A Roman soldier stationed in Britannia around 100 CE watched a local fisherman mend his net with a three-pronged spear. The soldier laughed and called it a tridens, a word his own people used for Neptune’s weapon. Fifteen centuries later, a French woodcarver shaped a similar tool for a cathedral’s tympanum, placing it in the hands of a horned figure tormenting the damned. The same shape. Two opposite meanings.
A trident is a three-pronged spear associated with sea gods, particularly Poseidon and Neptune, used to stir storms and shatter earth. A pitchfork is an agricultural tool for moving hay, co-opted in Christian iconography as the implement of demons and devils. The two share a form but diverge in origin, function, and symbolic weight.
Where Did the Three-Pronged Shape Come From?
The trident predates written record. Minoan frescoes from the palace at Knossos (circa 1500 BCE) depict a figure wielding a three-pronged spear, possibly an early sea deity. The word itself comes from Latin tridens, combining tri (three) and dens (tooth). The Greeks called it a tríaina, and archaeological finds from the Bronze Age Aegean show actual three-pronged fishing spears made of bronze, used for spearing tuna and other large fish.
Poseidon received the trident as his primary attribute in Hesiod’s Theogony (circa 700 BCE). The poem describes how the Cyclopes forged the weapon for him during the Titanomachy, the war between the Olympians and Titans. With it, Poseidon could strike the earth to cause earthquakes, raise or calm storms, and split rocks to create springs. The trident was never a farming tool. It was a weapon of dominion over the sea and land.
The pitchfork has a humbler origin. Agricultural forks with two or three tines appear in Roman farming manuals like Columella’s De Re Rustica (circa 60 CE), where they are called furcae. They moved hay, straw, and manure. The word “pitchfork” enters English in the late 14th century, from “pitch” (to thrust or toss) and “fork” (a pronged tool). Its function was entirely practical until Christian art reimagined it.
Why Did the Pitchfork Become a Devil’s Weapon?
The shift happened in medieval Christian art, specifically in depictions of Hell from the 12th century onward. Earlier images of the devil, such as in the Byzantine tradition, showed him as a dark angel without special tools. But as artists sought to humiliate and animalize demonic figures, they borrowed attributes from pagan gods and rustic life.
The pitchfork entered the visual vocabulary of Hell through two paths. First, the goat-footed, horned figure of the devil was partly modeled on the Greek god Pan, who carried a lagobolon (a throwing stick with prongs for hunting hares). Second, artists needed a tool that implied torment and bodily labor. A pitchfork could rake souls into the fires of Hell the same way a farmer raked hay into a cart. This was not accidental. It was doctrinal insult: the king of demons reduced to a farmhand.
The earliest clear example appears in the Winchester Psalter (circa 1150 CE), an illuminated manuscript from England. Its depiction of the Harrowing of Hell shows Satan with a pitchfork, prodding the damned. From there, the image spread through Gothic cathedrals, mystery plays, and woodcut illustrations in printed books like the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). By the 17th century, the pitchfork was inseparable from Satan in European folk imagination.
That history explains the confusion. A visitor to a cathedral saw a three-pronged fork in a demon’s hand and a three-pronged spear on a statue of Neptune. The forms were identical. The meanings could not be more different.
What Each Symbol Actually Means
The trident carries the weight of sovereignty. In Greek and Roman religion, it was a skeptron, a scepter of authority. Poseidon, as one of the three chief Olympians (with Zeus and Hades), held the trident as his badge of rule over the seas and all waters. When he struck the ground, he created rivers, springs, and horses (the latter was a common claim in Greek myth, though historians dispute whether the horse association came first or was added later). The trident also appears as a symbol on coins from the Greek city of Poseidonia (modern Paestum, Italy), minted as early as 530 BCE, reinforcing its civic and religious power.
The pitchfork means torment and humiliation. In Christian iconography, it is never a weapon of a ruler. It is the tool of a torturer, used against the powerless. Demons thrust it into the genitals, mouths, and eyes of the damned in scenes from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1500) and countless Last Judgment frescoes across Europe. The pitchfork’s tines are not elegant like the trident’s. They are crude, uneven, often depicted as wooden or iron farm implements, not divine metal.
