saga) and Indo-European and Egyptian myth and folktale (cf. Sleeping Beauty, The Westcar Papyrus).

Ennead

An expansion of the triadic concept is that the triad can expand into an ennead, or a group of nine aspects or nine goddesses, e.g. the Nine Muses, the Nine Maidens.

The manifestation of the Maiden aspect of the Great Goddess, known to archaeologists as The Goddess of Love-and-Battle^{citation needed} (such as Inanna/Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Freyja of Scandinavia), is represented pictorially as The Three Graces, The Bull with Three Cranes or the as triad: Athene, Hera and Aphrodite in the Judgement of Paris representing the embodiments of victory in battle, royal dominion, and love. This was a recurrent theme in Bronze Age myth and iconography in both Europe and the Middle East. This was a time before Astarte became Aphrodite, as a separate goddess of love. This was a later, Iron Age development. As Anne Ross noted in her work Pagan Celtic Britain, "there is no Celtic goddess of love".²⁵

Each aspect of the goddess could thus appear in triad, for example, the Dea Matrona or Matres ("the Mother goddesses") shown as a triad throughout the Celtic, Gaulish and Romano-Celtic territories. They are still known in Welsh folklore as Y Mamau ("the Mothers").

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