Seven Swans

Originally published 30 December 2020 on Medium, with the title ‘Six Geese’.

Over banana pancakes and kids covered in date syrup, my good lady wife and I, just this morning at breakfast, lamented the sudden and abrupt cessation of yuletide festivities. No more Christmas songs on the radio; lights adorning houses on the road all out (I mean, ours were too, but that was by accident rather than by design); trees, we heard, were coming down already. It was only Five G-ol-d Rings [the day before] yesterday! As I have in previous years, I blamed the moving of New Year to January 1st with the introduction of the infernal Gregorian Calendar for its disruption of the festive flow. If two weeks of feasting sit astride of such an important marker as a whole new year, it’s obvious that they’ll be cut short. By the 5th of January, some people have not only stopped eating — they’ve stopped drinking too! Which is of questionable sense in this cold, dark month.

Lost days; moonlight

Anyway, as I’ve said, the 12 days is not really specifically to do with those 11 lost days, which does mean that the preceding paragraph is a bit of a tangent. However, I’ve written it now and you’ve just read it, so we’ll all just have to move on.

What it does have to do with is also a correction of calendrical drift, but rather one that stems from a mismatch between the Roman Solar Calendar and the Lunar Calendar favoured in the Roman provinces of the East. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll just quote my source, which cites Christopher Hill’s Holidays and Holy Nights: Celebrating Twelve Seasonal Festivals of the Christian Year directly:

This arrangement became an administrative problem for the Roman Empire as it tried to coordinate the solar Julian calendar with the lunar calendars of its provinces in the east. While the Romans could roughly match the months in the two systems, the four cardinal points of the solar year — the two equinoxes and solstices — still fell on different dates. By the time of the first century, the calendar date of the winter solstice in Egypt and Palestine was eleven to twelve days later than the date in Rome. As a result the Incarnation came to be celebrated on different days in different parts of the Empire. The Western Church, in its desire to be universal, eventually took them both — one became Christmas, one Epiphany — with a resulting twelve days in between. Over time this hiatus became invested with specific Christian meaning. The Church gradually filled these days with saints, some connected to the birth narratives in Gospels (Holy Innocents’ Day, December 28, in honour of the infants slaughtered by Herod; St. John the Evangelist, “the Beloved,” December 27; St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, December 26; the Holy Family, December 31; the Virgin Mary, January 1). In 567, the Council of Tours declared the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany to become one unified festal cycle.

Last night’s sleep was punctuated by the wakeful cries of my daughter at 5am, as a Cold Full Moon illuminated the snow-covered landscape. The moon disrupts; it lights our lives in dawn’s twilight.

BONUS CONTENT: 12 Lords, 3 magi, a toffee and a plastic fork

If this has been an epiphany, I’d now like to talk about Epiphany, which marks the arrival of the three wise men on the twelfth day of Christmas, or as we known it now, 5 January. Five years ago, I wrote these Yearnotes after the blog post I had written was, perhaps wisely, not published by my former employer. However, I recently found the draft and thought I would share it, with the caveat that it really wasn’t as good as the stuff that the Royal Society’s Repository blog post normally features, and this hasn’t been endorsed by them or anything. It was just fun to write!

Anyway, enjoy…

(December 2015) Gold, sesquiterpene derivatives, and Myrrh

OK! The game’s up. I’m not a historian. At all. Not a bit — not even would I count as a science communicator with any particular expertise in the history of science. And yet, the wonderful staff in the Royal Society’s Centre for the History of Science, known more commonly and with affection by those who know it as the Library, have been as helpful and welcoming and you might dare to hope. They’re that way with everyone, you see.

