Ideas - The Story and Magic of Three

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

From curses to charms to incantations and evocations, speaking thrice gives power — today, and in the ancient past. As our number series continues, we enter the powerful and spiritual realm of three. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 27, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, when the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window.

Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. As she was sewing, she pricked her finger with a needle, and three drops of blood fell on the snow. Three is a good way to start a story. Those three drops of blood in Snow White, or a genie who grants three wishes. Three is also a great structure. Three acts in plays and movies, three books in a trilogy. There is something enchanting about three, bewitching even. So we learned from a very early age that when the number three becomes dominant, there's something different going on. It's like entering an enchanted realm. It also casts a spell.

You say, by earth, by air, by fire, by sea, by all the powers of three times three, as I do will, so mode it be, and the spell is done. Of course, you have to say the magic words three times. People would say, oh, I spoke this charm three times as we walked around the Oaken Post three times. Using those words in that repetitive, ritualistic way is very powerful. This episode from producer Matthew Lazenrider is the second in our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time. This is The Magic of Three. Few people get their songs covered by three musical acts as disparate as Blind Melon, De La Soul, and Jeff Buckley. But Bob DeRoe did.

Three is a Magic Number. Here's the Jeff Buckley. Here's the De La Soul. And here's the Blind Melon. Bob DeRoe was the composer behind ABC's Schoolhouse Rock series from the 1970s. His first job for the program was to write songs about multiplication, and the first number was three. Bob died in 2018, but in 1996 he spoke with Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air about that very first gig, that song about three. And so I agreed to tackle it, and I spent about three weeks before I would let myself write the first song. I thought first, looked in math books,

and since I picked my first title, it was called Three is a Magic Number, I even looked in magic and occult books. Did you get anything from those books that you used in the song? What did you get? You know, embodied in certain things like the Trinity, the old sayings, the heart and the brain and the body, faith, hope, and charity. Trinities of sorts. So I got mainly that, trinities.

And, of course, I also was an admirer of Buckminster Fuller, so I was thinking of his triangle concept. And he's right. Threes are everywhere and have lots of positive associations. There's the Holy Trinity, other godly triads in religion. In various cultures and traditions, three is a number of stability and harmony and creation. Durow name-dropped Buckminster Fuller there, best known for his geodesic domes, those massive bubbles made of triangles, one being the biosphere in Montreal. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato also thought there was something fundamental in three. In his metaphysical account of the origins of the universe, he suggests a great craftsman built the world out of shapes, with the simplest being the nice, stable triangle.

But along with holiness, order, and stability, there's something else to three. Thoreau mentioned it. The mysterious, the eerie, the occult. Three has a dark side. It's in spells, chants, curses, hexes, and charms. There are millennia's worth of evil, powerful, and bewitching threes. Like this obvious one.

When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly's done. When the battle's lost and won. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters from Macbeth. And there is a long history of shadowy women appearing in threes. There are other figures that come in threes. There's Cerberus, the three-headed dog, Asmodeus, the demon sometimes depicted with three heads, but it's probably not the right tone

for Darrow's song. Before delving into the deep, dark, mythic history, there's a more recent place you can find powerful threes. Where three appears as a chant, a ritual, and a literary symbol all at the same time. And it gives a tantalizing hint about one of the meanings of three. It starts with this game of truth or dare. Truth. Do you want to make out with Benji Swartz? Dare. This is from the TV show Supernatural from 2005,

but the scene it depicts is real, at least has been repeated in real life countless times from the 1970s to today. You have to say Bloody Mary in the bathroom. Is that the best you can come up with? Who's Bloody Mary? She's this witch. It doesn't matter who she is.

Point is, if you say her name three times in the bathroom mirror, she appears and scratches your eyes out. Scratches your eyes out. It's called Bloody Mary, and reports of the practice among young girls started appearing around the 1970s. It became the stuff of schoolyard legends, of campfire tales and slumber party freakouts. No turning on the lights. And remember, three times. freakouts. The game is an attempt to summon an evil spirit using the power of three. Usually, nothing happens unless your jerk friends bang on the outside of the bathroom door. It's a dark and fun game.

