epiphany

In ancient Greek, epiphaneia described the visible appearance of a god to human beings, as when a deity revealed itself in battle or in a dream. Early Christians adopted the word for the manifestation of Christ to the world. The feast of Epiphany, held on January 6, is one of the oldest Christian festivals. In Western churches it commemorates the visit of the Magi, the wise men from the East; in Eastern Orthodox churches it centers on the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River and is also called Theophany. In Spain and much of Latin America, January 6 is the Día de Reyes, when children traditionally receive gifts.

The modern literary meaning owes much to James Joyce. In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man written in the first decade of the twentieth century and published only in 1944, Joyce's hero defines an epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation,” whether in a vulgar phrase, a gesture, or a memorable thought. Joyce collected such moments in notebooks, and the stories of Dubliners (1914) often end with a character's quiet, painful recognition of the truth about their life. Critics adopted the term, and the epiphany became a standard concept in the study of the modern short story.

Popular history is full of famous epiphanies, though many have been embellished in the retelling. The Roman architect Vitruvius tells how Archimedes, stepping into a bath, realized how to test the purity of a gold crown and ran through the streets shouting “Eureka!” Isaac Newton told his friend William Stukeley that the fall of an apple had prompted his thinking about gravity. The chemist August Kekulé said in 1890 that the ring structure of benzene had come to him while he was dozing and dreamed of a snake seizing its own tail.

Psychologists study epiphanies under the name insight. In The Art of Thought (1926), Graham Wallas divided creative thinking into four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification, with illumination corresponding to the flash of discovery. In 2004 a team led by the neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios reported that solving word puzzles through sudden insight was accompanied by a burst of activity in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. Such research suggests that the “aha” moment usually follows long, unconscious work on a problem rather than arriving from nowhere.

In everyday English, epiphany is often used loosely for any new idea, from a breakthrough in therapy to a decision about what to cook for dinner. Writers who want to keep the word's force reserve it for realizations that change how a person sees something important.