1. Again ‘three’ plays a central part in all the folk tales we looked at in the chapter on ‘Rebirth’. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, for instance, both unfold in three stages: the first when the heroine initially falls under the shadow of the dark power as a young child; the second when she arrives at the threshold of adult life and the dark power succeeds in imprisoning her in the state of living death; the third when, years later, she is finally redeemed and brought back to life by the Prince.

2. In the first published edition of the Cinderella story, included in Charles Perrault’s collection of French folk-tales, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (1697), he describes her as only going to the ball twice. This may have been because Perrault heard an already corrupted version; or that, in adapting the story for a French court audience, he shortened it because he did not understand the significance of the Rule of Three. But in almost all other folk-versions of the story (e.g., Aschenputtel, in the collection of German folk-tales by the Grimm brothers), the heroine sees the Prince-hero three times in her disguise, before the final fourth encounter which reveals her true identity.

3. Although the chief archetypal numbers around which stories are structured are one, two, three and four, other numbers which appear less often are those which combine and reinforce their significance, particularly compounds or multiples of three and four. Back into prehistory seven has taken on symbolic or magical significance as a combination of three and four, as in the mythical seven gateways to the underworld, the seven sages of the Greek world, the seven against Thebes, the seven ages of man, the seven deadly sins, the seven cardinal virtues. The Sumerians and later civilisations spoke of seven planets or ‘heavenly wanderers’, including the sun and the moon. Nine is significant as three times three, as in the nine Muses. Twelve is significant as three times four, making up a totality, as in the twelve apostles or the twelve supreme Greek gods on Olympus. Dante’s Divine Comedy, which as we shall see in Chapter 33 is structured round the rule of three as comprehensively as any story in the world, is divided into three books each of 33 cantos, apart from the first which acts as prologue to the whole work, to make a round 100 in all.