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Good morning. Today is Twelfth Night, the official end of Christmas. You may be taking down cards and decorations and wondering how to recycle the tree. In the Church’s calendar it is Epiphany, the festival of the Wise Men who followed the star to Bethlehem with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. I have always found this the most magical part of the Christmas story. Those three kings from what as I child I thought was the fabulous land of Orientar, gliding across the desert on camels in their richly embroidered robes and crowns.

It is usually assumed that the gifts they brought were tributes. Three kings bringing presents to a greater king. Gold, for his majesty, frankincense for his divinity, myrrh to indicate his death. But there were those in the early Christian world who had a different interpretation. Ignatius, an Asian bishop in the early second century, assumed that Magi were actually magicians. They would have dealt in alchemy; changing base substances into gold - and other esoteric practices. The surrender of the gifts was not a tribute so much as an admission of fraud. It meant giving up of powers based on deception. The star, they followed, he said was a sign ‘that the spells of sorcery were all broken and superstition received its death blow. The age old empire of evil was destroyed’ for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end’.

The implication, for Ignatius, was that from this point on we would all have to deal with a more human world.

We have other words for magic now: spin, charisma, vision. If I look at the story of the wise men in the light of contemporary sources of enchantment it takes on a new edge. The laying down of gold could signify the refusal to let ourselves be dominated by the love or fear or worship of money. That could mean a huge difference to our attitudes to wealth or to the lack of it. It could mean that we are less susceptible to bribery by those who want our loyalty as consumers or voters. Then there is frankincense, the sweet resin burnt in temples to divine images. Laying this down could mean the refusal to let ourselves be dominated by the cult of charisma, to be suspicious of those who rely on our devotion to keep them in the limelight, where they can persuade and manipulate our desires.

The third gift of the wise men was myrrh, the spicy substance used in embalming. Laying this down could mean a refusal to surrender to those who exercise powers over life and death; the terrorists, the executioners and torturers of the world, those who kill casually or at a distance; all who hold human life cheap. So three renunciations, three gifts – three paths of wisdom to negotiate our complex world. Happy Epiphany.

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