Page 31 - Countering Trinitarian Arguments With Historical Reference

Ancient Ways by Dan and Pauline Campanelli Practitioners of Witchcraft: “3 (three) The Triple Goddess; the Lunar Phases; the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of our species. The number three is sacred to the Goddess and reflects her threefold nature of Maiden, Mother and Crone. For this reason, ingredients in a magick charm are often three in number and spells are repeated three times. The third time's the charm. A triangle symbolizes the number three.”
The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia Page 440, under Baptism and Original Forms: “...by Cyprian’s express statement (Epist., lxiii, 17), that the [original believers] Jews and the [Pagan/Apostate] Gentiles in the Apostles’ time [historically after the Apostles time when Justin Martyr came around 150 AD] had a different manner of baptizing; that among the [real] Jewish Christians a single immersion was the rule, in the Name of [Jesus] Christ alone,...wile the threefold immersion in the threefold name, which had its counterpart [or origin] in the [Pagan] heathen lustrations, was the rule among the [later Pagan] Gentile Christians.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition, pages 365-366. “Trine immersion...[was] invented to explain an existing custom, which the [Catholic] church had adopted from its pagan medium. For lustrations were normally threefold. Ovid...Persius...and Horace... similarly speak of trine lustrations; and on the last mentioned passage the scholiast Acro remarks, “He uses the words thrice purely, because people in expiating their sins plunge themselves thrice.” Such examples of ancient usage encounters us everywhere in [Pagan] Greek and Latin antiquity”
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Edited by James Hastings Volume 2, page 371 “Among the ancient [Pagan] Hindus the following ceremonies were performed. Before the navel-string was cut the Jatakarman rite was performed for male children, and wile the sacred formulae were recited, the child was fed with honey and butter...Other writers speak of the child being ceremonially washed, or dipped in sacred waters of the Ganges or some other river...[Persian] Beausobre says the child was carried to the temple, where priest plunged it into a vessel of water, and the father gave it a name...Among modern Parsis there are no formalities in conexion with name-giving, the mother conferring a name upon the child although the Joshi (Astrologer) “first gives out the names the child can bear according to its affinity to the stars under whose influence it was born.” Among the ancient Pagan races of Europe similar customs were also found. The heathen Teutons had a baptismal rite long before Christian influences had reached them. The ceremony took place immediately after birth, the father sprinkling the child, giving it a name, and consecrating it to the household gods. In this way he acknowledged it to be his own, and after the right the child could not be exposed, as it had now become one of the kin. The ceremony was known as vatni ausa, “Sprinkling with Water.” Infant or adult sprinkling three times in the names of the gods all comes to us from Paganism. We see the real origin of ideals and doctrines of Tertullian and other Catholic founders.
We find also that Tertullian, like many Catholic Theologians, believed in and prayed to three gods; again, the sacred Pagan number three comes into play.
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