A practical detail separates them further. The tines of a classical trident are straight, parallel, and symmetrical. They splay only slightly at the tip, designed to pierce fish or human flesh in combat. The tines of a pitchfork are curved outward in a slight arc, designed to cradle hay without puncturing it. The geometry tells the story: one is a weapon, the other is a tool for lifting.
How the Two Have Been Confused
The blurring begins in the 14th century, when artists started showing the devil with a trident instead of a pitchfork. The Visio Tnugdali, a popular 12th-century vision of Hell, described demons with “iron forks,” but illustrations of the text varied widely. Some manuscripts show a two-pronged fork, some three. By the Renaissance, the distinction had eroded in popular art.
Modern esoteric and occult traditions have further muddied the waters. The ritual tool called an athamé is sometimes depicted with a trident tip in ceremonial magic grimoires, though historically the athamé is a straight double-edged blade. The “Devil’s Trident” appears in 19th-century folklore as a term for the three-pronged mark left by a demonic encounter, though this is likely a folk etymology blended with the shape of the traditional horned god symbol.
A common modern misconception holds that the trident of Poseidon was originally a pitchfork, and that the god was a fisherman deity before becoming king of the sea. This has no basis in primary sources. Poseidon is never associated with pitchforks, hay, or agriculture in Greek myth. The trident was always a weapon of dominion, not a farming tool.
Another error: that the devil’s pitchfork was stolen from pagan gods. The fork’s origin in Christian art was not theft from Poseidon. It was an independent development, rooted in agricultural tools and the humiliation narrative. The similarity is visual coincidence, not intentional borrowing.
Notable Appearances in Texts and Art
The trident appears in the Iliad (circa 750 BCE), where Poseidon uses it to shake the battlefield at Troy. In Book 13, he strikes the ground and the earth trembles, causing the Achaean ships to groan. The trident here is not ceremonial; it is a physical instrument of massive, destructive power.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) gives the trident to Neptune (the Roman Poseidon) as the tool that strikes rock to produce the spring of Hippocrene on Mount Helicon. The poet describes Neptune striking “the ground with his trident” and the earth opening to release a stream.
The pitchfork in art reaches its fullest expression in the Inferno of Dante Alighieri (1314). Though Dante does not describe the devil’s tool in detail, later illustrators of the Divine Comedy, such as William Blake (1827) and Gustave Doré (1861), gave Lucifer a pitchfork in their engravings. Doré’s depiction of the demon at the center of Hell, with a three-pronged fork, cemented the image in public consciousness.
In occult literature, the two tools appear together only rarely. Eliphas Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854) uses the trident as a symbol of the triad in magical operations, while ignoring the pitchfork entirely. The Thelemic tradition of Aleister Crowley (early 20th century) adopted the trident as the symbol of the god Hadit, the point of consciousness in the universe.
FAQ
Is the devil’s pitchfork actually called a trident in Christian texts? No. Latin Christian texts use furca (fork) or tridens only in classical contexts. Medieval writers distinguishing demonic from divine tools reserved tridens for Neptune or pagan gods.
Did Poseidon ever use a pitchfork instead of a trident? Never in ancient sources. The confusion emerges only in modern pop culture and misinterpretations of classical art.
Why do some depictions show the devil with a two-pronged fork? Two-pronged forks were common farm tools before three-pronged versions became standard. Artists chose what they knew from daily life. The number of tines varied by region and period.
Can a trident be used as a real weapon? Yes. Historical tridents were used for fishing and combat. Roman retiarii (net fighters) in the arena used tridents against gladiators, and the tool survived as a naval boarding weapon into the 17th century.
The trident is a god’s instrument of authority over the natural world. The pitchfork is a demon’s instrument of humiliation over the condemned. They share a shape because the human hand found three points useful for piercing and lifting. They share nothing else. For those studying the visual language of mythology, the difference is not academic. It is the difference between sovereignty and suffering, between a weapon and a tool.
If this distinction interests you, you may want to read more about symbols of power in mythology and our guide to demonic iconography in medieval art. The full mythology hub contains deeper treatments of Poseidon, the classical gods, and their attributes.