Over the course of the past 15-or-so months, research for a series of films dreamed up by some top communicators of science, including Fellows of the Society, journalists and writers, has had me filling out paper request slips to have items sent up from the warren of annexes and antechambers beneath the Society staff’s feet (except when they’re in the basement, when those annexes are half-a-floor above their heads). The book room. Early letters. The map room — actually, that one’s from that festive period TV stalwart, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the Ark itself? Afraid not. Rutherford’s potato-masher, which is kept down there, thankfully lacks the radioactive qualities that could cause a scene reminiscent of the movie’s climax. Whether or not it was present during the famous gold foil experiments, whereby the deflection of an alpha-particle helped our past antipodean President deduce the structure of an atom — decidedly concentrated mass in the centre of a void and all that — is unknown. And in spite of the huge implications of Rutherford’s discovery, his will not be selected as one of the three Philosophical Transactions-related papers selected for their somewhat incidental relevance (through a masterpiece of late 20th century culture) to our somewhat cliched titular trio of festive materials, because he went ahead and sent his findings to Taylor and Francis’s Philosophical Magazine. Never mind.

Just over half a century earlier, one of the greatest scientists of the age — one whose impact on many science-buffs’ Christmases, through the lecture series that still continues today, is unmatched* — gave the coveted Bakerian Lecture on the subject of the interaction of light with metal films; in particular, gold. Faraday’s lecture, Experimental Relations of Gold (and other metals) to Light, was published in Phil Trans in 1857. From the long historical perspective, we can see how the ideas in that paper have had a huge impact on a huge range of fields: his remarkable insight that the ’washings’ left behind during the chemical etching of thin gold were in fact very fine particles — what we today would call nanoparticles; the fact that materials alone could change the number of undulations of light — something that sounds prescient of frequency doubling now common in lasers. The Christmas link here is the author himself of course, the Bakerian Lecture having been given in February 1857, and while it may lack the completeness of his celebrated ‘A Chemical History of a Candle’, it is no less accessible. It stands as my choice for gold.

I couldn’t find anything satisfying on frankincense named as such in the indexed archive, but some digging around the subject has revealed a 1708 paper on the making of styrax liquida, which its author James Petiver indicates was in great demand in Mecca and Judah in June and July. Styrax is important for frankincense olibanum resin harvesting: Herodotus had it that the only way to ward off the venomous snakes (which he insists are the snakes that attack Egypt — to my mind going a step too far in imputing in our reptilian chums the potential for coordinated warfare) that protect the trees is to burn storax, which drives them away. This is the styrax that Petiver refers to as Rosa Mallas — itself, like frankincense, produced from the bark of a tree related to the boswellia genus that yields true olibanum resin. The acrid smoke it produces results from the unsaturated and polyaromatic hydrocarbons in the sap — which always give a sooty flame — and in the storax or styrax itself a high quantity of styrene is also present, exacerbating this effect. If you’ve received or, better yet, given an electronic item for Christmas this year, you may come into contact with its processed polymer form as the polystyrene in its packaging. Top tip: don’t burn it, even if you’re being attacked by an army of snakes.

Searching for the final gift in our festive triplet, Myrrh, returns one conspicuous reference in the Philosophical Transactions: a 1775 paper by James Bruce which was sent to celebrated Scottish Anatomist William Hunter .The paper begins by positing the question: is the myrrh being made in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia and Eritrea) the same myrrh that Discorides describes? Hunter stops a hair’s breadth short of calling the first century physician a Charlatan (‘The ancients, particularly Discorides, spoke about myrrh in such a manner, as to leave us with no alternative to suppose that either they have described a drug which they have never seen…’) but continues throughout the paper to doubt that ‘Abyssnia’ and ‘Asia Minor’, where Discorides practised, were sufficiently well connected either by trade or tourism for him to have seen real myrrh. I also wonder whether the myrrh in the Christmas essential oil that is scenting my front room, bought at Greenwich Christmas market, is truly the myrrh of the ancients; I’d rather ascribe to Discorides a greater sense of adventure and cosmopolitanism than Bruce has.

So there you have it: gold, sooty sesquiterpene derivatives, and myrrh. And now here’s a game: why not try to beat my tenuous Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh connections using the online publishing archive? Until January 2015, when the Library reopens, it’s probably your best bet. (Although Indiana Jones is on again, so why break tradition?)

_*Except maybe Newton, who was of course born of Christmas day itself_