Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for Aug. 15–21
Archaeology
' Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations '
By Sam Kean
Archaeology reveals how people lived in bygone eras. Some archaeologists itch to experience the past they are studying. This book explores their efforts: experimental archeology, investigating the past by experiencing it. It shows how enthusiasts examine the smells, tastes, and sounds of the past by recreating the past in the present using era-appropriate technology. Informative and entertaining, this book is for anyone with a bit of Walter Mitty within them.
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Scientific American
7 days ago
- Scientific American
Sam Kean's New Book Dinner with King Tut Explores the Wild World of Experimental Archaeology
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Experimental archaeology takes a hands-on approach to understanding the past. Instead of just studying ancient objects researchers re-create them. They build 30-foot medieval catapults, perform ancient surgeries with stone tools and prepare authentic Roman banquets using techniques so traditional, not even your nonna would recognize them. The goal is to understand not just what our ancestors made but how they made it—and what it felt like to live in their world. Our guest today is Sam Kean, a science writer who's written seven books. His latest is called Dinner with King Tut, and it explores the world of experimental archaeology. He's tried his hand at everything from ancient brain surgery to mummifying a fish, and he's here to tell us all about it. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Thanks so much for coming on to chat today. Sam Kean: Well, thanks for having me. Feltman: So what exactly is experimental archaeology, and how did you get interested in it? Kean: Experimental archaeology involves doing things—so making things, re-creating things from the past. And I got into it because I'd always had a bit of a gripe with archaeology, traditional dirt archaeology, in that I think it's a fascinating field; you learn so much about humankind and these big, meaty questions about us—you know, who we are, where we came from—these really important questions about deep human history. So I really like that aspect of traditional archaeology. But every time I would go to an archaeological site, I found it so boring [laughs] to be there. It was just a bunch of sunburned people sitting around with brushes and dental picks, picking out little pot shards from the dirt. It just seemed like the most unimaginable tedium possible. And so there was always this disconnect in my mind between the big, important, cool things archaeology wrestled with and the day-to-day work of the field. But experimental archaeology got me excited because again, they were doing things, they were making things: re-creating lost recipes, making ancient stone tools—everything from that up to, you know, people making giant catapults and boats and sending those off on the ocean. So it really got me excited 'cause you're much more active, and it's a very sensory-rich field, too. So I felt like it was a lot more immersive and it was more involved and kind of immersed in the past than you get from traditional archaeology. Feltman: Hmm, and for people who aren't familiar with the idea of experimental archaeology, what are some of the projects from recent years that stand out in your mind as particularly exciting, that our listeners might wanna go learn more about? Kean: Well, for the book I got to attend an authentic Roman banquet [laughs], which was pretty cool. I got to try my hand at ancient surgery and tattooing. There's a lot of food stuff out there; that's probably the best entrée for people wanting to get involved, is just try to make some ancient recipes—you know, some heirloom grains, things like that. I made a fish mummy at one point for the book, and that was surprisingly easy to do, so you can mummify a fish or, you know, another small animal, something like that. So there's a lot of cool things to do, and it kind of runs the gamut, again, from everyday things like food and tools all the way up to catapults and boats and people—making human mummies, even stuff like that. So there's really a range of activities. Feltman: Yeah, well, and I think even some folks who, you know, have maybe come across some of these projects, like people making perfume that smells like a mummy, might be surprised at how hands-on you were able to get in the book. Could you tell us some more about some of the things you were able to experience while you were researching? Kean: Yeah, so, like, the catapult I got to see was pretty amazing. This guy made a 30-foot tall, medieval—authentic medieval catapult. And we spent a day out—he built this in Utah—we spent a day out there in the mountains, throwing these giant garden stones around at this wall that he had built that was 250 yards away, and it was pretty magical being out there and getting to see this thing