Epiphany: You can't keep a good revelation down

A story about the three wise men, and a recently added fourth

An imagining of the three wise men.

A good friend and colleague retired recently after experiencing a road to Damascus moment on a weekend away. The same age as me, he was struck by the shortness of life and the length of his unticked-off things-to-do-before-you-die list.

On returning to work the next Monday, he announced his almost immediate exit to his fellow directors.

Martin had experienced an epiphany, a sudden and great realisation. If the word sounds somewhat religious to you, that’s because it is. Epiphany is a Christian festival celebrating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles, which took place when the magi, or three wise men, visited you-know-who after following the Star of Bethlehem across the desert.

Epiphany (sometimes called the Epiphany of the Lord) is not celebrated on Christmas Day, however, but in early January. That’s because for many Christians, it also commemorates the baptism of Jesus, which didn’t take place until he was 30, and the wedding at Cana, where he performed his first - and my personal favourite - miracle, turning water into wine. Not only that, but some scholars, such as Epiphanius of Salamis, claim Jesus’s birthday was actually January 6. (Epiphanius also claimed this as the date of the wedding at Cana, which makes you wonder whether scholarly rigour or wishful thinking was driving him on this point.) Finally, there’s no record in the Bible or elsewhere of how soon after Christ’s birth the magi visited him.

Like Martin’s revelation, what the magi experienced when they encountered Jesus wasn’t a complete surprise to them - they weren’t just running around the desert like headless camels, you know. Yet there’s a world of difference between knowing something and coming face to face with it, as any parent who’s held their newborn child will tell you, or anyone who’s experienced the death of a terminally ill loved one.

Epiphany has come to us little changed from the languages from which we took it. There was Old French epiphanie, from Late Latin epiphania, from late Greek epiphaneia, “manifestation, striking appearance, festival held in commemoration of the appearance of a god at some particular place”. Even before that, Greek had epiphanes, “manifest, conspicuous”, made up of the prefix epi “on, to” and phainein “to show”. Etymologists trace phanein right back to the PIE root bha-, “to shine”, which is also the source of the Sanskrit bhati (“shines, glitters”) and Old Irish ban (“white, light, ray of light”).

English nabbed this word for itself in the 14th century, which raises the question: what did the Christian church in Britain call the feast day before that? It’s possible they didn’t call it anything or have much need to. For many centuries, Epiphany was more important in the Eastern Church (where it was called Theophany and was rated ahead of Christmas) than in the west.

For the first few centuries of its English existence, epiphany referred exclusively to Christ. By the 1660s, however, it could also refer to other deities. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that this was also close to 1688, the year England passed The Toleration Act, granting freedom of worship to nonconformists as long as they still pledged allegiance to the monarch.

According to etymonline, it wasn’t until the 1800s that one could experience an epiphany as Martin did - that is, a secular revelation devoid of God, gods, or any divine or semi-divine entity. In Dubliners, James Joyce expanded the definition of epiphany to include not only the experience (or “spiritual manifestation”), but also the account, or capturing of it in writing. For English students and professors the world over, a question now hangs over each use of epiphany: Does it refer to the experience itself or the account of the experience? This has led one scholar, Herbert Tucker, to drily observe, “epiphany is the ‘account of an experience’ and ‘the account of an experience’,” a joke that has become lore within a small circle within the English studies universe, and more power to Professor Tucker for that.

Are you ready for another revelation? The name Tiffany derives from Epiphany, with possibly more than a passing nod towards the t in Theophany. It began as a common name for the festival of the Epiphany before being adopted as the name for a type of thin, transparent silk fabric, similar to gauze. Along the way, it also became a popular name for girls born on Epiphany.

Tiffany & Co., the famous luxury store commonly known as Tiffany’s, is named after its founder, Charles Tiffany. In Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the heroine, Holly Golightly, never actually sets foot in the store. In the early drafts of the story, Capote named her Connie Gustafson - an egregious error we can be grateful he corrected before it was too late. You may also be interested to know that Holly was short for Holiday.

Magi, three of whom feature heavily in this story, were priests in Zoroastrianism, a religion that dates back to the 6th century BCE and is still practised throughout the world. It shares much in common with Judaism, Christianity and Islam, including belief in a messiah. Whether it’s monotheistic, as those religions are, is a matter of debate - some scholars say it’s polytheistic while others claim it’s henotheistic, which is to say its adherents worship a single deity without denying the possible existence of other worshipable deities.

I have to say - while acknowledging my own atheistic bias on such matters - that henotheism sounds like a mighty wishy-washy approach to the whole deity business. It may be that all religions are wrong, but at least most have the spine to tell you clearly what it is they are wrong about. Henotheists, on the other hand - arguing with them would be like trying to catch wisps of smoke on a windswept plain, on a dark desert highway even.

And we all know how that ends.

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Bits and specious

Tiffany Renee Darwish, known professionally as Tiffany, had a Number 1 hit in 1987 with a rendition of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now”. Also an actor, her first role was as the voice of Judy Jetson in 1990’s Jetsons: The Movie, replacing the long term Judy, Janet Waldo, who studio executives felt would not attract younger viewers. The decision saw casting director Andrea Romano ask to be removed from the credits. The movie bombed and Tiffany’s performance was widely panned.

The Jetsons began airing in 1962 and was the first programme that NBC broadcast in colour.

In 1589, Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, gave Elizabeth I a hat of tiffany inlaid with 28 gold buttons, with eight further gold buttons attached to the hat band and feather. He was later appointed Lord Privy Seal, which probably tells you something.

The original typed manuscript of Breakfast at Tiffany’s was sold in 2013 for $US306,000. Capote was paid $US3000 for publishing rights to the story by Esquire magazine, which ran it in November 1958. In 2021, the magazine re-published the story online.

As a writing coach, one of my loudest mantras is that simple, clear writing always trumps unnecessarily cloudy, complex work. If only science journals saw it that way too.

This is the last Lingwistics for 2024. Part of me writes these things because I would explode if I didn’t write something, and the other part writes them because it connects me with people like you. So a deep thank you for taking care of that second need for the last 12 months. See you in 2025.

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Quote of the week

I can honestly say - and it’s a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.
Neil Armstrong