Moral Reason and Literate Analysis Applied to Cultural Meltdown

This may be the oddest issue of Praesidium ever published. The off-beat, of course, need not be synonymous with the uninstructive (except perhaps to empirical science, where only the repetitive has interest). Once upon a time, I developed an intriguing article about oral-traditional style over a period of several years following my dissertation work which explored the clustering of narrated events in threes. I knew of no other study quite like mine, so I was excited about its reception. Only as the ever-more-polished paper met with constant stiff rejection did I begin to suspect that the very novelty of my thesis was proving to be its ruin. I had discovered, in other words, that what commonly passes for scholarship—the journal refereed by a select group of recognized experts (recognized by younger "experts" who have successfully borne a mentor’s theoretical banner through the killing fields of academic employment)—does not brook dissent. The system is not primarily designed to uncover latent truths: the system is designed to keep proving, per saecula saeculorum, what is not really provable, to begin with, but acquires the fixity of truth once a generation has sung its litany.

My revenge is to publish that odd article on the very odd number three here and now. Students of literature will perhaps enjoy the discussion of Homer and the Celtic Middle Ages. More general readers of the journal whose interest is drawn to the "culture wars" may find that my comments following the article proper are grist for their mill. We all know that the ivory tower is tumbling about our ears; yet few of us, I think, realize that even the most insistently backward-looking disciplines of the troubled humanities are more committed to preserving a certain ideological pecking order than to sustaining a Western tradition where the notion of the classic nestles.

Classic: I was aware that the word had been applied to Coca-Cola, but only this spring did I learn that it also has special meaning to fans of Star Trek! Those who know me even through the impersonal medium of a year or two’s issues of Praesidium may well be shocked to see the journal carry two analyses of the popular TV series. In the first place, these are very good analyses, though they also radically disagree. In the second place, they radically disagree—an exercise almost always enlightening in matters of taste! Finally, I realize that I am quite isolated in my indifference to science fiction, and I am unwilling to deny readers the pleasure of these essays simply because I have never sat through an hour of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in my life. I recall as a teenager having to seek out an obscure corner of the house so that I could follow a BBC detective serial called Man in a Suitcase which was scheduled (to its ruin, of course) adversarially to ST. Now there was moral reality! A slandered and wrongfully dismissed CIA agent trying to make a buck in a foreign country by cleaning out the dirty closets of the rich and the powerful without drawing attention… and getting shafted by his employers more often than not, just like old times in the Agency. Ariosto would have enjoyed that one—for Ariosto, I must explain, sits high on my list of moral realists.

It occurred to me, of course, that fortune had again conspired against me in bringing to the journal a rare science-fiction submission for the last issue but none for this one. Mr. Davies’ very sad story about a professor shot down in his tenure review, however (actually about the consequences of this catastrophe), may well turn out to be the better choice for the Summer issue. I say this because the short story raises questions about the academy’s fairness and efficiency which, though posed from a different angle, jibe with my own essay’s. To my mind, the most elite and research-oriented institutions are as deeply mired in careerism and self-aggrandizement as is the political hack’s pasty wade to power. To Mr. Davies’ mind, apparently, the smallest and intellectually least pretentious campuses feature exactly the same kind of egotism operating with more or less the same measure of lethality. That makes a pair of bookends: cynical assessments of the system around visions of men in tights boldly going where none has been before. Is the truth some blend of these extremes? Are not both extremes, rather, true at the same time—homo paradoxicus longing to touch alien fingers over Barnard’s Star even as he circulates uncharitable tales about his rival missionaries?

May the heaven beyond our intrepid starships protect us all from each other—and from ourselves!

A disclaimer: The "Evangelus University" which appears in Mr. Davies’ story is fictitious and in nowise an allusion to schools of a similar name (of whose multiplicity the author was ignorant while writing).

How Never to Write a “Scholarly Article”: On Falling Afoul of Academic Bigotry

Postmodernists are fond of writing stories within stories—or at least of writing about them. I offer below an article within an essay. I instantly reassure the reader, however, that my purpose is not “metacritical” or otherwise cutely ironic. I am in grim earnest. My opinion of the academy’s conventions for screening articles submitted to any of its myriad journals—lest anything but the most “cutting-edge” work find its way to publication—could not well be more grim. The quotation marks of my title share in this sobriety. I do not intend to rail at the scholarly article from a humorist’s remove: I intend to indict the system behind it of patent fraud.

The occasion of this piece was my return to the undergraduate classroom and, specifically, my teaching once again of Homer’s Odyssey in the context of a sophomore survey. Several years earlier, while still held captive by the naïve notion that I might earn tenure though publishing worthy articles (in fact, publication only ever earned me antagonism on the small campuses where I taught), I composed an article about triadic structures deeply embedded in the plot of traditional texts like the Homeric epics. I argued that a persistent trebling of narrative events of a similar sort must have helped Homer to complicate his tale while remembering where he was amid all its folds. I argued, further, that structuring a plot with triads is a common oral-traditional technique around the world. I offered my evidence. The case seemed to me compelling—and maybe just a little too facile. How could something so transparently true have passed unremarked since the days of Maurice Bowra and Milman Parry?

Yet the article was repeatedly rejected—and not for saying the obvious! What upset me far more than its failure to find a home were the terms of the rejections. The anonymous referee of the highly respected Oral Tradition, for example, sniffed that the paper was “deeply disturbing”—as if proceedings should be initiated to repeal my doctorate, or at least force me into a five-step program. I hadn’t the resources at my disposal which an Ivy League professor enjoys—the libraries, the research assistants, the grant money and time off from teaching. I knew full well that many of my efforts were sophomoric. But I found “very disturbing” very disturbing. Shortly thereafter, I allowed the paper to yellow away in a file cabinet, from which I retrieved it only this Spring, after about a decade. I had a great craving to read it all over again; for, as I came to Homer once more, my mind cleared by a lay-off of years, I found that the article’s argument made more sense to me than ever. In fact, I had discovered new evidence for my case as my group of undergraduates read through the Odyssey in English. There it lay, right on the surface: one needn’t even read Greek to find it. Yet reputed scholars had insisted over and over that it wasn’t there at all—and I have no doubt that they would do so today.

I have reproduced below the text of this ill-fated article for Praesidium’s readership. Many of you, I know, teach a survey class similar to mine, and a few of you (such as Professor Bertonneau) are not novices to the body of theory surrounding oral tradition. I consider it a worthwhile endeavor to elicit responses from sensible people who labor “in the trenches”. My mature verdict about the whole business is, in fact, that the paper was rejected for reasons having nothing whatever to do with Homer or the other texts discussed therein. Having once presented it (and I have introduced only a few changes into the original version), I shall conclude by naming the forces I suppose to be at work. I will anticipate those final remarks only by saying that the academy imposes a sweeping worldview upon its variously focused searches for the “truth”—a complete ideology—and that any investigation which conflicts with mainline dogma is… well, “very disturbing”. This kind of supercilious sophistry operates even within Classical Studies, a discipline which basks in a reputation of relative objectivity and rigor: it most certainly pervades the rest of the Humanities, as well, and has been known to leave its stain upon the Sciences.