fire—being able to fire it myself, actually. So that stands out as something. That, that was probably the most fun thing I did for the book, was [laughs] seeing that giant catapult. Then there were some things, some days, that were really painful and awful. Like, the, the surgery that I mentioned that I did, it was a, a surgery called a trepanation, so you're removing a bit of the skull, essentially. And it's startling to think about, but this is one of the most ancient surgeries ... Feltman: Mm. Kean: That we know of. It's thousands and thousands of years old, and it involves, you know, kind of brain surgery, of all things. And we know that people survived it because we can see new bone growth around the rim of skulls that we found with holes in it, so we know that people survived this operation. And I tried it out not on a human, on a deer head, at a sort of a survivalist school, an experimental-archaeology school in Maine, and they made some stone tools for me, so I gotta try it, you know, pretty authentic. And the stone tools worked really well at first. You can get a really, really sharp edge on a stone tool, and obsidian even—it's a type of volcanic rock—you can get a sharper edge on that than even modern surgical-steel scalpels ... Feltman: Wow. Kean: They form a really, really sharp edge. The problem with stone tools is that they wear down quickly ... Feltman: Right. Kean: And so after I made the first, initial cut—I was removing a triangular-shaped piece—after I, I made the initial cut, the one leg of the triangle, it went really well for the first cut, but after that the stone tool got worn down, and after that it was just a war of attrition ... Feltman: Mm. Kean: Of me sort of grinding my way through this skull. I was just sitting there—there were flies biting me; it was hot. I was really upset and getting frustrated. But that was a good learning experience in and of itself, just to show you what something basic like medicine was like back then. And the emotions eventually became an important part of the process. Learning things like that, you know, you get frustrated, but it really stuck with me, and it made me appreciate just how difficult things were for our ancestors and made me appreciate the fact that they did all this work and we wouldn't be here if they hadn't. Feltman: Yeah, did those hands-on experiences change your perspective of the past in any other ways, beyond just appreciating how difficult things were? Kean: It made me appreciate how good some of the technology was. Feltman: Mm. Kean: I was surprised at how—yeah, that you can get stone tools that are very, very sharp, form a very nice edge. I think we have sort of a narrow view of technology nowadays. We think about electronic gizmos as technology; they're sort of synonymous, almost, in our minds. But they were really good about practical chemistry, everyday biology—you know, observing other creatures, observing plants, things like that. And I think we've lost some of that nowadays. So it did open my mind up and helped me appreciate the really nice technologies that people had in the past. Feltman: And you mentioned in the book that experimental archaeology is sometimes dismissed as kind of, like, a showy form of theater more than a science. What would you argue is the scientific value of sort of actively re-creating the past? Kean: There are some cases where we just don't have information about how people did things. So the best examples of that in the book are with Egyptian mummies and how they built the pyramids in Egypt. We just don't know how they did things, especially with the pyramids [laughs]; we have no idea how they did that, which is kind of embarrassing for archaeologists, that they don't know this, but we just don't have any information. So by running these experiments you can learn things and you can rule some things out. So I think it's valuable 'cause it can actively teach us things about the past. And I think by doing certain things, even something basic like making bread or beer or something like that, you start to ask more questions and different questions, and it teaches you aspects of the process that you would not have thought to ask about otherwise. And there were some cases in the book as well where—there was one instance with a chef and one instance with a, a hairdresser who got interested in Roman archaeology, and they read these papers by classicists, by historians, by archaeologists, and they, even within a few paragraphs, realized that [the authors] had no idea what they were talking about [laughs]: they didn't know how to cook properly; they didn't know how to style hair properly. And because [the chef and the hairdresser] had this outside expertise they could make a lot of progress. These people who didn't have the expertise were just theorizing without any real evidence or basis ... Feltman: Mm. Kean: For their conclusion. So it can help you avoid going down wrong paths, and in some cases it can answer questions or evoke questions that we just wouldn't