#threeroadsmeet

The very word trivia derives from the Latin Trivium; meaning "the place where three roads meet" (tri + via). The spot marked by the meeting of three roads is a very powerful place in folkloric traditions around the world as it symbolically signifies the meeting of two realms. You know: our realm and that other one. At such a site of being “neither here nor there”, “betwixt and between” is where most contact with the supernatural occurs.

So, anyone wishing to cut a deal from beyond, has best do so at the Trivium. Faust struck his pact there. Hoodoo religion claims that a 3 time visit at the strike of midnight will turn someone into a mean musician or dice-thrower.  In ancient Greece Oedipus murdered his father at such a spot, and in Britain up until the mid-18th century, the bodies of the unclean dead (suicides and criminals) where buried there.

Instruments of public execution such as Gibbets, (a low budget type of gallows), where often placed at such spots. Those usually convicted of treason or murder where put in a cage suspended in the air and where left in the trivium to die of thirst and hunger.