Structural Triads in Homeric Epic and Other Traditional Narratives: A Case for Mnemonic Utility

The prominence of triads in such well-known products of folk tradition as Grimm’s Fairy Tales strikes even the most casual and untutored of readers. Many of us must have remarked the magical presence of threes in such stories even before we knew how to read, if we were lucky enough to have been weaned on fairy tales.. The reason for these riots of threeness, however, is anything but transparent.. In the case of certain cultures, such as ancient Celtic civilization, a quasi-religious significance clearly attaches to the number three; but in other traditions, triads persistently crop up without any discernable religious justification. It might seem tempting to conclude that the number three simply fascinates the human mind. Yet many scholars have derided this conclusion as needlessly mystical or denounced it as ethnocentric. The oral works of certain non-European cultures, they warn, bestow upon other numbers the importance enjoyed by threes in the West (e.g., Dundes [“Number Three” and Hansen). The fours of American Indian myth and lore or the fives of China are often cited to repudiate the universal magnetism of the triad.[1]

Such objections are intimidating. In his eloquent preface to a collection of classic essays dedicated to exposing ethnocentric views, Alan Dundes wrote, “It is difficult to doubt the validity of one’s own native categories of cognition. Far too often such cultural categories are projected to the point where they are considered categories of nature rather than categories only of a single culture…. Of equal importance is the fact that cultures also serve as barriers between peoples, often interfering with, if not preventing, meaningful communication” (“introduction” vii). Without doubt, the traits which distinguish people—even two individuals—are innumerable (the very title of Dundes’s anthology, for instance, might be labeled sexist). Yet surely this is why one must eventually return to formulating generalizations; otherwise, all the amassed circumstantial differences so dear to the scholarly comparatist become a barrier as immense as unexamined prejudice. Indeed, to argue that the brains of native Americans or Chinese work differently from those of white Europeans is potentially to indulge not only in ethnocentrism, but in the racism of asserting, “They just don’t think like us.”

I would contend that the academic community has come to consider the particular issue of trichotomy from just such a narrow perspective. Several years ago, Classical Journal carried a stimulating series of exchanges on the subject of threes.[2] W.F. Hansen’s argument that the employment of triads results entirely from cultural conditioning seemed to enjoy a kind of victory by default, since no immediate response challenged his observations. As if to concede an empirical vulnerability without relinquishing an intuitive resistance, Lawrence Giangrande recently opined in the same journal, “My own answer to ‘Why three?’ consists of three reasons. It is charming, traditional, and I like I, despite its non-universality” (66). Since Giangrande’s final words come very close to surrender, however, I believe the issue deserves to be re-opened. Is the mystique of threeness truly a mere cultural accident?

In what follows, I wish to offer a particular demonstration and to make a general point. The particular case primarily concerns the Homeric epics. By analyzing their structure, as many hundreds of scholars have done, one may find evidence of a marvelously simple method of composition which most of those scholars have chosen to overlook, perhaps due to its very lack of complexity: i.e., the triadic stucturing of narrative events. Inasmuch as the number three is neither overtly mentioned nor plainly visible in this function, a deliberate religious or mystical invocation of its powers seems very unlikely. Rather, I would conjecture that the Homeric bard employed triads (at least originally, before our texts were recorded) because they, like the formulaic phrase, assisted him in recalling and ordering a vast amount of matter during oral performance. Twos, of course, would have been more easily recalled than threes to the extent that memory favors brevity, and Homer paired scenes quite often for reasons connected with oral performance. Yet the plurality of two is ambiguous, suggesting comparison or contrast on a single basis (the double-edged sword, the two sides of the coin, etc.), whereas three things offer an unequivocally multiple prospect. They create a sense that the full range of possibilities has been measured (and in ancient Greek, of course, the dual number was not plural in form: only three or more objects were discussed with plural inflections). An array of three happenings also contributes a stronger sense of suspense—of approaching climax—than would two occurrences. Hence the triad would have served the Homeric performer as the most reliable means of pleasantly complicating a narrative without losing track of the complications: it is the least forgettable form of manyness. In this capacity, it really needs no religious or sociological conditioning to account for its attractions. Essential human logic is enough.

The complexity which devoted Homerists like to see in their author, certainly exists, to be sure: triadic structuring seems a simple, if not simplistic, mnemonic device only in abstract. A short tale with a patently threefold structure would be the work of an amateur. A bard like Homer who had arranged his triadic reference points carefully could indulge in numerous excursions around them, thereby drawing the audience’s attention away from their naïve design. Furthermore, when one visualizes this evolving, intricate role of triads in oral narrative, one need hardly wonder that threeness should often have acquired a religious value. Sacred tales about gods and heroes would naturally come to have a threefold motion, which would (in the better tales) appear coyly, almost magically hidden under the narrative’s surface. Added to the logical qualities of the number which rendered it memorable, this gradual association with orally communicated myths must have elevated the three to an especially reverend status. At the very least, utility and sanctity would have complemented each other, for revered objects are less easily forgotten than incidental ones.

In thus conflating the number three’s power to stir emotion and to serve practical necessity, I may seem to be clouding the issue to the logical, literate minds of our academy, which revel in fine distinctions and excel at descrying them. Yet I contend that the triad’s ritual and mnemonic aspects would have drawn strength either from the other, symbiotically: three was useful because it was special and special because it was useful. The culturally conditioned and the rationally ordered, the preemptive and the adaptive, the sacred and the profane, are categories which distance us from oral culture more than they render it comprehensible to us. In an oral culture, there is no distinction between theory and application, properly speaking: there are only particular reenactments of the cosmic. In Mircea Eliade’s elegant terms, “An object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype” (Myth of the Eternal Return 34).[3] To conform to the ritual is to be practical, for the surest way to get things done is to do them in the pre-established pattern.