ask otherwise. Feltman: Yeah, very cool, and I mean, I'm sure this really runs the gamut, but in your experience who are the people who are creating these experiments? You know, how are they getting interested in these questions? Kean: Yeah, it really does run the gamut. In some cases they are traditional professors or credentialed archaeologists who realize they couldn't answer the questions they wanted to if they didn't try some experiments out, so they just decided to try 'em out. And in some cases, I think, they wanted to connect with their area of study a little bit more. And again, it's such a sensory-rich field—you feel more immersed in the past when you do these kind of things—so it helped them have a deeper connection with their field. Then there are amateurs, people who just got obsessed [laughs] with some topic—and amateurs in the best sense of the word, in that they just loved the topic and wanted to learn all they could about it. They're not getting paid to do it, but they have a deep knowledge of the field, and they just decided to try something new and different. So they are a part of the field as well. And then another really important aspect is there's a lot of native and Indigenous communities who have either kept traditions alive or they're trying to revive traditions that got stamped out by colonialism, missionaries, whatever the case was. And in a lot of cases they're the ones going to the archaeologists and teaching them how things were based on either things they have kept alive or lore they might know. So all of those groups are kind of working together, and I think that's part of the fun of the field, is that you can get insights from a lot of different people in a lot of different places. So it was fun to meet all of 'em. Feltman: Did any of the experiments you participated in in the book change the way you do things in everyday life? Like, I don't know, for example, have you picked up some Roman culinary techniques [laughs] or anything of that nature? Kean: One thing it did do: I sort of view the world itself a little differently in that ... Feltman: Mm-hmm. Kean: Before I would walk down the street where I live in D.C., and there were a lot of trees in this neighborhood, but before to me it was just sort of this green canopy overhead; it was almost like decoration. And now I see it and I, I'm better about telling individual trees apart—you know, 'This is this type of tree. This is this type of tree.' And I also look at the trees differently because I can see them as, you know, a resource: the wood that they have—the acorns that they have are a food source. So I look at things like that differently, and—even, like, rocks on the ground, I can look at those and say, 'Oh, that'd be a good hammerstone for making tools,' or 'That's a good type of rock to make a tool with.' So I feel a little more connected in the sense that it's not just, again, decoration, it's more, you know, their resources, and I feel like I understand that aspect of nature better because of the experiences I had. Feltman: And is there anything that you really wanted to try that you, you weren't able to? Kean: I did get to do, in Micronesia, a little bit with navigation there. So I got to go out in a boat, and they taught me a few things about navigation. I would really love, at some point, to get way out into Polynesia, maybe, even and be on an authentic ship like they used thousands of years ago and just sort of set sail and, you know, head out for an island you can't see over the horizon and just navigate with all of the amazing tricks they knew about, you know, the stars but also looking at wave patterns, wind patterns, migration patterns of birds. So at some point I'd love to take a long ocean trip on one of those authentic ships. Feltman: Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the book. I'm sure our listeners will love it, so this has been great. Kean: Well, thanks for having me. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. Don't forget to check out Dinner with King Tut for more on the wild world of experimental archaeology. We'll be back on Monday with our usual news roundup. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Epoch Times
14-08-2025
- Epoch Times
Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for Aug. 15–21
This week, we feature an archaeological time portal into the foods, sights, and smells of ancient civilizations and 11 riveting mysteries by the author G.K. Chesterton. Archaeology ' Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations ' By Sam Kean Archaeology reveals how people lived in bygone eras. Some archaeologists itch to experience the past they are studying. This book explores their efforts: experimental archeology, investigating the past by experiencing it. It shows how enthusiasts examine the smells, tastes, and sounds of the past by recreating the past in the present using era-appropriate technology. Informative and entertaining, this book is for anyone with a bit of Walter Mitty within them.
