Three is the number most associated with the goddess. In Greek and Roman myth, it is the number of the Furies (Gk Erinyes); the number of the Graces, the number of the Hesperides, and the number of the Fates (Moirae). This triplicity of aspects of the goddess is referred to in later goddess lore as three women: a young girl; a nubile woman, and a crone. These three represent the three stages of Woman's relationship with Man, or the three stages of a man's relationship with the goddess. The first, the young girl, symbolises the goddess as Spring or Ceres or Persephone, connoting that man is born of woman.The second, the nubile woman, is Aphrodite or Venus, and refers to Woman's role as lover; mother and nurturer of Man. The third, a crone, is the fearsome aspect of the goddess, referring to Woman's role as layer-out of Man, and to a man's return in death to the unknown, to the goddess.

Other uses of the symbolism of three include the triglyph, three parallel grooves found on the Parthenon and other temples, and the three-fingered hand sign (made by holding the little finger with the thumb) which in times past signalled adherence to the goddess, but which in recent times is used by Girl Guides, and in American Sign Language for the letter W.

Three held a particular fascination for the mathematicians of the temple, and they produced tables of values of all kinds of permutations of its uses, including trines (similar, but not the same as squares or cubes). Three, or triangles. were the basis of Pythagoras' investigation of mathematics, which he believed contained and revealed the hidden order in the universe, that is, the goddess. The Pythagorean Decad (right), a triangle made up of triangles, contains all the numbers 1-10, and can be extended geometrically to cover a plane or arithmetically to any number.

Triangles (apex downwards) are a glyph (picture-letter in primitive writing) of the female pubic area, where babies come from, and so have had a symbolic meaning since neolithic times connected, generally, with birth, joy, and origins, and specifically, with life.

Triangles, with the apex upward have a reversed meaning, death, as this glyph (occurring first in Cretan script and later in Hebrew) which evolved to our present letter D, began as a picture of a burial cairn, a pyramid, a tomb.