Scared ya. Or is it a game? I've used the term game ritual. It's playful, it's fun and exciting, but it's also very serious. It means that you're venturing into another realm and you're not sure what might be happening there. And so I think the term game is not quite enough. Elizabeth Tucker studies folklore at Binghamton University in New York. I was leading a Girl Scout troop as part of my interest in learning about pre-adolescent storytelling. And the girls in my troop meeting kept excusing themselves to go to the bathroom,

and they seemed to be going to the bathroom quite a lot. And so after a while, I asked, why are all of you leaving so much to go to the bathroom? And one of them said, well, it's Mary Wolf. We have to go see Mary Wolf. And so I asked them to take me over to the bathroom to show me what was going on. And they said, she's there, she's there. She's a wolf woman, and she's going to reach over, and she's going to scratch our faces, and she's going to hurt us. And I could tell from the look on their faces that she was there for them. They were scared of her. The light was down.

It was very dark in the bathroom. And they were all taking turns going in and calling Mary Wolf, who's a variation of Bloody Mary, to try to get her to appear and to hurt them. Usually with Bloody Mary or Mary Wolf or Mary Worth, the various names she's called, it's something destructive, something that's going to be damaging or harmful. And so, of course, the question comes up, why do kids want to summon something in a mirror that is supernatural and that's going to hurt them? If you go into a bathroom every night for three nights and you say Bloody Mary three times, then the first night a spot of blood appeared. We chanted Bloody Mary three times in the hope of seeing her in the

mirror. Then we flushed all the toilets and the stalls. And the second night it's a little bigger and then the third night it's supposed to be a woman's face. Once the lights are out you close your eyes and turn around three times. Then you open them and stare straight into the mirror and chant Bloody Mary show your fright show your fright this starry night. These are reports gathered from young people in the 1970s on what they've heard about the Bloody Mary game. They were gathered by Alan Dundas, a folklorist at UC Berkeley, who had a special interest in the number three.

As you can hear, three is a big part of the Bloody Mary ritual, the obvious being the repetition. I think repetition is vital because it moves you gradually from the first stage of the ritual toward the culminating stage in which something may happen. If you say the name slowly and then repeat after that, you are building up incrementally toward a state of heightened excitement and fear in which you expect something will happen after the third repetition. And so it's very important to have that slow repetition of just the right number of names to get you into the frame of mind where you expect something amazing to happen and where you are both longing for that to happen and terrified that it may actually take place and you may lose control

of your own safety while going through that experience. You have to chant slowly so she has time to come from the spirit world. Then you wait and see her face. So there three is more about frame of mind. By taking your time and saying it three times, it gets you in the mood for something spooky. But there's another three as well. The number three is a very important centering number in the stories that children learn. If you look at any collection of folktales, you're likely to find many tales with the number three in the title. A story about three sons, for example, who go out in search of their fortune. And each of them has to go through the same sequence of actions in a certain way to try to achieve his heart's desire. age that when the number three becomes dominant, there's something story-like, something not exactly fictive, but different going on.

It's like entering an enchanted realm where the possibilities are fantastic. Once you see her, you have to run out of the bathroom where your friends are waiting. If you've sinned or done anything evil in your life, then you'll have three scratches of blood on your cheek. waiting. If you've sinned or done anything evil in your life, then you'll have three scratches of blood on your cheek. A few of the reports gathered by Alan Dundas mentioned this, three scratches on the face or three drops of blood. And that's where Bloody Mary connects with centuries of folk tales and fairy tales. There is a trope in a lot of stories about three drops of blood. Think the beginning of Snow White. Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, a queen sat at a window. As she was sewing,

she pricked her finger with a needle, and three drops of blood fell on the snow. But Snow White isn't the only one. In the Grimm's Brothers collection of fairy tales, there are at least three other stories that involve exactly three drops of blood. There's the Goose Girl. Then she held out a small white cloth and let three drops of blood fall into it. Faithful John. He spat out three drops of blood, and immediately she breathed again and regained consciousness.

