Trinity, Revival, and Modern Reinvention

From the medieval period the triquetra was increasingly read explicitly as a symbol of the Christian Trinity, three equal, distinct, inseparable arcs sharing one continuous line, and it is used in that sense in churches today, often labelled the Trinity knot. The nineteenth-century Celtic Revival recovered Insular knotwork as a marker of Irish and Scottish identity, and from the later twentieth century the triquetra was adopted by modern Pagan and Wiccan currents as a sign of a triple goddess or of threefold nature. Its single most concentrated push into wider recognition came from broadcast fiction rather than any Pagan text: the American television series Charmed, which ran from 1998 to 2006, used a triquetra within a circle as the emblem on its central prop, the Book of Shadows, and tied it to the show's central magical device, the Power of Three shared by its three witch protagonists, a fictional framing that nonetheless sent large numbers of viewers looking for the symbol's real-world Celtic and Wiccan associations. These modern meanings are genuine to the communities that hold them but are not continuous with the medieval usage; the claim that the triquetra is an ancient Celtic goddess symbol reads a recent interpretation back onto ornament that did not carry it.