Yahoo
25-12-2024
- Yahoo
They Left for Their Own Country by Another Path
G.K. Chesterton The Ball and the Cross, 1909 The inverted cross is the sign of our times—not because it stands for some kind of serious evil but because it stands for unserious evil: shallow, sophomoric, self-indulgent, and, above all, derivative. It has no power—and no content—of its own, only that which it borrows. Its fundamental character is parasitic. It can be deployed as a simple insult, or as satire or parody, but never reaches anything higher or more interesting than that. And the great limitation of satire is that its power dissipates when knowledge of the thing being satirized fades. The annihilating kind of satire or parody is a joke on a suicide mission. It cannot live on its own; it requires a host organism. And the one it has—our culture—is not in especially good health. We may live in a society that thinks of itself as morally and intellectually post-Christian (though it is no such thing), but aesthetically we remain fascinated by—practically hostage to—Christianity, its images and its stories. Popular culture from television to film and pop music to best-selling novels to fashion to journalism to supposedly high art from generation to generation seems to do little else but recycle Christian imagery. Andy Warhol, a genuinely original genius, was up to his wig in Christian imagery, but, then, so are banal cabaret artists such as Madonna and Donald Trump. Political propagandists and power-worshippers have simply occupied Christian churches, as in the French Revolution and its Cult of Reason, or built mock 'cathedrals' to their causes, or appointed themselves the heads of their churches, as Henry VIII did and Charles III has, carrying on the tradition. When GQ wanted to depict Muhammad Ali as a martyr, the art director did not borrow an image of Yasir ibn Amir—he made the great boxer into St. Sebastian. Dan Brown didn't make his private-jet money typing illiterate imbecility about imagery associated with Marxism or feminism or Unitarian Universalism or Jungian psychoanalysis. If you want to make that Godfather money, that Exorcist money, that Star Wars money, you dip into the well of Christianity. And maybe you don't think too hard about why that well seems to be bottomless. You can keep cashing the checks without ever having to figure that out. That is not a matter of religious belief or of religious self-identification—it is a matter of civilization. At a critical moment in the Harry Potter books, the hero visits the grave of his parents, upon which is engraved a line from 1 Corinthians: 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.' Which is natural, as J.K. Rowling explained: 'They're very British books.' It is not a matter of mere happenstance that 'very British' goes along with the New Testament rather than with Confucius or the Bhagavad-Gita or the Koran. 'Very American' remains a close cousin of 'very British,' of course, and so GQ went with St. Sebastian and not with a great Islamic martyr—no one in its intended audience would have understood the latter reference. And, speaking of GQ, none of this Christendom-mining even requires basic religious literacy: Writing in that esteemed fashion magazine about the Star Wars prequels, Joshua Rivera describes the virgin birth of Anakin Skywalker as an 'immaculate conception,' a phrase referring to a Catholic doctrine that has nothing at all to do with the virgin birth of Jesus. It may never have been quite true that the Golden Age of Hollywood was a case of 'a Jewish-owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America' (the original source of the witticism is disputed), but it surely is the case that today a very large chunk of our pop-culture industry comprises religiously illiterate, ask-me-about-my-pronouns secular-minded types whose senses are arrested by religious habits, the saints and martyrs, the Eucharist, visions of Heaven and (especially!) Hell, monasteries, stained-glass windows, Latin phrases engraved in stone, celibacy, angels, crucifixions, etc. In a similar way, I do not credit the idea that these angry Christopher (Who-topher?) Hitchens types are in any genuine sense atheists. A genuine atheist should be either indifferent or maybe a touch regretful. Our so-called atheists are more like the maniac in The Ball and the Cross—they cannot stop thinking about Christianity and see Christian influence everywhere, especially where it isn't. (It will be amusing once they figure out that about half of the prominent placenames in these United States are explicitly Christian in origin, from Providence, Rhode Island, to San Francisco, California.) No, these so-called atheists are not non-believers—they believe, hard. There is a reason they insist on replacing 'A.D.' with 'BCE,' as though that would somehow change the fact that we number our very years from the life of Christ. That isn't disbelief: That is fanatical belief. For a point of comparison: I myself do not believe in astrology, and I think it is profoundly silly and just a little irritating that the Washington Post publishes columns by people who want to lecture me about 'believing in science' while also publishing horoscopes, but the day I start a committee for the purpose of suppressing the publication of horoscopes, you'll know that I have finally cracked. I do not believe in astrology and, discerning no power in it, do not obsess about it. The pagan world, which still has a little juice in it, lives on in the background, and sometimes in the foreground: Washington, D.C., with its Augustan monuments to imperial power, is a much more thoroughly pagan