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Plate 1 Three pointed loops joined at the centre, each pointing outward

Triquetra

A knot of three interlaced loops, used by Christians today as a sign of the Holy Trinity.

Christian symbols. Also called Trinity knot.

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.

See also

Chi-Rho, Skull and crossbones, Latin cross, Orthodox cross, Jerusalem cross, Celtic cross.

Sources

  1. triquetra, Dictionary.com (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)
  2. Catalogue, chapter 4, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, Durham University, Chapter 4
  3. 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
  4. The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, 1903, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Internet Archive), Part II, p. 305
  5. Ancient symbols of the Most Holy Trinity, Sean M. Wright, 12 February 2025, Detroit Catholic, Archdiocese of Detroit

Last reviewed September 24, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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