And Sweet sweetheart Roland. The girl got the magic wand. Then she took the dead girl's head and dropped three drops of blood onto the floor. One in front of the bed, one in the kitchen, and one on the steps. Then she hurried away with her sweetheart. It's such a common trope, it must have some kind of meaning. There have been a few attempts to find one. For example, in the 1970s, when young people were freaking themselves out in the bathroom, something else was going on in academia. And that was a resurgence of interest in what's called psychoanalytic criticism or Freudian criticism, where you look at stories and myth and TV and movies using the ideas of people like Sigmund

Freud and Carl Jung, this search for hidden symbols that resonate with our unconscious minds, usually in some way reflecting the internal journey of the psyche. And because it's Freudian, you could probably guess they involved sex in their analysis. It is the threesome of snake, Eve, and Adam. In the unconscious, three stands for sex. This is from a 1976 book called Uses of Enchantment by a controversial Freudian psychologist and writer named Bruno Bettelheim. While other Freudian scholars related the three drops of blood to girls' anxieties about puberty and menstruation, Bettelheim went big. The three is there to put us all in mind of our personal journeys from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. And it starts with the idea that we're all born

into a triangle with our parents. Three stands for the relations within the nuclear family and efforts to ascertain where one fits in. It symbolizes the Oedipal situation with its deep involvement of three persons with one another. The child begins to feel themselves as a person, as a significant and meaningful partner in human relation. One becomes a person only as one defines oneself against others. Thus, three symbolizes a search for who one is, biologically and sexually. Broadly put, three symbolizes the search for one's personal and social identity. That Freudian read on things does make sense in the context of young people at a sleepover

freaking themselves out. It's got it all, separation from parents, danger, and staring into a mirror is itself a pretty great real-life metaphor for searching for identity. Freudian and psychoanalytic ideas have faded from popularity quite a bit over the last 50 years, but it does leave some useful things to think about. One is, threes in scary stories and fairy tales don't necessarily have to have an intention behind them. Nobody wrote, ah yes, this story is about children searching for identity, so I'll put a three in there. We just retell them because our minds find those things meaningful. And the Freudian focus on sex might also hide something a bit more nuanced. Elizabeth Tucker at Binghamton University does think the game relates to transition through

life stages, but it also relates to time. I think Mary represents suffering womankind who has gone through something terrible and who wants to reach out in a liminal space and inflict pain or at least a big scare upon those who dare to come and confront her. I think this has to do with women's suffering. And we see this in legends about Mary's grave on Long Island and Indiana and other locations. The idea that there's a hidden history of women's suffering and there are certain ways to learn about it. But one of the most powerful ways is by entering this liminal zone and invoking a woman, a Mary, who represents all of that. It's just opening up a dimension of knowledge that is saddening,

but is something vital to learn about, and you're more prepared going into your future. Time, our perception of it anyway, can be split into three. And the game, in Tucker's reading of it, plays around with time. A young person standing in the present, knowing the horrors of the past, and confronting the dangers of the future. These days, with many liminal experiences happening online, this has become more of an issue and more young folklorists these days are looking at what happens online, how one can have certain experiences without going anywhere, but undergoing the same sorts

of challenges, fear tests, experiences that open up your mind in ways you might not expect. And so this becomes more cerebral and emotional, less dependent upon physical circumstances. And during the past several years, as we've made our way through the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen more of this shift because for quite a while we weren't supposed to go out. And even once we were allowed to go, time and space felt somewhat different. Back at you again with another 3am challenge. Today we are going to be doing the Three Kings Ritual. And this has been the highest suggested 3am challenge. A more recent fear test, spread mostly online, is called the Three Kings Ritual. Hey guys, it's Brittany. In today's video, we are playing the game known as the Three

Kings and I'm like pretty much dressed up. I think a lot of this has to do with the timing of the ritual. So to play the Three Kings Ritual, you need a quiet and empty room. You also need three chairs, turn off the lights, leave the door open and go to your bedroom. Set your alarm clock for 3.30 a.m. Do not let the candle go out. Look straight ahead and stare into the darkness and do not look at the mirrors. You have exactly three minutes to light your candle, grab your cell phone and make your way to the dark room to sit in your throne. You should be seated by 3.33 a.m. Suffice to say, you won't be alone. And if you have questions, you'll get answers.