city than Rome could ever hope to be. (If you want to see real atheists, you can find them in Rome, packed into the churches to gawk at the Caravaggios.) For years, Christian worship services were held in the U.S. Capitol, the dome of which is decorated on its interior with a painting of George Washington depicted as Jupiter and surrounded by Greco-Roman deities and deified American heroes. The American founders thought of themselves as the new Israelites, and, somewhere, Ramesses the Great is smiling as their descendants go about their political business in the shadow of the giant obelisk they built to commemorate the leader of their exodus. The pagan world retains some cultural cachet. We're still making gladiator movies, and there is a reason for that beyond traditional homoeroticism. There is some aesthetic power left in the Greco-Roman tradition. But there is much greater power in Christianity, and so we'll spend at least part of this month fighting about the display of manger scenes in public spaces, or lamenting the vandalization of these scenes, or writing batty articles about why we should say 'Happy Holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas.' And feelings get tender around these issues because of an uncomfortable reality that makes some good and decent people feel excluded: Of course this is a Christian nation, whatever Thomas Jefferson put in his letters. It is a Christian country not because we have a Christian state (we do not have one, do not require one, and should not desire one), but because it is the product of a Christian society and a Christian civilization. None of those ever stopped being what it is simply because a lot of very influential people stopped believing in the religion itself while most everybody else continued doing what Christians have done for most of their history, i.e., affirming their belief in the nice and encouraging parts of the gospel while continuing to live like pagans. (And not even Dante's 'virtuous pagans'—far from it!) No, the Christian imprint on our society doesn't come from polling data about what the average American believes in the waning days of Anno Domini 2024, much less from the average American's behavior. Nor does it come from what the Bill of Rights says or from what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it says. Tradition, G.K. Chesterton wrote, is 'the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.' Americans are uncomfortable with what that implies. The god of the American civic religion is something called 'Fairness,' and Fairness requires that everybody be allowed to inhabit a world handcrafted ex nihilo to his specifications, a paradise in which no one is made to encounter or accommodate anything that is not of his own choosing or his own doing. The theologians' project called 'theodicy' consists of coming up with clever ways to pretend that Fairness and the God of floods and Egyptian plagues and Abraham and Isaac and all that blood and violence are basically the Same Guy. No one hates hereditary facts—and Tradition—as intensely as the adolescent, and it is useful to understand that it was American popular culture that invented the idea of the 'teenager' and then concluded that the best thing in life was to be one of those and to keep being one forever. The teenage mind may want to turn the cross upside down in protest, or to vandalize it, or to repurpose it, or insist that those who take shelter under it take up this or that position about gay rights or war or abortion or progressive income-tax rates. The derivative mentality can do anything with the cross except ignore it. At one time, one might have made a persuasive argument that this was at least in part a defensive measure, because people who claimed to speak on behalf of the church or of the Christian tradition had a lot of power and wanted to use it to interfere in the lives of people who saw the world differently. But that has not been true for a long while—the era of Jerry Falwell and his ilk has been over for some time. The modern equivalents of figures such as Falwell are churchmen such as Robert Jeffress, who have shown themselves much more willing to bend themselves and their churches to the demands of political power than to try to do the opposite. That old explanation will not do. Things have changed. Some people find it impossible to adjust to that new reality, which is how you get Slate reporting that the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo is an arch-Catholic billionaire political kingmaker when in fact he is a non-billionaire lawyer and nonprofit administrator whose organization's coffers were topped up with a $1.6 billion donation from Chicago businessman Barre Seid, whose background is Jewish. (Wrong conspiracy theory, guys!) The maniac in The Ball and the Cross ends up attacking roadside fences and his own furniture because there are crosses in the woodwork—our version of that is fretting about how Opus Dei secretly runs the FBI. Tradition—but just a tradition? Because anything might become part of a tradition, as the persistence of pagan religious elements (Easter eggs, Christmas trees) in Christian cultures reminds us. Flannery O'Connor famously said of the Eucharist: 'If it's just a symbol, to hell with it,' and, if I thought that tradition were all there really is to Christianity—if I were one of those 'cultural Christians' I've heard tell of, Elon Musk and the rest—then I might be tempted to say to hell with that, too. There is enough getting in the way of life's little pleasures—you know: hatred, selfishness, the stuff that really feels good—without some dusty old