Three's A Charm

McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson - the most recent example of celebrity deaths coming in three. Why threes? Why not fours, fives, or some other number? What supernatural mystique does the first, odd prime number have?

Three is symbolic in the Bible and in many Asian cultures. Euclidean geometry bases calculations on three points of a plane. Freud theorized on the Id, Ego & Super Ego. The Catholics have the Trinity. The Greeks had three fates: Clotho, Atropos & Lachesis. Plato's Utopia was inhabited by three classes of people: laborers, warriors & philosophers. The rallying cry for the French Revolution was Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Isaac Asimov wrote of the three laws of Robotics.

My favorite tertiary superstition involves three on a match. During World War I, three dough-boys lighting their cigarettes on one match gave an opposing rifleman enough time to draw a bead on them. In the trenches, that was more common sense than superstition. But it's still considered unlucky nearly 100 years later.

Something deep in our psyche feels an affinity to clusters of three. I don't claim to know the answer why. As Ken Kesey stated, the answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery - as ever BB

"The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses." - Sir Francis Bacon