The Ancient World
Symbol · The Ancient World
Triquetra
The Celtic Trinity Knot
Three arcs, one unbroken line: distinct forces that hold only because each relies on the others.
What it meansThree arcs drawn without lifting the pen: the figure is one continuous line that looks like three things. Whatever triad it has been used for — and it has served several — the reading is always that the parts are distinguishable and not separable.
Symbol · The Ancient World
Triskelion
The Spiral of Life
Life as motion, not state — spiralling out and back, at the risk of losing the centre you turn on.
What it meansThree arms in rotation, all turning the same way, so the figure has no rest position — it reads as motion even when still. The reading is of life as process rather than state: always going round, and always around a centre that is itself empty.
Symbol · The Ancient World · 1323 BCE
Ouroboros
The Serpent of Eternity
The end feeds the beginning: nothing is lost, only transformed — or nothing ever escapes the loop.
What it meansThe earliest drawing of it carries the legend hen to pan — the all is one — written inside the circle. The serpent eats itself and is not consumed, which is the alchemists' figure for a process that supplies its own material and therefore never has to stop.