I am not referring to such obvious and decorative triads in Homeric epic as Diomedes’ three attempts to slay Aeneas through Apollo’s protection (Il. 5.436-37) or Telemachus’s three attempts to string his father’s bow (Od. 21.125-26). These threesomes (like most of those, by the way, which Perry listed impressively to inaugurate CJ’s ongoing discussion) are named explicitly and incidentally rather than enacted: they certainly do little to cement the plot together or to add suspense. At most, they emphasize a plurality of efforts while, perhaps, infusing just a trace of tension or expectation. Fritz Göbel’s study (cited approvingly by both Dundes and Hansen) treats triadism almost exclusively at this level.[4] Even the highly literate Vergil could appreciate the efficacy of three as epic garnishment (e.g., Aeneid 10.685—and, naturally, Aeneas and Odysseus both try to embrace a parent’s ghost three times). The rhetorical conventions of both Greece and Rome fully acknowledged the power of ostentatious threesomes to insinuate an artificial multiplicity into the supporting evidence. Plato’s Socrates knows that three points prove the case and that three embarrassing questions exhaust the other side’s credibility (cf. Republic 1.332c-335d). Aristotle’s Rhetoric favors resonantly threefold groupings right from the start (e.g., the judge’s three feelings in 1.1.5, the three reasons for framing clear laws in 1.1.7, and the three services of rhetoric in 1.1.12). The author of the Ad Herennium often practices triadic argumentation (e.g., the highly stylized charge against Ulysses in 2.19.28-30 or such florid examples of figures as those involving epanaphora and paralipsis in 4.13.19 and 27.37). As for Quintilian, whose monumental Insitutio Oratoria is perhaps more devoted to a philosophy of education than to the practical stages of good oratory, his teaching and thinking are nonetheless prone to trichotomy. In one brief section (2.4.22-33), for instance, he mentions three examples of vice often denounced in commonplaces, the three kinds of thesis, three problems with writing out speeches beforehand and memorizing them, and the three kinds of law. To find Homer similarly using threes in order to impress upon his listeners a plural conception is hardly surprising—his abstaining from the practice would have been far more so.

With some persistence, however, one finds threefold order on a much broader scale. In the Iliad, three Achaean heroes—Diomedes, Patroclus, and Achilles—rout the Trojans irresistibly at different times. There are three duels in which an Achaean and a Trojan champion represent their side before a passive audience. The provocative Thetis appears thrice to her son, if we may view her return in book 19 as a continuation of the previous book’s encounter (the description of Achilles’ shield separating the two scenes is doubtless a late accretion, ingeniously spliced into the visit); and Zeus pontificates from his throne to the assembled Olympians on three crucial occasions. All of these triads are thoroughly obscured by the superficial action of the story and the sheer distance dividing their members. They do not exist to be worshiped, admired, or even noticed by the audience, but they could easily have reoriented the struggling performer to the general scheme of his vast undertaking; for, obscure as they are to the casual observer, they are vital to the plot. Each aristeia is a little more concentrated and ferocious than the last, leading up to Achilles’ greatest of triumphs. Similarly, the duel between Menelaus and Paris looks rather comical beside that between Ajax and Hector, while the Achilles-Hector match provides the epic’s climax.[5] Thetis’s intrusions motivate every major turn of events, from the jeopardy into which the Achaean campaign falls to Achilles’ resumption of arms to the poignant surrender of Hector’s body; and Zeus, having pledged to support Thetis (book 1) and forbidden the gods to assist either army (book 8), finally ordains that Hector should receive a decent funeral (book 24) and so resolves the plot’s ultimate tension. Such clusters of significant events solidify the narrative’s skeleton at a depth where formularization could scarcely have penetrated. Whether or not our Homer—the poet who engineered the surviving Iliad—consciously used triads in this capacity is another matter. He may well not have done so, but their vestiges suggest that his predecessors had found them helpful.

The Iliad contains still other triads which feature a fine orchestration of minor events for easy recall. In book 6—a small masterpiece of characterization—we see the noble Hector from three very different female perspectives: first his moth Hecuba’s, then the ever enigmatic Helen’s, and finally his wife Andromache’s. The exchanges which pass between Hector and each woman reveal a generous amount about the four characters and about Homer’s notion of human nature (a quintessentially classical notion, owing much to the traditional sense of cycle and limitation). These scenes must surely have captivated any audience. While not indispensable to the plot, they offer a sympathetic look at the trauma of a long siege and at the tragic tendency to underestimate looming miseries even among the afflicted. The episode’s triadic nature may have helped to insure that it would be correctly passed along. When Hector’s corpse is returned to Troy in book 24, the same three women—Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen—succeed each other in eulogizing the slain hero. Their speeches are again powerful, as powerful as any great narrator could have desired for his tale’s closing moments; and the threefold bundle is just a little easier to carry in memory, even if the poet who added these final touches was more writer than reciter (which seems unlikely).

The Odyssey shows the Homeric poet relying much more heavily upon triads than in the Iliad. The greater density of triadic structuring here is hardly surprising in view of the Odyssey’s lesser degree of historical resonance, political significance, and formal religious orthodoxy. The Iliad projects a quasi-national struggle of east against west. It reveals a nascent sense of ethnic consciousness in the collaboration of several more or less legendary Bronze Age kings, and the bard would have outraged both traditional and evolving values in radically changing its story. There were names to be applauded, customs to be observed, and—in short—egos to be curried. The sea adventures of Odysseus, in contrast, are rich in popular lore which the bard might have reshaped, multiplied, and displaced with little fear of stirring indignation.[6] If, as some have implied, the Odyssey contains fewer blatant inconsistencies (cf. Page on Iliadic contradictions, 297-340), then the main reason may well be that the performer was freer to put the stamp of his individual genius upon its matter.

The story viewed as a whole immediately displays triadic structuring. The first twelve books neatly halve into the medias in res scene-setting on Ithaca and Ogygia (which includes the so-called Telemachy) and Odysseus’s recounting of his adventures to the Phaeacians. This leaves a rather oversized third member to occupy the tale’s entire second half. Yet the hero’s homecoming could easily have been told as a yarn unto itself, and indeed also breaks into a definite triad: the appearance of a disguised shipwreck whom Eumaeus succors, of a disguised beggar whom the suitors abuse, and of a declared king who metes out justice.

In fact, if I may focus (in rambling epic manner) upon the second half first, I would stress that it has benefited from an extraordinary degree of subdivision into memorable clusters of three. Odysseus passes three days (counting his mid-morning arrival inclusively, as the Greeks would have done) with the swineherd Eumaeus, then three more scouting out the situation in his palace and exacting his revenge. In his beggarly guise, he is insulted three times by the suitors, twice when Antinous and Eurymachus hurl stools at him (17.462 and 18.394) and once when Ctesippus flings a pig’s hoof his way (20.299). There are three impudent rascals from the lower social orders, as well—the upstart goatherd Melantheus, the overbearing beggar Irus, and the sharp-tongued servant girl Melantho—who try the hero’s patience at successive points in the narrative. Three good servants, on the other hand, are to be found in the nurse Eurycleia and the herdsmen Eumaeus and Philoitius, each of whom has a private encounter with the returned master (though the meeting with Philoitius in book 20 is much the least dramatic in our Odyssey). Odysseus has three living family members to confront in Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes. These scenes of recognition are each rendered quite distinct by the circumstances and personalities involved, making them among the epic’s most memorable passages. Homer handles the slowly mounting tension and gradually emerging characters of his tale’s second half with truly remarkable finesse. The ready points of reference within his triadic groups would have assisted him handily in orchestrating so delicate a crescendo.

Triadism is particularly prominent in Odysseus’s long Phaeacian yarn—a rather self-conscious triadism, apparently, based on the rhetorical principle of increasing members wherein the last element is markedly more developed than the first. The hero relates two brief encounters with the Cicones and the Lotos-eaters before weaving a more elaborate tale out of the Polyphemus incident; he continues with two brief episodes involving Aeolus and the Laestrygonians, then has an especially long stay in the land of Circe; and finally he skirts the Sirens and barely escapes Scylla and Charybdis only to be delayed nightmarishly where the tempting Cattle of Helius graze. The longer adventures themselves display a threefold division. Polyphemus murders and devours members of Odysseus’s crew on three occasions before he is outwitted, the encounter with Circe is actually two encounters framing the trip to Hades (which trip, by the way, presents Odysseus with three distinct classes of spirits: minor individuals—three of them—with news or requests, heroes who fought at Troy, and illustrious women), and the Cattle of Helius are structurally the first element in a catastrophe which sees the remaining crew members destroyed and Odysseus himself nearly sucked into Charybdis. Even the hero’s stay on Scheria contains several triadic components. Odysseus spends a total of three days with the Phaeacians. His first day is punctuated by meetings with Mausicaa and her maids, with the goddess Athena (from whom he has recently been estranged), and with Queen Arete at Alcinous’s court: three august women. The second day (book 8) is also split into three scenes, moving from Alcinous’s palace to the athletic contest to the palace again. All in all, these retrospective books feature the kind of runaway trichotomy that looks too good to be true and leaves one spinning naively mystical explanations—or, in despair, mistrusting his own counting.

The mnemonic explanation, on the other hand, may seem less satisfactory here then elsewhere, for books 9-12 are relatively free of plot intricacies and have little direct bearing on the main plot. The poet could have strung together whatever maritime adventures occurred to him or appealed to him without apprehending any great risk to the narrative as a whole. It might also be argued that most of the Odyssey’s few points of incoherence arise precisely from the strange indifference of these four books to the rest of the epic, and that triadic structuring, therefore, has notably failed to impose that order which I have hypothesized as its purpose. Circe forces Odysseus to visit Teiresias in Hades so that he may learn what awaits him back home—but Teiresias’s advice (11.100-137) is neither specific nor optimistic, and Odysseus assumes a beggar’s guise in Ithaca to find out the same information, in any case. Furthermore, Athena, our hero’s guardian angel, is conspicuously absent throughout these narrated times of crisis, and her excuse in 13.341-43 rings true only for the adventures which succeed Polyphemus’s blinding.

My answer is that oral tales have innumerable versions, and the poet of our Odyssey is clearly selecting and tailoring the traditions for the sake of creating one great narrative. The marvelous sea adventures of Odysseus might well have exhibited a fairly taut coherence in another telling which was entirely occupied with them; in that telling, they might well have received such elaboration that triadic structuring was necessary to keep pieces from being mislaid. We know that Odysseus’s exotic travels were so popular that they survived in translations which ignored or severely distorted other parts of the tale (e.g., the medieval Irish Merugud Uilix[7]). If we consider the material in the broadest possible context—not that of Homer’s Odyssey, but of recurrent themes in folklore around the world—we find that an immense popularity surrounds stories about seductive witches, spirits in limbo, and cannibalistic ogres (cf. Mondi). Hence there is every justification to believe that the sights and deeds in Odyssey 9-12 were often told, embellished, and supplemented by Homer’s predecessors. The triads identified above would have been much less ornate and much more serviceable under such circumstances.

I note here that the foregoing discussion is not remotely a complete catalogue of triadic groups in the Odyssey. For instance, Athena appears thrice to Odysseus disguised as a young inhabitant of a new land (7.19-20, 13.221-24, and 16.155-58). The council scenes in books 2 and 16 are built around three suitors as speakers. The list could grow quite lengthy. Yet in proceeding to later ages, we observe that triadic structures of this sort quickly disappear from the Greek narrative tradition as it becomes more firmly based in literacy. The dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not to mention the highly literate Euripides, have no such structuring despite a frequent debt to the Trojan War cycle. Apollonius’s Argonautica relates the same kinds of seafaring tales as the Odyssey, yet lacks a single instance of triadic ordering; and Vergil’s Latin Aeneid, which reproduces many of Homer’s explicit threesomes (as mentioned before) in a much more imitative pursuit of the epic Muse than the neoteric Apollonius’s, nevertheless wholly overlooks the master’s threefold structuring. Were triadism dictated exclusively or primarily by a peculiar cultural taste, its absence from these later texts would be incomprehensible.

Not much controversy has been stirred by the assertion that dyads exist in Homer for reasons connected to those which I have offered to explain triads. In a now classic work, A.B. Lord observed that the Odyssey often employs two “parallel” sequences of action—parallel both in the sense of one episode’s mimicking another within the same narrative (e.g., Telemachus’s sojourn in Sparta and Odysseus’s in Scheria) and in an intertextual sense (e.g., the disguised homecomings of Odysseus and Orestes). Lord theorized that the oral poet, having a recent or frequent version of the sequence fixed in his mind, would naturally repeat it to some degree under the pressures of live performance when narrating a similar episode (172-77). This tendency appears prominently on the level of single formulae or short clusters of phrases: one need hardly be surprised, then, to find it embedded in the plot. Subsequent scholarship has emphasized the conscious art which may be discerned in Homer’s dyadism. Besides rendering his matter more easily recalled the second time around, the dyad would also offer him the opportunity of underscoring significant similarities between different characters, and even of suggesting ironic differences between similar situations (cf. Kirk’s contrast of Il. 3 and 7).

These explanations of dyadism, in both their utilitarian and their artistic implications, apply equally well to Homer’s use of structural triads. Indeed, to the extent that the triad arranges a greater volume of material and multiplies the opportunities for foils and contrasts, it suits the reasoning advanced above even better. We seem to discover a new dimension to the Homeric poet’s subtlety every time we carefully analyze one of his mnemonic stratagems. Scholars have already redefined his creativity over the past four decades in response to Milman Parry’s challenge. It should be stressed, therefore, that the mnemonic employment of triads would actually have enhanced an oral bard’s powers of finesse. With the assistance of such structural support, he would have been freer than ever to think ahead to the next phrase, the next line, and the next narrative twist. The best critical studies of the verbal formula have stressed its gift of liberation within restriction—not unlike what the sonnet does in the hands of a skillful craftsman. L.C. Muellner’s assessment of the formula’s virtues could easily be extended to Homer’s use of triads: “Formulas are not cliché’s, receptacles of cant, or merely convenient phrases to help a faltering poet. They are metrical combinations of words in which the heritage of the primordial past could achieve its highest potential for the expression of living poetic meaning” (140).

In the same way, threefold structures are very far from non-dramatic, unwieldy vestiges of crude narration. Properly speaking, the bard’s choice was between a simply tale and a more elaborate tale—not between a tale organized triadically or after “realistic” variation of plural encounters. Since any good narrator desires his story to have a certain intricacy, the recollective help of the triad must truly have been an artistic breakthrough. We have seen how adroitly the Odyssey poet integrates several such structures at once to generate tension. The need to remember multiple elements of the plot is only a need in the first place because multiplicity so often serves the end of a well-told story.

It is worth adding that the presence of threesomes, to the extent that it was ever evident yet not evidently relevant to the tale (as through religious invocation), would scarcely have outraged the earliest audiences of any oral tradition. Modern notions of relevance are heavily influenced by our scientific mentality, which has little patience for imaginative (or “subjective”, as we say) associations between events. Members of a mythopoeic culture would have exercised far more leniency in determining what might or might not have caused ta particular condition or occasion. To their mind, nothing which happened in the stories of the gods, demigods, and heroes could be merely utilitarian, even if we may demonstrate to our own satisfaction today that it was so. The “ornamental epithet” and the “mnemonic triad”, rather, would belong to that level of the cosmos where ultimate truth is expressed. Seen from this vantage, what we would consider largely practical features in the tales and crafts of simple hunter-gatherers or unlettered fishermen would already have appeared vaguely sacred to them from the beginning—the antelope-horn cup, the whalebone keel—and would grow more so as both they and their culture stabilized and developed.[8] “By manifesting the sacred,” wrote Eliade, “any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.” (Sacred and Profane 12). The reverse of this is also true: that which participates consistently in its surrounding cosmic milieu manifests something of the sacred, for the sacred is none other than that which penetrates existence, day in and day out.

The issues surrounding trichotomy may be elucidated by comparing classical Greek with medieval literature, but they also become even more complicated in several respects. Triads were long ago and are to this day brilliantly apparent in Celtic folklife. Narrative, social custom, superstition, and religious ritual all exhibit a persistent triadism, which is confirmed in each particular area by its prominence in others. Some of this persistence may be attributed to extrinsic influences rather than to native oral traditions and beliefs. To be sure, the oral past, substantial and fertile, clearly shimmers through the pages of many extant manuscripts composed in Irish and Welsh monasteries. The Celtic scribes who consigned their ancestral lore to paper were uncommonly tolerant of paganism (by the standard of the day), despite their own monastic calling.[9] Yet they nonetheless tended to insert, delete, and rearrange, as did all scribes of their era. Hence their writings are a less-than-accurate record of waning orality, unlike Homeric epic, seasoned heavily with allusions to Catholic liturgy and the Trinity. Such compositors can prove surprisingly erudite, often self-consciously so to the point of derailing a simple tale in a wealth of references. The threefold arrangements which, prima facie, seem obvious remnants of an oral heritage are just the modest sort of flourish by which a scribbling monk might have directed audiences toward his new faith.

This is certainly not to say that a peculiarly oral triadism may not be detected in ancient Celtic literature. Indeed, it has often left extraordinary and unequivocal traces. The Welsh Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Triads of the Isle of Britain), finally written down by some subversive scribe in the early Middle Ages, features dozens of threesomes which have emerged from centuries of oral tradition (Bromwich lxx-lxxvii and Stevens 598-99). A few of these are versified and answer to Morgan’s description of a distinctive folk genre. Most, however, are quite blunt; and we must assume that, rather than constituting an artistic endeavor in themselves, they merely connect similar themes or motifs to assist the storyteller’s or historian’s recollective effort.[10] “Their actual form suggests that they were preliterate,” claims Rutherford, “as triplets of this kind would have been a convenient mnemonic for those who had to memorize them” (48); and the evidence in favor of his argument is most persuasive. We know that the master story-teller of preliterate Wales, the cyfarwydd, memorized voluminous lists of triads in the process of learning his craft. They were, in effect, indices or all the major tales—and many of the minor ones—for which he would be held accountable. The narrator of the Mabinogion occasionally cannot resist orienting his matter within some time-honored triad of this kind. For example, at the end of Branwen Verch Llyr, he tells us that the burial of Bendigeidfran’s head was one of the Three Happy Concealments, its disinterment one of the Three Unhappy Disclosures, and the slap to Branwen which began the tragedy one of the Three Unhappy Blows.[11]

To be sure, an adept oral performer would seldom have used the triads in this otiose, self-promoting manner. Again, what we see, even in the Four Branches of the Mabinogion (the ancient core of the work), is a quasi-literate, or transitional, reportage of essentially oral matter.[12] Triadic name-dropping of the kind just mentioned seems especially self-conscious and remote from oral technique. Perhaps the author in these instances simply wanted to pay homage to the narrative tradition, or perhaps he wanted to show off his knowledge of that tradition. In either case, it would seem more likely that the exhibitionist was truly the literate scribe rather than someone in the line of oral transmission, since a tradition is usually in jeopardy when scribblers feel moved to advertise loyalty to it or strut knowledge of it. Yet the scribes are not above taunting their oral predecessors at times. The recorder of the Breudwyt Ronabwy (Dream of Rhonabwy) declares in open triumph at the end of his work that no one can repeat its lengthy, detailed descriptions—none of which displays triadism—without his written text.[13] (The gray area of transition is discussed eloquently by Hainsworth and Nagler, above all.)

The use of triads merely to shepherd similar themes for convenient storing remains one of their humbler functions in oral narrative, at any rate, and indeed seems largely confined to Celtic culture. Far and away the most common service which threes perform in such narrative lies in organizing its actual plot structure. Here one must examine individual tales with a magnifying glass, for the number three is seldom mentioned explicitly. To turn to the Mabinogion once again, the tale of Branwen is itself constructed in three parts: the princess’s ill-starred marriage, her brother’s expedition to Ireland, and the marvelous experiences of the survivors. A triadic order supports the story’s excursive appendages along with its trunk, as well. For instance, Bendigeidfran feasts Matholwch for three nights at Aberffraw, first on Branwen’s wedding night and then twice after Efnisien’s insult.

The other tales of the Mabinogion’s original core—those about Pwyll, Manawydan, and Math—reflect the same kind of threefold structuring.[14] Pwyll Pendeuic Dyfed divides neatly into the episodes of Pwyll’s substitution for Arawn, his courtship of Rhiannon, and his recovery of their kidnapped son. Upon closer inspection, we again find smaller triadic clusters of action, such as Rhiannon’s three mysterious appearances on horseback. As a matter of fact, the tale of Pwyll turns out to be a relatively weak example of triadic order, since it seems to originate in a dyadic “solar myth” of death and rebirth.[15] Manawydan’s story, by contrast, so abounds in threefold adventures that the tracing of them all would prove intolerably tedious here.

As I have suggested, three episodes or events can be easily remembered, whereas four might be too many to handle and two would hardly yield the desired dramatic amplitude. Some of the Welsh triads are altogether too transparent, however: surely they advertise themselves as well as—or instead of—bringing intricacy to the plot. Particularly in such intermediate tales of the Mabinogion as Llyudd a Llefelys, one finds triadism without pleasing complexity. In this case, the story is quite brief and the plagues to be dispelled quite superficially introduced. Could such grouping be more cultic than mnemonic? The late Georges Dumézil, more than any other, is associated with the notion that Indo-European cultures have a predilection for threes in their mentality based upon their peculiar socio-economic order. According to Dumézil, “la tripartition en magiciens-juristes, guerriers, éleveurs-agriculteurs” holds the secret both to the history and the myth of these civilizations (7).

Whatever one thinks of Dumézil’s theory (which itself is probably influenced by cultural predilection, the Celtic consciousness[16]), both ancient and medieval, was indubitably conditioned to regard the number three as special. On the other hand, a medieval text’s awkward, ostentatious use of triadism is no proof that an oral precedent did not integrate triads much more functionally into the story line. Perhaps Lludd a Llefelys is a scribe’s skeletal recollection of an oral performance, or even a performer’s shorthand: the writer recalls the memorable groups of three, but does not labor to reproduce the artistry of their presentation. His assumption may well have been that future readers would embellish as the bare text refreshed their memory, and he may well have been correct. Though A.B. Lord asserted in The Singer of Tales that literacy immediately shakes off orality, he was later to recant this position, and the Middle Ages are its obvious and irresistible rebuttal. An era wherein writing tries to negotiate a spoken heritage before declaring a fully independent technique may drag on for generations and achieve remarkable stability. Nagy has stressed of the Celtic Middle Ages that “most of what ‘happens’ in these literary texts, on the levels of both form and content, is directly and even self-consciously expressive of this clash” between oral and literate style (368). In the slightly different context of Old English literature, Renoir repeatedly warns that “we should exercise caution in guessing the rapidity with which earlier societies might have crossed the boundary line between preliterate and literate culture” (58). In short, it would be equally surprising if the Mabinogion’s scribes had expurgated all traces of oral technique and if they had preserved it fully and accurately.

By way of reaffirming the complex relationships within the Welsh material, let us briefly consider the Old Irish tradition. In Ireland, story-telling followed much the same course as it did in Wales, except that corresponding tendencies are even more ancient and exaggerated (cf. Bromwich lxiv-lxvii). The Irish fili, too, would have committed to memory a ling list of triadically arranged themes (some of them the same as the cyfarwydd’s) in the process of becoming a professional. These triads are sometimes cited rather ostentatiously in the texts recording the ancient Ulster Cycle: e.g., a late manuscript containing the Tochmarc Emire, of Courtship of Emer, refers to Cú Chulainn’s Three Harnessings of the Sickle-Chariot, and the Aided Con Culainn, or Death Tale of Cú Chulainn, mentions the Three One-Horse Drives of Ireland (Van Hamel 63 and 116). Once again, we are by no means certain that the fili himself (as opposed, say, to a pedantically show-off monastic) was responsible for such name-dropping; yet it seems fairly obvious that, like his Welsh counterpart, he used triadism liberally in the structuring of the plot. A medieval transcription of the Táin Bó Cúalnge in the Book of Leinster (LL), for instance, features threefold action throughout, and is generally agreed to stem from a lengthy oral tradition (cf. O’Rahilly xii-xiv). The Macgnímrada (or Boyhood DeedsO of Cú Chulainn recounted by Fergus to Medb and Ailill includes the following three adventures (LL 739-1217 )). The young Cú arrives at Emain Macha to dazzle Conchubar with his prowess; then he slays the ferocious hound of Culand, winning himself a sobriquet thereby; and finally he takes a warrior’s arms for the first time, and episode which is itself tripartite and one of whose elements involves Cú’s defeating the three sons of Nechta. Later on,. The sorceress Morrígan assumes the form of three different animals in an effort to wound Cú Chulainn, only to be maimed each time herself (LL1989-2011); yet she quickly manages to wheedle a threefold blessing from him in still another shape, and so is cured (LL2103-2113). The climactic context between Cú Chulainn and his foster-brother, Fer Diad, builds to its tragic finish over three days of matching strength against strength (LL 2606-3596).

These examples are among the most apparent, but scarcely begin to make up a complete tally. While other versions of the Táin may not produce the same list of triadic structures, they share the Book of Leinster’s respect for this technique of organization.[17] That different manuscripts should present differing accounts only emphasizes the utilitarian, non-ritualistic side of triadism in the Irish tales. An oral teller could most surely get lost in so many episodes, and he had most surely inherited some conflicting accounts.

Now, if triadism thrives here as in the Welsh texts because the number three is uniquely memorable to Celtic bards for its cultural implications, the technique should thrive even better in the early Christian era. Christianity was grafted onto Celtic paganism quite readily in many ways, and the two traditions would certainly have reinforced each other’s reverent affection for trichotomy. Nevertheless, just as Apollonius’s literate romance abandoned the threefold ordering so pervasive in Homeric epic, so the romances which conclude the Mabinogion—Peredur, Gereint, and Owein—display little of the triadic structuring so evident in the Four Branches. For instance, Enid warns Gereint of attacking brigands three times despite his command to be silent—and then does so yet a fourth time the next morning; and the otherworldly fountain of the last tale is violated three times, but Owein’s further adventures observe no such order. These Welsh romances are written narratives, conceived to be read (though probably aloud, and to others) rather than recited. Their style resembles that of Chrétien de Troyes (who wrote romances about the same three heroes, and may even have influenced the Welsh author) rather than distinctly threefold tales of Branwen and Manawydan.[18] Their ancient Celtic origins notwithstanding, they have little traffic with threes simply because they have left mnemonic concerns far behind.

In Ireland, too, virtually the same decades that produced the last records of the Ulster Cycle saw the arrival of utterly new matter from Greco-Roman antiquity by way of continental popularization. The late medieval translations of Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Statius’s Thebaid into Irish are fairly true to their originals. The Irish Merugud Uilix, however, does not remotely resemble Homer’s Odyssey; the Togail Troí is equally un-Homeric, and in general those romances based on Greek mythology are an impossible tangle of garbled transmission.[19] Even such renditions of contemporary matter as we find in the Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando’s evocation of Ariosto share no significant similarity with their nominal sources. Except for adaptations of Latin epic, then, these stories have been written and rewritten with the utmost license (from the perspective of modern translation). The Irish authors, no doubt relishing a new degree of freedom, have introduced many native stylistic peculiarities, such as an exuberant alliteration during sequences of heated action (a touch found abundantly even in the Irish Aeneid). Yet triadism of any sort—and here is the critical point for our discussion—is almost entirely absent. The single relevant difference between the new romances and the manuscripts of the Ulster Cycle is also the explanation of this vacuity: the romances had not reached scribal hands through a purely oral medium at any point. The scribes did not record triadic structuring because they had not encountered it in their sources and did not need it in their re-tellings; and they had not encountered it and did not need it because triadic order is a mnemonic device of use only in oral performances.

We shall never reconstruct the precise chain of events which gave many medieval Celtic texts their recorded form. Yet I would conclude this section by hearkening to a much more recent Irish story-teller—Tomás Ó Criomhthain—of whose tales we sometimes have both oral and written versions. The contrast observable in Tomás’s narrative technique was reviewed in a recent paper. I offer here a single instructive instance. “Tóír an Chiosa” (Collecting the Rent) was first told verbally to Robin Flower for publication in the collection, Seanchas ón Oileán Tiar (131-35). Tomás himself would later write down the incident in An t-Oileánach.[20] Both versions relate how the women of the Great Blasket Island once drove away the police sent by their landlord with a ferocious pelting of stones. In Tomás’s dictation, we learn that the official steamboat tried to land its launches at three different points without success, being anticipated at the first two points by a mob of stone-wielding females. The third site on the island’s windward side is simply inaccessible due to rough weather, though several men drench themselves in a vain attempt to come ashore. The three landing sites may be a clue of orality. They structure the first encounter in a pleasantly(for there will be more, of course) complicated yet easily remembered pattern, the first two members of which are quite similar and the third of which follows an alternate scenario (like several of Homer’s triads: e.g., the Paris/Menelaus and Hector/Ajax duels and the climactic Hector/Achilles duel). Upon this tripartite episode ensue two more, which are rather less violent and bring the story to a morally uplifting fulfillment as if it were something near to a parable. Both subsequent episodes involve what are now errands of mercy to the impoverished islanders. A boat leaves from the mainland town of Dingle again, this time bearing sympathetic observers who marvel at the misery of Blasket life. The encounter ends peacefully as a boatload of staple goods arrives. Three more boats of foodstuffs follow—a triadic flourish of no narrative importance, since the three missions take place without incident and are mentioned concurrently. In the story’s final adventure, the gentry in Dublin, moved by the accounts of abject poverty which have reached them, send an agent west to view the situation. On his recommendation, the relief effort continues.

The exciting confrontation between armed officials and the island’s womenfolk is thus kneaded into a somewhat rambling narrative full of conventional moralism. The account which Tomás wrote later in chapter 6 of An t-Oileánach (59-61) is stunningly different. A young Tomás is now an active participant in the excitement, assisting in the collection of stones for the women to hurl, and his point of view as a narrator is accordingly quite limited. As the steamboat’s first launch reaches the strand and stones begin to fly, the boy sees a young officer cock his gun ominously… but the trigger is never pulled, and the unwanted visitors retreat. There are no second and third attempts to land on other beaches—just a second attempt to land along the same shore. Many of the characters have a more rounded personality and (in a literate sense) more realism in this version. As for the subsequent errands of mercy, they, too, dissolve into “realistic” detail. The next authorities from the mainland are not conscience-stricken by the poverty they see but beguiled by the islanders’ trick of hiding all but the most sickly livestock. The final visitors are a group of health officials whom the islanders similarly delude by jumping clothed into their beds and feigning illness.

Hence the triadic structures of the Seanchas version have been virtually discarded. Instead of three distinct landing sites, the more reflective autobiographical account mentions three launches which attempt two landings in unison at the same site; and instead of two subsequent episodes which reintegrate the violent original encounter into a communal ethos, the last two vignettes are caustic barbs aimed at a foolish, self-righteous gentry. At least one of the two versions must simply be untrue if both are judged by literate standards of accuracy. We would progress farther toward an understanding of the oral mentality, however, with its concatenations of similar events and its ultimately serene moral vision, if we would concede that the Seanchas yarn has a truth of its own. The triads provide a rhythm and an amplitude to this vision. In an oral idiom, they say that the tale’s optimism is not haphazard or premature, but based upon a patient, thorough experience of life. They are not mystical symbols: they are straightforward assurances that the picture before us is complete. Might Homer’s triads not have had a very similar kind of origin?

A culture-wide gravitation to a certain number which once met largely practical needs may also account for the tetrads of virtually all American Indian societies. These foursomes are often cited to prove that threes cannot have the universal attraction which Europeans love to discern in them. Yet Amerindian oral tales employ triads in the same menner as did the Celtic and Greek narratives, if somewhat less frequently. The phenomenon of Amerindian tetradism, then, does not so much rival triadism as coexist with it. For whatever reason, the Celts had elevated triads to occupy an exalted religious role as well as a humble mnemonic one. Amerindian culture exalted a different number to occupy the most visible and—in a sense—superficial position in its art and rites. Perhaps the four seasons clearly observable in most parts of North America (the cradle of this culture in the Western hemisphere) exercised a decisive influence. Or perhaps the origin of these tetrads was more rational than circumstantial. The number two is at least as deeply embedded in the human mind as three. Indeed, three may be viewed as a working compromise between the polarized absolutes of the dyad. Another way of resolving such a polarized worldview would be to pair off two such poles. At the same time, the tetrad, as a group of two twos, might be seen as a celebration of the cosmos’s essential dyadism, just as three groups of three crop up commonly in the Old Irish tales.

Without indulging in further speculation, we may simply declare that the tetrad holds a special fascination for Amerindians which manifests itself brilliantly throughout their oral traditions. Such passages as the following (from a Brule Sioux myth which clearly serves to explain existing rituals) seem as exuberantly fourfold as the Celtic tradition is threefold.

Iyan Hokshi closed the entrance of his little lodge with a flap of buffalo robe, so that no air could escape or enter. Pouring water from the bag over them, he thanked the rocks, saying, “You brought me here.” Four times he poured the water; four times he opened the flap and closed it. Always he spoke to the rocks and they to him. As he poured, the little lodge filled with steam so that he could see nothing but the white mist in the darkness. When he poured the water a second time, he sensed a stirring. When he poured the water a third time, he began to sing. And when he poured the water a fourth time, those dead, dried-up things also began to sing. (Erdoes and Ortiz 19)[21]

Sometimes other numbers add variety to the tales (Iyan Hokshi happens to have five uncles), yet four is not only preferred in all explicit contexts, but specially revered in religious or ritual scenes. Every North American Indian tradition documents this phenomenon. Four seems to hold the key to the rhythms of the universe. It is not merely aesthetic: it is holy (to the extent that a mythopoeic culture would have distinguished the two). The passage below (also from a Brule Sioux tale) addresses the metaphysical even more directly than the one just cited--and the tetrad is even more in evidence.

“With this holy pipe,” she said, “you will walk like a living prayer. With your feet resting upon the earth and the pipestem reaching into the sky, your body forms a living bridge between the Sacred Beneath and the Sacred Above. Wakan Tanka smiles upon us, because now we are as one: earth, sky, and all living things, the two-legged, the four- legged, the winged ones, the grasses. Together with the people, they are all related, one family. The pipe holds them all together.

“Look at this bowl,” said the White Buffalo Woman. “Its stone represents the buffalo, but also the flesh and blood of the red man. The buffalo represents the universe and the four directions, because he stands on four legs, for the four ages of creation. The Buffalo was put in the west by Wakan Tanka at the making of the world, to hold back the waters. Every year he loses one hair, and in every one of the four ages he loses a leg. The sacred hoop will end when all the hair and the legs of the great buffalo are gone, and the water comes back to cover the earth.”

As riddled with mystical foursomes as the White Buffalo Woman's instructions are, however, we must not fail to notice that, even here, a triad intrudes. The body “forms a living bridge” between earth and sky: there is no fourth member. The conception of a culture hero interceding between earth and sky (sometimes interpreted as the earthy and celestial components of human nature) occurs in oral traditions around the world.[22] Amerindian raconteurs, then, are no more immune to the triadic logic of mediation than anyone else. Furthermore, they are not above using threes to impart a sense of plurality or urgency, as Demosthenes or Cicero would have done. The triadic cry of Komashtam'ho in a Yuma tale, “Wood, come into being! Wood, come alive! Wood, come here to where I stand!” (Erdoes and Ortiz, 79), builds to a rhetorically effective climax. And when the Navaho gambling-god Nahoilpi fumes in one telling, “I will kill you all with lightning. I will send war and disease among you. May the cold freeze you! May the fires burn you! May the waters drown you!” (Matthews 96), the third element of his curse is itself a triad. Such threesomes occasionally graduate to the status of aphorisms, it would appear, as has so often happened in the European tradition. The protagonist of a Sioux tale, for example, finds out that "a vision comes as a gift born of humility, of wisdom, and of patience" (Erdoes and Ortiz, 72).

Indeed, the native Americans of some areas have bestowed upon the triad a little of that aesthetic/religious recognition usually reserved for tetrads. The prehistoric inhabitants of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico worked triangular motifs into the basically square patterns of their pottery (at a time several centuries before the first European’s explosive arrival). Many tribes of this southwestern region still employ such motifs in their art (Stiles 40-76). A thousand miles farther east, the engineers of the Mississippian mounds, which in many respects seem monuments to the square (cf. Hudson 220-21) and which antedated the European onslaught by about as much as Chacoan civilization, have left occasional evidence of a tendency to construct in threes. It appears that the plateaus on top of the mounds were either rendered rectangular or were occupied by rectangular buildings, and the mounds themselves are often squared against the four points of the compass with marvelous accuracy; yet the number three has nonetheless been admitted into the sacred equation on a few sites.[23]

Again, one cannot contest that, as a matter of cultural circumstance, Amerindians find foursomes to symbolize cosmic truths more effectively than threesomes. Hence the number four is mentioned explicitly, and even ritually, in many of their tales, whereas the word "three" occurs very seldom. Furthermore, since tetrads are (as one might say) on their minds, Amerindian raconteurs frequently organize the essential plot structure of their stories into fours. The favoring of one number over the other, however, is ultimately a question of degree. Threes have by no means been ignored in the art and ritual of this culture, as some would have us believe. Since my objective is to establish only the triad’s utility in oral story-telling, let us examine how threefold structures support the minutiae of especially complex performances, in Amerindian culture as elsewhere.

There is no dearth of recorded tales which demonstrate this practical reliance upon triads beneath the reverend and highly visible adornment of the tetrad. While a given tale, viewed as a whole, is likely to consist of four episodes, one or more of these episodes may well display a threefold order if it happens to be especially long and involved. In a Seneca story about a young lad reminiscent of Cú Chulainn, the boy-hero is forbidden by his father to seek adventure in each of four directions--which he proceeds to do, anyway, overcoming a more ferocious ogre on every new foray. The second and longest episode pits him against the giant Stone Coat. This monster he duly slays after three—not four—trials of strength and wits (Erdoes and Ortiz, 22-3). Similarly, a Blackfoot tale about the boy who brought horses to his people from an enchanted land is ostensibly tetradic in style and organization; but the boy’s journey to the Great Mystery Lake takes him past two smaller lakes, making an obscure but convenient triad. The distance between each of the lakes demands four-times-four days of walking, and, once at his destination, the boy must watch four days for a chance to ensnare the spirit chief. He is instructed, however, to ask the chief for three gifts. The much-coveted Elk Dogs (i.e., horses) are granted, as a result, and the chief assures him that they will approach docilely if he retraces his steps for four days. Yet he receives three commands to be followed at various stages of his return journey: to trust in his magic clothes without looking back, to ignore the horses when they first appear, and to catch one with his magic rope when they finally overtake him (Erdoes and Ortiz, 56-59). Triadic structuring plainly serves the Amerindian raconteur as a mnemonic tool even as he weaves more evident fourfold structures. The two numbers work together harmoniously in his hands, one of them being mystically charged, the other simply a practical help.

The list of instances above could easily be extended. Though native American culture differs widely from end to end of the vast continents which it spans, its reverence for the number four is persistent—but scarcely less so is the tendency of Amerindian story-tellers to build intricate episodes upon a threefold pattern. This simple fact of narrative mechanics is especially clear in western North America, where a substantial body of tradition has been garnered directly from native sources. A Hopi tale in which the sun’s child, like Phaethon, goes to seek his father relates how the boy travels four days and nights on each stage of his journey; yet a mere three stages in all bring him to the sun’s house (Erdoes and Ortiz, 146-47). A Cochiti story about a maiden who refuses all suitors has her ignoring two courtship dances and two artistic displays put on by local beaux before Coyote finally wins her with a third dance and a third display. In other words, there are four original suitors, but the method of Coyote’s suit fills out two triads (Erdoes and Ortiz, 310-11).

As we saw in the Celtic and Homeric traditions, the number three itself is not mentioned in the coordinating of such structural groups. From the oral teller’s perspective, the sheer ease with which three things or similar events may be recalled recommends the triad. It has no immediate mystical value when used as the principle for organizing superficially variegated episodes. This is not to say that triadic religious rites or concepts do not render the number yet more memorable in some cultures—but neither should we assume that the occasional influence of cultural circumstance is the one and only cause of the triad’s mnemonic utility.

[1] While Western societies certainly lay an exaggerated stress upon their beloved triads, it is not true that the number three has no inherent privileges in human logic. The most compelling case for the triad’s universal character may have been presented unwittingly by Immanuel Kant in fashioning his threefold “categories of the apperception”. As Kant points out, the first two members of each categorical group combine to form the notion of a third, giving us, for instance, the concept of a unitary wholeness from concepts of the one and the many. Kant’s qualitative categories have a particularly dynamic triadism. Here he maintains that we conceive of any perceptible quality—hardness, heat, speed, and so on—as existing between a pair of abstracted polarities. Hence we live in the zone of the eternal third element: the heat which could yet be hotter, the speed which could yet be faster. To our minds, any operative qualification is threefold, including that which is definitely not the feeling, that which is the feeling to perfection, and that which we feel in reality.