Triquetra
A knot of three interlaced loops, used by Christians today as a sign of the Holy Trinity.
Meaning
The name comes from the Latin triquetrus, three-cornered. It is drawn with three loops, each like a pointed oval, passing over and under one another around a shared centre. Catholics read the form as the equality of the three persons of the Trinity. Writing in Detroit Catholic, Sean M. Wright describes its three equal arcs, drawn with one continuous stroke, as showing the Trinity’s eternal unity and equality, and a circle drawn around it as the unity and eternal life of the one God.
Origin and history
Triquetra knots are common in early medieval stone sculpture and metalwork in Britain and Ireland. The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture notes many examples among the carvings of south Durham. The Irish antiquarian George Petrie found the figure on an old crozier, on the coins of the tenth-century Dano-Irish kings Regnald and Anlaff, and on Irish stone crosses of the same age.
A disputed reading
Whether its early makers meant the Trinity is disputed. Petrie, writing in 1845, thought that its frequent appearance on the Irish church's early antiquities meant it “would appear to have been used as a mystical type of the Trinity”. J. Romilly Allen disagreed in The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (1903). Apart from carvings at Meigle and at Llanfrynach in Brecknockshire, he wrote, the triquetra is purely ornamental, and “there is not the least foundation” for reading it as the Trinity. If it ever had a meaning, he thought it was probably from pagan times.
Worn today
Christians wear the triquetra as a sign of the Trinity, often under the name Irish trinity knot. Some Christians object that the knot comes from Wicca or paganism. The apologist Edward Dalcour, writing in 2021, calls that “the incorrect uninformed assertion” and answers that the knot’s “actual origins are unknown”: it turns up on Viking combs and saddles and on early Germanic coins “with no religious significance at all”.
Read next
- Next in Christian symbolsDoveA dove, in Christian art the sign of the Holy Spirit, and also of the Christian soul.
- In Celtic symbolsCeltic knotA pattern of bands woven over and under one another with no loose ends: the interlace of early medieval art in Ireland and Britain, best known from the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Its makers left no record of what, if anything, the knots meant. Readings such as eternity and unending love are modern.
See also
Shamrock, Triskele, Chi-Rho, Skull and crossbones, Ichthys, INRI.
Sources
- triquetra, Dictionary.com (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)
- Catalogue, chapter 4, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, Durham University, Chapter 4
- The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, Anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion, George Petrie, 2nd ed., 1845, Hodges and Smith, Dublin (Internet Archive), pp. 323–325
- The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, 1903, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Internet Archive), Part II, p. 305
- Ancient symbols of the Most Holy Trinity, Sean M. Wright, 12 February 2025, Detroit Catholic, Archdiocese of Detroit
- Triquetra and the Trinity, Edward Dalcour, Christian Defense (2021)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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