Triquetra meaning
The triquetra is three interlocked arcs, a threefold knot. It appears in Insular Christian art and in later Celtic revival work. A pagan “triple goddess” reading is modern.
Three vesicae locked, so that parting them destroys the drawing.
The name. Latin triquetrus, three-cornered.
Where it comes from
Insular Christian art — the Book of Kells and its cousins — uses the triquetra for the Trinity. Threefold figures are older in the islands than the gospels, so a triquetra on a stone is not automatically a creed. The ringed form is the one most people mean: three pointed ovals and a circle that binds them.
Christian
Three that are not three things
The Trinity is not a committee. The knot is one of the few diagrams that behaves like the doctrine: you cannot isolate a lobe and still have the knot. That is a better teaching picture than three identical circles in a row, which always look like three gods standing politely.
Celtic
Threefold is a habit of mind
Brigit and other threefold figures, the triskele’s spin, the triquetra’s lock — these are different geometries for a culture that liked to think in threes. The triskele turns. The triquetra holds. Do not swap them because both are “Celtic.”
Near this
Sources
- Insular gospel books and stone carving
- Modern Celtic-revival and neopagan reuse
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.