This one appears to have started on Reddit. And if you follow all those steps precisely, with all those threes, you get access to a place called the Shadow Side, where you can ask questions and get forbidden knowledge about the future. It doesn't quite have the mythic quality of Bloody Mary, but does keep that relationship with threes and time. Get rid of the third person spell. Write down your person's name and date of birth three times. Then write down, leave my man alone three times over.

There's also just three as a magic spell invocations of three to change your life get more money bring back a former lover find a new job on tiktok and other sites you can find plenty of spellcraft going on money come to me an abundance three times three may i be enriched take a glass of water blow on it three times and say water to drink money to attract my man alone three times over it once you're done make sure to sign it three times hold the paper you don't want to do this part that's totally fine you could write your name three times going down the paper you take it you put in a black bag you tie it three times, and you throw it away far, far away from your house. You're listening to Ideas and to a documentary called The Magic of Three from producer Matthew Lazenrider.

We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This is Toronto,

wherever you get your podcasts. Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Those TikTok spells probably won't win you the lottery or bring your lover back. But those witchy streamers are following an ancient tradition by invoking all those threes. Starting in the 19th century, historians, collectors, and antiquities dealers began coming across ancient scraps of books from Greco-Roman Egypt. They're now known as the Greek magical papyri. These snippets from magical tomes were either from illicit back alley magic providers or just kept behind the desk at the local ancient Egyptian magic shop. And they are rife with threes. For a sleeping woman to confess the name of the man she loves,

place a bird's tongue under her lip, and she calls the name three times. Charm to restrain anger, which is to be spoken three times. I am the soul of darkness, the eternal one. Restrain thy anger and wrath. Put down a clean vessel, add barley meal, and form bread. Say the spell three times, eat the rolls, and you will know the power. Love spell. Take a clean papyrus and write the name and say the spell three times. Some things never change.

As part of our series about the greatest numbers of all time, Ideas producer Matthew Lazenrider delves into the enduring power of three in ritual, magic, and witchcraft. This is The Magic of Three. Witches come in threes. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Like Shakespeare's Weird Sisters in Macbeth, with weird in his day meaning beings who control our fate.

Here's the blood of a bat. Put in that. Put in that. Run about four to go. In the hole. Entrail, throw. This is actress Catherine Hunter, who absolutely steals the show playing all three witches in the 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth. Macbeth.

Macbeth. Macbeth. In three years, I'd hear thee. Three witches is a modern trope as well. Think of the movie Hocus Pocus, where you've got Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy playing three witches. I don't think that Menonty answered everything. Then why do we always end up talking about them? Then you've got The Witches of Eastwick, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon and Cher.

People here have been really rude to me. Oh, really? These three girls are behind you. Don't stare. And in the 1990s, Witch Hit The Craft, Robin Tunney comes across a trio of witches, Nev Campbell, Feruza Balk, and Rachel True. They're witches. Witches. Well, that's what people say. Now, maybe all of those were just inspired by the three witches in Macbeth. Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine. But Shakespeare knew his mythology,

and the idea of three weird sisters affecting the fate of men is ancient. And there were three who sat around, each one on her throne. The fates. Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos. Lachesis singing the things that were, Clotho the things that are, and Atropos the things that are to be. Appearing in stories and myths stretching back thousands of years,

they are the Fates. From the Theogony, a poem of Greek mythology from 700 BC. Clotho, the spinner, is she who spins the thread of man's life. Lachesis, the disposer of lots, assigns to each man his destiny. Atropos is the fury with the abhorred shears. Clotho creates the thread of life. Lachesis measures it, and Atropos cuts it. They are the weavers of time, fate, and destiny.

