| VEDIC HINDOO. |
| Agni, Fire, governing the Earth. |
| Indra, The Firmament, governing Space or Mid Air. |
| Surya, The Sun, governing the Heavens. |
| BRAHMINIC HINDOO. |
| Brahma, the Creator. |
| Vishnu, the Preserver. |
| Siva, the Destroyer (the Transformer) (= Fire). |
The Platonic and other philosophic Trinities need not detain us; it has been asserted that by their means the doctrine of the pagan Trinity was grafted on to Christianity.
Right down through the ages the number three has always been regarded as of mystic force. Wherever perfection or efficiency was sought its means were tripled; thus Jove’s thunderbolt had three forks of lightning, Neptune’s lance was a trident, and Pluto’s dog had three heads. The Graces, the Fates, and the Furies were each three. The trefoil was held sacred by the Greeks as well as other triad forms. In the East three was almost equally regarded. Three stars are frequently met upon Asiatic seals. The Scarabæus was esteemed as having thirty joints.
Mediæval thought, in accepting the idea of the Christian Trinity, lavishly threw its symbolism everywhere; writers and symbolists, architects and heralds, multiplied ideas of three-fold qualities.
Heraldry is permeated with three-fold repetitions, a proportion of at least one-third of the generality of heraldic coats having a trinity of one sort or another. In all probability the stars and bars of America rose from the coat-armour of an English family in which the stars were three, the bars three.
St. Nicholas had as his attributes three purses, three bulls of gold, three children.
Sacred marks were three dots, sometimes alone, sometimes in a triangle, sometimes in a double triangle; three balls attached, making a trefoil; three bones in a triangle crossing at the corners; a fleur-de-lys in various designs of three conjoined; three lines crossed by three lines; and many other forms.
God, the symbolists said, was symbolized by a hexagon, whose sides were Glory, Power, Majesty, Wisdom, Blessing, and Honor. The three steps to heaven were Oratio, Amor, Imitatio. The three steps to the altar, the three spires of the cathedral, the three lancets of an Early English window, were all supposed to refer to the Trinity.
Having seen that the idea of the Trinity is a part of most of the ancient religious systems, it remains to point to one or two instances where, in common with other ideas from that source, the Trinity has a place among church grotesques.
There is a triune head in St. Mary’s Church, Faversham, Kent, which was doubtless executed as indicative of the Trinity. The Beehive of the Romishe Church, in 1579, says: “They in their churches and Masse Bookes doe paint the Trinitie with three faces; for our mother the holie Church did learn that at Rome, where they were wont to paint or carve Janus with two faces.” In the Salisbury Missal of 1534 is a woodcut of the Trinity triangle surmounted by a three-faced head similar to the above. Hone reproduces it in his Ancient Mysteries Described, and asks, “May not the triune head have been originally suggested by the three-headed Saxon deity named “Trigla”?” The Faversham tria, it will be noticed, has the curled and formal beards of the Greek mask.