The tri-spiral at Newgrange, Brú na Bóinne, carved around 3200 BCE, sits in the chamber's back recess; the larger triple spiral guards the entrance stone. Professor Michael O'Kelly, who excavated from 1962 to 1975, confirmed in 1969 that the winter solstice sunrise penetrates the passage and lights the chamber. The motif predates Celtic arrival in Ireland by two and a half millennia; Malta's spirals are older still, 4400 to 3600 BCE. Gimbutas traces the tri-line motif to 24,000 BCE. Its original meaning is unknown, officially, honestly.
Every meaning attached is retrospective: Celts made it land-sea-sky, Christians made it Trinity, neopagans made it the triple goddess, Sicily made it three legs. The name triskelion itself is modern, coined in French in 1835. The carvers left no caption, so each era writes its own, and the spiral absorbs them all without protest, the perfect host symbol.
The claim: the spiral survives precisely because it is a diagram of process, growth, return, approach without arrival, and every culture recognizes the form because the form is what thinking about time looks like when drawn by a hand without physics. Verdict: unfalsifiable but honest about it, and the solstice alignment gives the oldest instance a real astronomical anchor. The archive's reading: the first symbol was not a picture of a thing. It was a picture of a going. Five thousand years later, still going.
Why did the first symbol we know we invented have no words attached?