The motif of magic and weaving is ubiquitous throughout folklore as well. Remember how Snow White begins, with the queen pricking her finger while weaving, dropping those three splatters of blood? Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, activating the curse that causes her to fall asleep. And there are many others. So many weavers are pricking their fingers, it's awfully tempting to read something more into this line from Shakespeare. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. When Shakespeare was writing Macbeth, real women were being put on trial for witchcraft, often for saying things three times. People are saying the same thing in threes.

It's a very ritualistic kind of way of denoting that what you've said is actually powerful, that you're kind of invoking powerful words. Sierra Dye is an assistant professor of gender history at Cape Breton University. Using transcripts from actual cases, she studies the witch trials in Scotland, which began in the 16th century. So it's pretty common to say that people would say, oh, I spoke this charm three times as we walked around the Oaken Post three times, something along those lines. You might be just saying words that sound like a prayer that are just using the words in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But if you say it three times, and you're trying to actually change something, for example, if you're trying to heal somebody

who's sick, or cast a sphere of protection around somebody, using those words in that repetitive, ritualistic way is very powerful. In the 16th century, Western Christianity splits apart, and Scotland adopts a new Calvinist church with ideas of predestination. All events have been willed by God to occur, and he alone knows the future of each and every soul. Meaning, there are no three faiths to weave anyone a new destiny. But it also means, if you're trying to alter the course of reality by using magic speech, Christian or not, you're a witch. You can pray, but that's really just a sign of your relationship with God. And even by really asking him to do something, when you invoke the Trinity and in hopes, and maybe you say it three times in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost three times, it's really the devil who's making you do that. It's

associated with diabolical intent. So when you really get to the, to the meat of it, what is witchcraft, it's really trying to make changes in reality, which was against God's rules. Only God can decide what is reality and what is true on earth. He's the only one who can decide if somebody's going to heal or if they're going to die. But if you think that you can, by saying these words, change that, then that's where it becomes witchcraft. That's where it becomes evil. The church courts often made special note when someone repeated something, especially three times. Like in this trial, for an accused witch named Stephen Maltman. Stephen Maltman, he asked to help heal somebody,

and he says, give me your shirt. So they give him his shirt, and he says, God be betwixt this shirt and all evils in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And then he has them put the shirt back on and then take it off three times. And another case transfers sickness from a person. So this is the idea that if you're sick, we can't necessarily cure it. We can't make that sickness go away. It exists, but we can transfer it to somebody else. We can put it off of your body and put it onto somebody else's body or to an animal's body or to an item. And that's part of this whole relationship with cloth in a lot of cases. Another man transfers sickness from a person to a cat by passing yarn over that person's head nine times. So nine becomes a ritual number as well because it's three times three.

So that becomes even more powerful. At the time of the witch trials, the number three already had that long association in myth and literature with magic and witchcraft. It was the default number of magic words or ingredients. King James VI of Scotland wrote a book in 1597 called Demonology. It's part textbook on how to identify a witch, part philosophical treatise. In the book, James tells a story that can't possibly be true and was probably inspired by medieval and Roman jokes and fables. It's about a schoolmaster who tried unsuccessfully to seduce a woman, so he turned to witchcraft. The schoolmaster confessed that he tried to use mean sundry to obtain his purpose of the gentlewoman, but was disappointed of his intention.

He therefore determined by all the ways he might to obtain her by conjuring witchcraft and sorcery. her by conjuring witchcraft and sorcery. This woman had a younger brother who happened to be a student in the teacher's class. The teacher asked the brother to creep into the woman's bed at night and, with a pair of shears, snip some of her pubic hair. Three strands, to be exact. He would obtain for him three hairs of his sister's privates, for which the youth promised faithfully to perform. He took a piece of paper from his master to wrap them in, and thereupon the boy practiced nightly to obtain his master's purpose, especially when his sister was asleep. Of course, the sister wakes up, calls for her mother, who storms in furiously, and the boy spills the beans, telling mom all about the teacher and the three hares. Unfortunately for the teacher, the mother is also a witch.

