Epiphany // 25 Years

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord - the end of the 12 days of Christmas. The word ‘epiphany’ means ‘revealing.’ Here this refers to the revealing of the Christ to the nations of the world, as represented by the Magi (the three kings or wise men), who had travelled from the East.

They, of course, were guided by the stars, by some eastern prophecy outside of the Old Testament, which foretold that a king would come from Judea. (Similar stories circulated Rome at the time too.)

The Jewish leaders did not recognize their Christ. In the Christmas narratives, the epiphany is first of all granted to Mary, then Joseph, and then shepherds outside of Bethlehem, and finally to wealthy travellers from a foreign land.

This epiphany was a foretaste of what was to come - a universal church for all nations, specifically for the humble in heart.

As I thought about this all today, I also realised that this Epiphany is a kind of close to the first quarter of the 21st century. I wondered, what has been revealed in our day over these past 25 years? What will be remembered in our times, in the years to come?

Some obvious things come to mind: 9/11, the Middle Eastern wars, Obama, Trump, the covid event, and, for South Africans in particular, the continued unravelling of the once-celebrated ‘rainbow nation.’

But something perhaps more important surrounds all these events, contains them. And that frame is the most significant happening of our time. By ‘frame’ I refer to the revolution in how we perceive the world around us, a revolution whose roots may be found in the printing press, later in radio and television, and now in the internet and social media.

Today we woke to news of military action in Venezuela. Quite bizarrely, American forces entered the capital city to arrest their President and extradite him and his wife to New York City to stand trial for drug trafficking charges. Something similar happened under Bush Sr in 1989 when the President of Panama was seized.

Going online to read more about it, one enters a hall of mirrors: of denunciations, of militant approval, of strange stories of Biden having placed a huge bounty on Maduro’s during his own Presidency.

I thought of the famous claim of the French postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard, in a 1991 collection of essays entitled ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.’ Because of how this first televised war existed entirely through the prism of live recordings of it, particularly the broadcastz on CNN, Baudrillard argued that the war, as it existed in public consciousness, was a mere simulacrum: a copy whose original is lost.

My first instinct to anything postmodern was long one of dismissal. Of course, the Gulf War happened, when the US threw Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. If it didn’t happen, what could we say has happened? Wouldn’t we find ourselves in a whirlpool of scepticism, eventually descending to the thought experiment of Descartes, who famously doubted whether he could know for certain that he himself existed.

But now I wonder…

Swap the Gulf War with covid. Swap iDoes Baudrillard make more sense now?

Where did covid happen?

Was it happening when those fake videos from China spread around social media like wildfire? They were, and are, so obviously fake, yet one is still not really ‘allowed’ to point this out. Lockdown only started after 17 covid deaths in Wuhan. How did they notice this in a city where over 20 000 die everyday?

Did it happen when people were arrested for taking videos of empty hospitals during lockdown?

When reports of the futility of masks were suddenly memory-holed?

When Britain had its 12th lowest year of mortality ever?

When friends and families were barred from hospitals as apparent live death curves showed something like bombs going off in New York and Italy (bombs synchronised with lockdowns)?

There was something mythological about the whole thing. Chinese wet markets and virology labs. Andrew Cuomo on TV each night. Boris Johnson in ICU. Trump shaking it off like a common cold.

I have written about this sense of the simulated before. Mass delusion is part of scientific literature, as surely as the placebo effect is.

It was the stars of heaven which guided the Magi to their Epiphany, which has become ours.

Our generation can barely see the stars anymore. We look down, not up. And what do we look down to? An algorithmic, electric network specifically designed to hold captive our attention, confirm the biases of the ‘global village’, and prevent any kind of transcendent epiphanies happening again.

Canadian philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, was famous for coining the terms ‘the global village’ and ‘the medium is the message.’ Priot to the rise of the internet and social media, he wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull… The electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.

He also had a term for these ‘electric information environments.’ He called them a ‘blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.’

This Anti-Christ is a mystical body of its own, governed by the tribal drums beaten in a dark global village.

Yes, we lived through a pandemic. The virus was informational. We downloaded it electronically, via servers and cables, electric signals of the air, until it reached our own nervous system and made us sick.

We thus live in a time of ‘anti-epiphany.’ The minds of the nations are darkened. We cannot see the stars, let alone understand what they mean.

Nothing but grace will save us. A grace that calls us on a journey through dark deserts, in order to see what was seen 2025 years ago: a light shining in the darkness.

Let him who has ears, hear. Let him who has eyes, see.

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