List of The Sandman Characters - Gods, Demigods, and Major Personifications - Three

The Three is an entity unique to The Sandman, something like a god and something like a dream and completely mutable in appearance, seeming to exist as a sentient concept or symbol in the form of any group of three women, particularly when they represent the Mother, the Maiden and the Crone, the three aspects of the Triple Goddess in many mythologies. Sometimes they appear in the form of the three witches from DC's horror anthology, The Witching Hour: Mildred, Mordred, and Cynthia. As these witches, they also appeared in a prestige format limited series of the same title, and two standard limited series, Witchcraft and Witchcraft: Le Terreur.

In The Sandman

The Three repeatedly appear throughout The Sandman for many different reasons and fulfilling different functions at different points in the story. Their first appearance is in The Sandman #2, where they appear as the three witches, Mildred (mother), Mordred (crone), and Cynthia (maiden) from the DC horror anthology The Witching Hour. They later take many different forms over the course of the series, and the "three women" symbol remains an extremely common one, often blurring the lines between when characters are supposed to be merely themselves and when they are supposed to be representations of the Three.

The Three represent the female principle, prophecy, and mystery, and they are often a vaguely menacing and enigmatic presence in the series. As a three-in-one mystical being, they can be seen as contrasting with the commonly-used triple-male Trinity. Indeed, legend and mythology play a much larger role throughout the series than religion does, though some segments suggest a supreme monotheistic God at work behind the scenes.

Common incarnations of the Three include the Erinyes (Furies) in their vengeful aspect and the Moirai (Fates) or Weird Sisters in their divinatory aspect. They also sometimes subtly appear in the form of other characters (such as Eve) or groups of characters.

After The Sandman

The Three later appeared in a graphic novel named WitchCraft, in which one of their priestesses in ancient Rome, Ursula, is set upon and raped by barbarians. She is then reincarnated three times, followed by the witches, and wronged again by reincarnations of the barbarian leader until the modern age, when she comes back as his elderly mother-in-law and manages to defeat him.

The Three are then able to exact their own suitable punishment for the barbarian: that he would be reincarnated as each of the priestesses he had raped, in order, with the exception of Ursula. He would never know what was happening until the moment of death, at which point it would start all over again.

The Three are satisfied, and in the end decide that Ursula will live another twenty years and become an accomplished and respected witch in her twilight years, and her grandchild will be beautiful, demonstrating a rare instance of apparent empathy.