The mother, therefore, being well-practiced in witchcraft, met the schoolmaster in his own art, and took the paper from the boy. She went to a young heifer, which never had borne calf nor gone to bull, and with a pair of shears, clipped off three hairs from the udder of the cow, and the boy gave it to his master. The schoolmaster, so soon as he had received them, thinking them indeed to be the maid's hares, went straight and wrought his art upon them. But the schoolmaster had no sooner done his intent to them, when the cow, whose hares they were, came into the door of the church, went inside, and made straight towards the schoolmaster, and following him back and forth of the church and what place soever he went, leaping and dancing upon him, to the great amusement of the townsmen. The story has a classic, comedic, turnabout ending, and unusually for the time, the woman in that story is the hero.

Reality, though, was far different. Women were the most frequent targets of the Scottish witch trials. So, for example, Isabel Bennett, she is somebody who probably dealt in healing. She offered her services to other people. People went to her when they thought that they were bewitched. And so one of the things that she had was a charm to heal maw-turned persons. So this is maw like your mouth, people who are nauseous, maybe vomiting, or children who are sick and throwing up. And so she will take them about an oaken post in the ground three times. And as she does so, she recites three times these words, oaken post stands thou,

Baron's Ma turns thou, God and St. Bernie Bain, the bright, turn the Baron's Ma right. And the bairn is the child. So it's healing the child. So that's a really interesting charm. And I have seen it appear in other cases. Bessie Stevenson also confesses to using this same charm. She also has another one, and it's for curing people who are forespoken or bewitched. And it's for curing people who are forespoken or bewitched. And she will protect them or cure them by saying, Three bitters hath thee bitten, ill heart, ill eye, ill tongue, and all the most the bit may be in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And what happened to Isabel Bennett and Betsy Stevenson? Were they convicted? Yes, Betsy Stevenson and Isabel Bennett and Betsy Stevenson? Were they convicted? was to be tied to a stake and then strangled and then burnt. So they weren't being burnt alive.

Most people assume that. There are other parts of Europe where burning alive may have been practiced. But in Scotland, they would strangle them first and then burn them. And this is really interesting because it's almost symbolic in kind of stopping that speech of silencing the witch before ritualistically burning them. This has been a long journey through my research, and it was the common element that kind of kept popping up is how interested people were in words and how fearful they were of words and how words became this common thread through so many of the cases where people are admitting to saying certain things and they're being asked about what they've said. If you look at just general historians studying the early modern period, there's a whole genre, a whole branch of scholarship of people who look at speech and the power of speech during this time and crimes of speech, crimes of the tongue, sins of the tongue.

And they're really worried about whose words had power, defining that question of whose words have the tongue. And they're really worried about whose words had power, defining that question of whose words have the power. People in power kind of at all levels of society, from the king to the government, but also just locally in local communities. The ministers are quite involved in this as well. They're very interested in cracking down on these dangerous forms of speech and sedition and treason and heresy and blasphemy. Just like there were pre-existing cultural ideas around threes and magic, there were pre-existing ideas around women and speech. Ideas that virtuous women spoke little and sinful women were guilty of excessive speech. So when you see a concern with words in the early modern period ramping up, this association of witchcraft with words and women with words, then it almost becomes inevitable that women are going to be caught up in this witch hunt because they're already at the forefront of crimes of speech.

