A Cold Coming
My original plan was to record a version of this post to video and use it to revitalise my dormant YouTube channel. The video would have included me reading Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi to you, however I would have had to record it in the office/shed and it is too cold up there, so you have been spared that.
January sixth is traditionally known in the West as the Feast of the Epiphany but it is a very ancient Christian celebration that predates what we now know as Christmas. In its original form it celebrated several things but the common element in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions is the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus.
Mark, generally said to be the first of the canonical gospels to be written, has no infancy narrative at all and begins with the man Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist. The Gospel of John, generally said to be the last of the gospels to be written, follows Mark very closely but has as an added bonus a prologue that introduces the whole thing in the light of Greek philosophy.
It is generally thought that Matthew was the second gospel to be written and it is in Matt ch.2 – and only there – that we find the magi – here meaning Zoroastrian priests – who observe the rising star of the King of the Jews and journey westwards to pay their respects (the verb used, προσκυνησαι does not mean ‘worship’ as we now understand the term in a religious sense but is closer to the root Old English meaning of worship as paying respects to something or someone worthy of it.) Luke, who seems to rewrite Matthew for a more Graeco-Roman audience, wants nothing to do with magi and replaces them with shepherds washing their socks by night.
One might wonder, as many have, why Matthew thought it was important to have an infancy narrative at all and why he has Zoroastrian priests come to visit (note that they were neither kings nor, alas, underwear salesmen of Leicester Square.) It could be that they were a symbolic representation of gentiles in general; it could be that, like the gospel writers’ obsession with John the Baptist there is an echo of religious turf wars; it could be something else entirely.
Eliot’s magi, or rather the aging magus who narrates the poem as a memory from his past, is focused on the end of ‘the old dispensation.’ Importantly, the death of the old is presented in conjunction with the birth of the new: the magus says that he thought death and birth were different and Eliot leaves it to us to understand the implicit suggestion that the opposite is true, that they are the same. Eliot and the writer of Matthew have in mind the primacy of Christian mythology no doubt, but Eliot also taps into much older myths of the death of the old and the birth of the new. Death and birth/rebirth are at the heart of festivals everywhere, from solstice to May Day to Harvest.
Eliot’s magus concludes,
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 final sentence can bear several readings, and Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic, is perhaps looking at the death of old religions and the birth of Christianity as well as the aging magus himself recognising it is time for him to go and welcoming it. But I do wonder if the final sentence should also carry an implicit echo of rebirth.
A cold coming the magi had of it, at just the worst time of the year but, as Edinburgh temperatures fall to -5C, I reflect that it is now, when the year is at its coldest, that snowdrops emerge.
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