Fascinating Mysteries Area51: Prophecies

F A S C I N A T I N G M Y S T E R I E S A R E A 5 1 : P R O P H E C I E S

The Mystical Three

"Third time's a charm" is among the many casual superstitions that have survived from ancient times. Godhead as well as hell-sign, three has been regarded as a magical number in widely diverse cultures for millennia.
The classical Greeks had some 120 mythical triads, or groups of three. Some of them were beneficent, some were not. The good ones included the Three graces, handmaidens of Apollo, shown below in a detail from Botticelli's Primavera. But there were also such triads as the three snakehaired Furies, goddesses of retribution, and the three grim fates.
Norse mythology also had three Fates, and it divided the cosmos into three distinct parts. Even certain elements of Christianity, the trinity and Holy Family, have rough counterparts in ancient Egypt's Osiris, Isis, and Hours, as well as in the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.
In numerology, three denotes both spiritual harmony and sexual energy, the transcendent and generative forces.

The Significant Seven

Folklore has it that seventh sons of seventh sons have uncanny powers-one legend among many that reflect the number seven's mystical connections. the legends may be related to human knowledge of the heavens. the astronomy of antiquity knew only seven "planets," whose movements were thought to bear on human destiny. As an illumination (above) from a manuscript of the 1300s shows, astronomers studied a solar system in which the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn revolved around Earth. It was also deemed mystically noteworthy that the moon's four phases lasted some seven days each.
The Bible abounds with significant sevens, from Genesis's precept of a seventh day sabbath to the seven-headed Great Beast of Revelation. Pythagoreans apportioned life itself into ten periods of seven years each. The ancient Assyrians divided their gods into groups of seven, and Sanskrit lore has seven sages, seven castes, seven worlds. The Chaldeans thought seven was a holy number, and it was sacred to two ancient sun-gods, the Greek Apollo and the Persian Mithras.