Women naturally kind of fall into that category of people that they are most likely to look at because they're most interested in women's words. They're most interested in controlling those women's speech. This is also a sculpture of her. You can also see symbols of three on her. It's time to hear from an actual witch. And this is, to the trained eye, is an altar, but to the untrained eye, it just looks like a shelf of knickknacks. I'm speaking with Louise Bunn in Vancouver. She's showing me around her altar. I'm a sculptor and painter. I am also a witch. Great, and here we are in your beautiful home. Yes. And my coven meets in our backyard. Louise is a Wiccan. That's a modern neo-pagan religion. One of the few to survive the death of its founder. Wicca started in the 1950s and takes ancient symbols and figures and repurposes them into something new and meaningful to some people today. And there's lots of different opinions about what is correct practice. And there's a common

kind of joke that if you ask any two pagans an opinion, you'll get three different answers. Three? Yes. Well, that's handy. But seriously, there are lots of threes in Wicca. So there is an ending to any spell that you're doing that you can do where you go. At the very end, you've done all the workings and stuff. And so when you're finishing up to make sure the spell is happening to bind it, you say, by earth, by air, by fire, by sea, by all the powers of three times three, as I do will, so mode it be.

And the spell is done. Just like people's fears in the 16th century, spells in modern Wicca are about change. A spell is a way of changing your consciousness or your way of understanding in the world at will. So spells don't actually change the world. Like I can't do a spell to make my car a Ferrari, but I can do a spell to pass my exams, but I also have to study. pass my exams, but I also have to study. And I can do a spell to get a job, but I also have to dress well for the interview. But I can also put a charm on the lipstick that any words that pass my mouth will be eloquent and wise, that sort of thing. They're good for affecting the person that you are to be a better person or wiser or kinder or whatever you're working on.

There are other threes. There's the threefold law, a kind of karmic rule about whatever good or evil you put in the world comes back to you three times. It's not a straightforward thing that way. I mean, it could be, but I don't think it's really necessarily quite that direct. But I do think it's generally a bad thing to go around cursing people just because they peeve you. There's also the triple goddess, the maiden, mother, and crone, used to symbolize three phases of life, three phases of the moon, or the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. The maiden is the possibilities, the springtime, the beginning. The mother is the nourishing, the bringer of life, the fertility. And the crone is the reaper, the end of life, death, also the beginning of another cycle. If it sounds like we're rushing through things here, it's because Louise isn't really that big on the triple goddess.

Louise is a devotee of Ceridwen. Ceridwen is a figure borrowed from Welsh legend. She's a sorceress. And there's a story about Ceridwen that involves a big number three. And the story starts like this. Ceridwen had two children, and they were nothing like each other. One was very beautiful, the daughter, and one was terribly ugly, the son. He was ugly and stupid. And she said, I can't do anything about his ugliness, but I can fix his stupidity. Keridwyn decides to brew a potion to grant intelligence and inspiration to her stupid son. But the potion is going to take an entire

year to brew. And it needed different herbs added at different times, but it also needed to be constantly stirred. So she hired a boy to stir this potion while she would gather the herbs and add them at different times. Now, a key part of this magic potion is it's only the first three drops that grant inspiration. Anything after that is poison. And one day, when the year is almost up, Caridwen is out gathering herbs, her stupid son is off being stupid somewhere, and the servant boy is busy stirring the cauldron. And the boy was stirring it away. It had to be constantly boiling. And when it was just about ready, three drops flew out on the boy's thumb, this boiling hot potion, and it was hot. He stuck it in his mouth, and the three drops came to him.

So, Servant Boy gets the three drops of potion, leaving none for Keridwyn's stupid son. And when you're a lowly Servant Boy, you really don't want to annoy a sorceress. He knew he was in big trouble. She knew instantly what had happened, and they started a chase. Fun thing, those three drops of potion give the servant boy the power to transform. He transformed himself into various animals. First he was a bird, and he flew away, and she turned into a hawk and chased him. Came to a stream and he turned into a trout, and he swam away, and she turned into an otter and chased him. The kid keeps changing shape. Keridwyn keeps catching up.

And then he got to a barn and he thought, I know just the thing. He turned into a kernel of wheat and she turned into a hen and packed him up and ate him. Keridwyn eats the servant boy turned seed and naturally she becomes pregnant. She said, when this baby is born, I'm going to kill him. But when he's born, he's so beautiful, she can't bear to harm him. He's too beautiful to kill.