Levantine wine cult's getting in the way just because it (like Jonah Goldberg's Animal House references) has a 'long tradition of existence to its members and to the community at large.' I've never made much effort to convince anybody of the truth of Christianity. There have been many, many words written to that effect, and a lot of them have been pretty dumb and, for that reason, probably have done more harm than good. The Case for Christ, for example, is a book so supernaturally dumb, so transparently dishonest in its account of the evidence, that one half suspects that it was infernally inspired to discredit more intelligent Christian apologists. I have a few friends who are very into biblical archaeology and things like that, believing (or maybe only half-suspecting) that one of these days somebody is going to find an indisputable fragment of the True Cross or Noah's ark or the manger in Bethlehem or something like that, and that all of the skeptics will, in that way, be put to shame. As it stands, we have very little contemporary documentary evidence outside of the gospels themselves that such a person as Jesus ever existed, much less that any of the stories that Christians tell regarding that episode are true. Just under half (or, depending on your tabulation, just more than half) of the books of the New Testament (amounting to about a quarter of the words) were written by Paul, who never claimed to have even met Jesus in the flesh during the ministry described in the gospels. If you put that very light stuff on one side of the scale and then load up the other side with the sheer unlikeliness of it all, the inconsistencies in biblical accounts of Jesus's life and work, the apparent indifference (or at least reticence) of God in the intervening millennia—you are not going to make a lawyer's case for Christ, or, at least, not a very good one. Nor will you make a good archeologist's case or an astronomer's case or an evolutionary biologist's case. And, if you try, you will be reduced to intellectual dishonesty, debater's tricks, vulgarity, and nonsense. That isn't how to go about it. But, what to do, then? I've often thought that one of the reasons Christian institutions and thinkers (like those belonging to many other religions) put so much work into creating beautiful things—churches, art, literature, drama, music, etc.—is because the aesthetic sensibility is adjacent to the religious one. Which is not to say that we should embrace Christianity because we admire Notre Dame or the Mass in B minor or Moby-Dick any more than we should embrace Islam because we admire the Shah Jahan Mosque or the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the poetry of Al-Mutanabbi. (Or Judaism because we admire, what, half of the greatest American contributions to literature?) Without reducing it to a question of metaphysical utilitarianism, you don't do push-ups to get good at doing push-ups—you do push-ups to get stronger. Art and literature and architecture aren't there to be propaganda for Christianity, but there is a relationship there. You don't come to believe that Christianity is true the same way you come to believe that Smith has the better argument in the case of Smith v. Jones or in the way you come to believe that Apple shares are underpriced. It is more like—but not the same as—the way you come to believe that this painting or building is beautiful, that this man is admirable, that a certain friendship is suddenly very valuable to you, that you are in love. And it is here that the strangeness of Christianity comes into play. The Magi—the wise men from the east, the 'three kings' in the popular tradition—aren't there at the manger in Bethlehem. That is a conflation of different biblical events. They follow the star and arrive sometimes 'after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea,' entering 'the house' to see 'the Child with Mary His mother.' When I think about biblical stories, I sometimes have to remind myself—and try to emphasize in my writing—that we are expected to believe that these are stories about real people, who, when they are not appearing as characters in Scripture, have the usual problems real people have: work, family, health, demands on their time, demands on their attention, demands on their financial resources, etc. Another way of saying that is that for every wise man who came journeying from the east, there probably was a wife or a boss or a brother-in-law back home who suspected that he was not so wise, after all, that he was off on some damned fool's errand with his wise-guy friends, taking a long and no doubt expensive trip to some faraway land in order to observe—and financially support—events of no obvious immediate consequence to him or his family or his people or his community. You're going where? To do what? Because you saw … a star? A star at night, in the night sky, you're saying? In the place where you usually see stars? And you're taking how much gold? And you're leaving me here, alone, to do all the work and take care of the kids by myself? The Magi make their journey, and what they first find is not Jesus but Herod—powerful and scheming, mean, fearful, meddling, full of jealousy and malice. He questions them and then obtains from them a promise of collaboration with his regime. The Magi move on. They press forward through the darkness, led in a way that is vague and mysterious but compelling, negotiate some difficulty with the secular powers, and then, after all of that complexity and complication, they encounter—what? A child, Jesus. Not Jesus as a child—the Magi cannot see forward or backward along the timeline; what