Three is the Magic Number
I loved watching Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. The joy of counting by fives, “Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty…” or the jazzy, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” One of my all-time favorites was, “Three, the magic number.”
If you want a refresher, you can see it here. The lyrics start like this:
Three is a magic number,
Yes it is, it's a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity.
You get three as a magic number.
The past and the present and the future.
Faith and Hope and Charity,
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number… (1973, Bob Dorough)
The Enneagram is built on the number three and groups of threes. Indeed three times three equals nine, and the prefix “Enneagram” is Greek for a nine-pointed figure. In the center of this figure is a triangle, a three-sided shape.