So she sewed him into a leather sack, threw him into the sea. He washes up on distant shores, is found by strangers, and grows up so beautiful, intelligent, and talented that he becomes known as Taliesin, the greatest bard in Welsh history. So, that's the story of Taliesin and how he came to be. And the three drops of inspiration, everyone would like the three drops of inspiration. So, they ask Cidwyn for these three drops of inspiration. Poets and writers and musicians and artists all approach Keridwyn for these things. And since I work as an artist, that's who I work with. So what's the significance of the number three in this story?

Well, like casting a spell, three is the catalyst that leads to change. This is also a story like all of those other fairy tales with three drops of blood and three drops of poison that are about transition, change, and rebirth. There's one more figure in modern witchcraft that embodies the number three. She's borrowed from ancient Greek mythology, and she is the goddess Hecate. She's very popular with people who are more into sorcery. They like to think of it as dark magic. Like they do a lot of the spells from the Greek magical papyri, and they're into reconstructing those spells and doing those spells.

And they call for sort of esoteric ingredients, like hair of a black dog and a pelt of a black rabbit and, you know, stuff like that. Hecate appears in one of the earliest texts to describe the Greek pantheon, Theogony, by the poet Hesiod. Hesiod makes no mention of witchcraft. Instead, he writes a glowing review, saying Hecate brings aid to all the peoples of the world. saying Hecate brings aid to all the peoples of the world. But over time, she grows dark and picks up associations with night, magic, thresholds, and gates. Later, in Metamorphoses,

from Roman poet Ovid, Hecate is the goddess of witchcraft. In one scene, the sorceress Medea performs an elaborate ritual to summon Hecate. Three nights were spent before the moon's horns met to make their complete orb. When it was shining at its fullest and gazed on the earth with perfect form, Medea left the palace dressed in unclasped robes. Medea left the palace dressed in unclasped robes. Only the flickering stars moved. Stretching her arms to them, she three times turned herself about. Three times sprinkled her head with water from the running stream. Three times let out a wailing cry, then knelt on the hard earth and prayed.

then knelt on the hard earth and prayed. Triple Hecate, come to aid the witch's art and all our incantations. One of the reasons you might pray to Hecate in antiquity is for her help in contacting the dead. She was associated with boundaries, both as a guardian of gates and doorways, but also as someone who could cross into the afterlife. Over time, she becomes associated with crossroads, especially where three roads meet. It's a space where there's possibilities you can go any direction and a space where you can contact the divine or the numinous. And if you're going to cast a spell, something that requires a suspension of the regular rules of time and physics, you need to be in that liminal space. Once you have a three then you've got an entryway

into that space of possibilities and three seems to do it and it's not the real world and it's not make-believe it's this other space that somehow this magic space where things are possible where you can invoke something special.

So to modern fans of Hecate, she's about creating a powerful, magical space in the midst of transition. Oh Hecate of crossroads, come to me. You rule the sky, earth, and sea. This is selections from the Orphic Hymn to Hecate, circa 3rd century BC. At home among the dead, you wildly dance. Fond of solitude, unconquerable queen of night, key to all the cosmos. We pray you, lady, see our sacrifice. We pray you, lady, see our sacrifice. Thinking back to what Elizabeth Tucker, the folklorist at Binghamton University,

had to say about the Bloody Mary game, that it was a meeting place between the past, the present, and the future, sounds an awful lot like modern interpretations of Hecate. And maybe the meaning people find in threes is power over change. If you can stand there in the middle of a crossroads, accepting your past, knowing the dangers of the future, you can have mastery over whatever path you take. path you take. You were listening to The Magic of Three from producer Matthew Lazen Ryder. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard on this episode and hear the other episodes in our number series, go to our website cbc.ca slash ideas. Thanks to Matt Humphrey,

Lisa Christensen, and a big thanks to the team at Ideas for all the readings. You can also find us on Twitter and on Facebook. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Austin Pomeroy. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad.