This is part twelve of the “Twelve Posts of Christmas,” a series exploring twelve traditions of the Christmas season.
At long last, the twelfth day of Christmas. We have arrived, dear Reader! And so my little series comes to a close.
Today, the fifth of January, is the Eve of the Epiphany or “Twelfth Night.” (Shakespeare’s play is named after the day, for the record.) When the sun goes down this evening, a new liturgical day begins: the Solemnity of the Epiphany.
On January 6, the Christians around the globe celebrate the Epiphany. The Western world of Christendom celebrates the arrival of the Magi to the side of Mary and the baby Jesus on Epiphany, whereas the Eastern Church commemorates Christ’s baptism — the public declaration of Christ’s divine sonship.
The day is marked by King Cake, caroling, polar dips, and — for those who are high-church curious — house blessings.
Have you ever spotted a mysterious collection of chalk letters and symbols above a front door? To the untrained eye, there is something fairly occult about the hand-drawn collections of letters and numbers, a breath of ancient gnostic knowledge.
The symbols look something like this:
20 + C + M + B + 24
No, their purpose is not to ward off aliens or immanentize the eschaton. The inscription is the ceremonial accompaniment to an Epiphany house blessing — an invocation for the protection of God, with His angels and saints, over the home.
The letters “C + M + B” have a double meaning. They are the initials of the the traditional names of three Magi, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, who travel from the East, following a star, to worship the newborn King of the Jews. The letters also stand for the ancient Latin blessing: Christus Mansionem Benedicat (“May Christ bless this house”). What appear to our eyes as “plus signs” are crosses, invoking the sacrifice of Christ.
The term “Magi” conjures images of the delightfully detailed figurines of the miniature nativity set, always outfitted with long beards, gilded robes, and fine treasures. The Magi hold a beautiful and crucial part in the story of Christ’s birth. In a sense, they were the first converts to Christianity from “paganism” — the word here simply meaning a religion outside of the Abrahamic faiths. The Magi had nothing to rely upon but the wisdom of old and a new hope, as they traversed the desert to find the Christ-child.
I will leave you, dear Reader, with one of the most piercing poems of Epiphany: “The Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot. In the poem, Eliot masterfully guides his reader through the story of the Magi, as told from their own point of view.
First published in 1927, the work now rests in the public domain, so I can share all of it with you —
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The last sentence describes, powerfully and succinctly, the experience of a faithful man living in an increasingly secular world. To encounter the Good and the True and to hold on to it firmly — in the midst of “an alien people clutching their gods” — is the call of the knight of faith. According to Russell Kirk — notably a good friend of Eliot who wrote a wonderful biography of him, Eliot and His Age — this is also the call of the conservative. It is a call to stay human in the face of the uniquely dehumanizing forces wielded by modernity.
Eliot was distinctly attuned to such forces. In a series of lectures the poet gave at Harvard in 1933, Eliot offered his own fears regarding the dehumanization of our technological society:
When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheaper motorcars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless receiver attached to its ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians [a society whose own culture was neutralized by the import of “modern civilization”].
Epiphany is meant to shake us — a lightning strike that clarifies the ordering of our own values. Let us hold onto the permanent things, and remain uneasy under the standard dispensation.