“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
That’s Sir Toby Belch, speaking to Feste the Clown in “Twelfth Night.” During the Middle Ages, Christmas was a time of continuous feasting and merriment, which climaxed on Twelfth Night. The height of celebration became the night before, or eve, of Epiphany. The twelve day count actually begins with the night of December 25, the “first night.” The Twelfth Night is the night before Epiphany, and the twelfth day is Epiphany itself.
Food and drink are there in abundance. A punch called “wassail,” consumed during Christmastime, is especially plentiful on Twelfth Night. Around the world, special pastries, such as the tortell and king cake, are baked on Twelfth Night. They are eaten the following day for the Feast of the Epiphany celebrations. That’s why Sir Toby speaks of the cakes and ale.
So here we are on January 5, the Eve of the Christian Feast of the Epiphany. The Twelfth Night revelry commemorates the visit of the Magi, the “Wise Men” from the East who followed the Star of Bethlehem and found the baby Jesus. But who were those guys anyway? Is there any grain of historical truth to this biblical legend?
There may be. Here’s the rest of the story.
According to an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, the “magoi” were surveyors of the night sky. Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior could be called astronomers, astrologers, or magicians. However you label them, they were probably real people. The Latin word “magi” is the pluralization of the Greek singular “magos,” which signifies to the Latin-speaking world a Persian priest or “wise man.” The “magos” to the Greeks also connoted someone who was a sorcerer.
The WSJ piece goes on to state that the three were seeking not only scientific knowledge of the stars and planets, but they were also looking for divine portents. They were probably priests of the Zoroastrian faith, whose studies of astrology were their attempts to understand the relationship of the powers in the universe to humans.
If this is what they were up to, they would have had good reason to set out on their journey. Right around the time of Jesus’s birth, in 7 B.C., there was a “planetary conjunction,” in which Jupiter and Venus came very close to each other. They stayed close together in the sky for the better part of a year. Then, even more dramatically four years later, they sat just one-tenth of degree apart in the sky. On the morning of August 12 in 3 B.C., Jupiter and Venus sat just 1/10th a degree apart in the dawn sky. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the Full Moon. They appeared to be a single body about one-fifth the diameter of the full moon.
We actually had a similar conjunction in December of 2020. I remember going to Millennium Park, a high point in West Roxbury, to view it. There were hundreds of people, crunching through the now and carrying telescopes and binoculars, there who had the same idea. We did indeed see the “Christmas Star” in what was referred to as the Great Conjunction of December 2020.
So, to me anyway, it’s entirely plausible that these three wise men, scientists first and driven by their thirst for knowledge, did actually see something wonderful in the sky and hopped on their camels to find out what it was.
The Christian religion says that what they found was not an updated map of the sky, but another form of the ultimate good that they were seeking. They were the first people from a foreign land to see the God who had taken on a human nature in order to save humanity.
The Greek prefix “epi” can mean “upon” or “through;” think of how you use an epi-pen. And the Greek word “phaino” means “to appear;” you know what a “phenomenon” is. Christians call January 6 the Feast of the Epiphany, because God “showed himself” through his human form for the first time.
Now you know the rest of the story, and whether or not you are a believer and whether or not your true love gives you twelve drummers drumming, may the peace and good will that we sang of in our Yuletide carols be with you and your loved ones this whole year through.
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