“Adoration of the Magi,” Gentile De Fabriano, 1423, tempera on panel
30 December 2024
The Christian festival of Epiphany celebrates the visit of the Magi to worship the newborn Jesus. It falls on the sixth of January. According to tradition, Christ’s baptism and the wedding at Cana, where he turned water into wine, fell on the anniversary of the Magi’s visit. Doctrinally, all three of these events signify the manifestation of the divine Christ to the wider world. And the word epiphany is from the Latin epiphania, which in turn is from the Greek adjective ἐπιϕάνια (epiphania) and the verb ἐπιϕαίνειν (epiphainein, to manifest). Use of epiphany in English can be traced to Old English, but later use, from Middle English onward, is influenced by the borrowing of epiphanie from Old French, which also comes from the Latin and Greek.
In addition to the borrowed Epiphany, the festival was also called by the native Twelfth Day, because it falls twelve days after Christmas. And Twelfth Night is used to refer to celebrations on the eve of Epiphany. We see both Epiphany and Twelfth Day in the first law code of King Cnut (r. 1016–35), written c. 1018:
And na þearf man na fæstan fram Eastran oð Pentecosten, butan hwa gescrifen sig oððe he elles fæstan wylle; eallswa of middanwintra oð octabas Epiphanige (þæt is seofen niht ofer Twelftan mæssedæge)
(And no one needs to fast from Easter to Pentecost, except he who is shriven [i.e., fasting due to penance] or if he otherwise desires to fast; likewise from Christmas to the eighth day of Epiphany (that is seven nights after the Twelfth Day.)
Cnut’s first law code dealt primarily with ecclesiastical matters, the second primarily with secular ones. Both are thought to have been penned by Wulfstan, the archbishop of York (d. 1023).
And we see Twelfth Night in the Peterborough Chronicle for the year 878 C.E. This entry describes the defeat of King Alfred’s army by the Danes and his fleeing into the swamp to hide, although there is no mention of him burning any cakes:
Her hine bestæl se here on midne winter ofer twelftan niht to Cippanhamme & geridan Westseaxna land & gesetton & mycel þæs folces ofer sæ adræfdon & þæs oðres þone mæstan dæl hi geridon butan þam cynge Ælfrede; litle werede unyðelice æfter wudum for & on morfestenum.
(Here the Danish army stole away from Christmas until Twelfth Night to Chippenham and overran and occupied Wessex and drove many of the people across the sea, and the greatest part of the others they overran, except King Alfred, [who] with a small band went with difficulty through the woods and into moor-fastnesses.)
Epiphany is also used generically to refer to any revelation or discovery. This sense dates to the early modern period. We see it a sermon written by Bishop Jeremy Taylor (d. 1667) that was preached on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. The text for the sermon is Luke 9:54, in which James and John ask Jesus if they should call God’s fire down on Samaritans who have rejected him. Taylor writes:
It would have disturbed an excellent patience to see him, whom but just before they beheld transfigured, and in a glorious epiphany on the mount, to be so neglected by a company of hated Samaritans, as to be forced to keep his vigils where nothing but the welkin should have been his roof, not any thing to shelter his precious head from the descending dew of heaven.
An appropriate text to mark a failed plot to detonate a bomb in order to kill a king.
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. epiphanie, n.
Irvine, Susan, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 7, MS E. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 50. JSTOR.
Liebermann, Felix. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, 1 Cnut 16.1 (c. 1018), 1.296.
Middle English Dictionary, 2024, s.v. epiphanie, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Epiphany, n.1, epiphany, n.2, Twelfth-day, n. Twelfth-night, n.
Taylor, Jeremy. “A Sermon.” In The Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. 4 of 5. T. S. Hughes, ed. London: A. J. Valpy, 1831, 238–39. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: Gentile de Fabriano, 1423; Uffizi Gallery. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.