they know is what they have in front of them—simply, a child. The child has no particular urgent use for the gifts the Magi present, each of which corresponds to one of the child's attributes: gold, for the king; incense, for the priest; myrrh, for the corpse of the sacrificial victim. Perhaps the symbolic value of these gifts was not immediately obvious to the Magi: These were expensive commodities and fitting royal gifts if only for that reason. What they could not have seen, except perhaps through the gift of divine insight, was that the gifts not only said something about Christ but also about their relationship to Christ as men: a king, a priest, and a sacrificial victim are those things only in relation to other men (subjects, worshipers, and those who are to be sacrificially redeemed) and on their behalf. In that sense, the journey of the Magi presages the Christian journey itself. It begins with a persistent, urgent call, one that any entirely rational person—including the one being called—might reasonably suspect is a matter of fanciful misinterpretation and seek out a second opinion or a more moderate course of action. One then sets out into the darkness rather than out of it, into the night, with its mysteries, rather than into the cold light of day, when one might think better of these strange feelings. One encounters Herod, who is but one of many forms of the same adversary. One draws near to Christ and then encounters Him all at once, in the most (seemingly) simple of forms. One possibly glosses over the significance of the fact that He already was there, waiting for us. One gives such gifts as one has been able to carry so far in the night and its darkness, only to realize that He has no need of any such gifts, and that, in giving them, we come to understand what it is that we need. It is not that doctrine and dogma are not important—it is that they come later and are subordinate. They do not lead us to the experience of Christ but only help us to understand it and to integrate it into our lives. And, then, the hard part: 'They left for their own country by another path.' They traveled together, surely, at least for some of the trip, but each of them was now also traveling alone, having laid down the gold and the frankincense and the myrrh and taken up the much heavier burden of the truth, which is also the burden of the Cross but not only the burden of the Cross. And what was that star, after all? Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; World's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, Since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. Immortal is a very nice word—the sound of it, the thought of it. But that word, by its nature, points to the future. At least it does for us—for now. What falls to us in the present moment is to do what the Magi had to do after the remarkable encounter: find our way to our own home by another path, without anything so obvious as a new star blazing in the heavens to show us the way. We do not know the way. The night is dark and the roads are unfamiliar, and home is very far away. What we want is a sign—what we have is memory. We remember what we saw that night, and we have the stories, which is how we remember together, how we remember in community. But we do not remember these things because we wish to embark on a program of self-improvement or a program of community-improvement, not because we care about 'the culture' or because we believe that religious observance will lead to stronger families and healthier communities and a more glorious republic. As worthy and good as any of those things may be, what are they next to that scene in Bethlehem? Outside, it is dark and cold. Inside, there is the firelight and the scene of love and life and warmth, the mother and father and child. And then there's us. The ones who have waited outside the longest are the most used to the cold and the dark, but we know where we want to be. Before we were the Magi, we were the shepherds, also called, also uncomprehending. What do we know? That if the manger is empty, then the tomb isn't. We stop short, almost there, standing at the periphery of the scene, gripped by some kind of compulsion if not yet by belief, starting to figure out that the edge of the light and the edge of the darkness are, after all, the same place. And that is the place where we live and always have lived, and must live, for now. 'They left for their own country by another path.' If that scene in Bethlehem is just a story, a pretext for moral instruction and a long weekend and time with friends and family and vague good feelings about generosity and kindness, then it would be better to forget about it altogether. You cannot build anything good on a foundation of lies, which is another word for nice old stories fortified with cheap sentimentality. You cannot make the trip to Bethlehem and then return to the east, reporting to your exasperated friends and family, 'Well, it wasn't really much of anything, but it's going to inspire some very beautiful buildings in a thousand years, and some very good poetry, and some first-rate paintings. And the stories will make people feel like they should be nicer to one another, at least for a few weeks in winter toward the end of the year.' Anno Domini: Either we number the years of our lives from the events at Bethlehem for a good reason or we don't, and, if we don't, we should knock it off. One way or another, we eventually will come to the end of our journey, and we will find exactly what the Magi were destined to find from the moment they first set their eyes on that star: Christ or nothing.
