Ezpiphany: Festival of The Twelfth Night

Jan 6, 2004, 12.00am IST

Anniyil Tharakan.
Epiphany celebrates the intervention of God in the life of a people, relating effectively, the Christmas message which emerged from Christ’s birth place at Bethlehem. Hence it is also called the Feast of Lights or the Candlemas Feast.

In the past it was also known as the Twelfth Day as it falls on the twelfth day after Christmas and winds up formally the Christmas season of rejoicing.

The Twelfth Night celebration begins on the evening of January 5 and the feast of Epiphany is celebrated on the following day. In the Jewish tradition a day begins the previous evening. The ceremonies and festivities are called “revels”. Comedies were performed at the courts and homes of nobles.

Shakespeare’s comedy, Twelfth Night, embodies the genial spirit of the Twelfth Night’s revelry. Coming early in the year, it superseded rival feasts that occurred in ancient times. The festival of the god Aeon, Persephone the Virgin’s son, was celebrated on January 6. Each year on this day, the waters of the Nile in Egypt were believed to have acquired special powers, and in Asia Minor and Arabia fountains sacred to the god Dionysus were reported to have flowed with wine.

The feast originated in the first half of the fourth century sometime before Christmas was introduced in Rome around 354 A.D. Epiphany was originally celebrated by the people of the Eastern Churches, commemorating Christ’s birth and the manifestation of his divinity to the world at the time of his baptism. It was the “Christmas” of the Christian Orient.

In the tradition of the western Churches the festival marks the visit of the three Wise Men or Magi from the East to the infant Jesus. The visit of the Magi is symbolically the manifestation of Christ to the world outside the Jewish community or the Gentiles. Though the eastern and western traditions proffer different perspectives of the feast, they concur in that it invariably celebrates the manifestation of the spiritual mystery latent in the person of Christ.

Much has been written about the whereabouts of the Wise Men from the East who were led, as the Bible says, to the infant Jesus by the course of the stars they read in the sky. India, Victor Cousin wrote, was the centre of the East and the East was identified with India. So the Biblical reference to the three Wise Men visiting Infant Jesus could well have been from India. Why would wandering yogins travel all the way to Judaea?

Roman historian Suetonius pointed out that there had spread all over the East the belief that some great sage was to be born into Judaea, who will spiritually transform the world. The gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, which the Magi carried to the Babe, are the traditional eastern ways of honouring a great personage.

The feast of Epiphany telescopes into the focal point of India’s religious discourse. For the feast inaugurates God’s descent into the world with an invitation to partake of its mystery and thereby ascend to Him. Indian spirituality is a cyclical rhythm of ascent and descent, occurring both at the individual level and the cosmic.

At the end of a cycle, man and the universe devolve into the Absolute thereby ascending to the Divine. This pattern is evident in the feast of the Epiphany: the Manifestation of the mystery of Christ to the world at large.

In Christian tradition it is a unique event whereas in Indian spirituality, it is a recurring one. But the Christian perspective telescopes into the Indian when the linear historic event is re-enacted cyclically in the ritual celebration of the feast annually.