Antiquity has plenty of goddesses in threes. Hecate is shown with three faces at the crossroads. The Moirai spin, measure and cut. The Matres appear on Romano-Celtic altars as three seated women with baskets and infants. The Norns and the Irish trio of war goddesses are triple as well. None of these is a set of maiden, mother and crone, and none is described in the ancient sources as one goddess passing through the stages of a woman life. Where three figures appear they usually have different functions rather than different ages.
Historians of modern paganism, Ronald Hutton foremost among them, have set this out clearly, and the finding is not contested in the scholarly literature: the triad in the form modern practice uses it is a twentieth century construction. That is a statement about its history and not about its value, and many practitioners who accept the history continue to use the scheme because it works in ritual.
There is also criticism from inside the movement, on the ground that defining the divine feminine by three reproductive stages leaves out women who do not pass through them and reduces a goddess to a biography. Some traditions have responded by adding further aspects, a warrior or a queen between mother and crone, and others have set the triad aside for pantheons and for named goddesses whose own sources describe them. The atlas records the scheme as modern, widely used, and disputed within the traditions that use it.