Some people say an Epiphany is when we, human beings, are touched by the Hand of God.
Someone else said, and I agree, that an Epiphany is when we, human beings, slip free from the Hand of God.
Epiphany, as the Webster 1913 definition for this word notes, comes from a Greek phrase meaning, roughly, "appearance, manifestation". However, the context seems to be missing. To a Greek, epiphaneia would imply the literal appearance of a deity to a mortal. The connotation is clearly of religious awe in the presence of the divine.
Epiphaneia is infrequently used in Greek tragedy, most notably by Euripides. In the opening scene of his play Trojan Women, Poseidon and Athena debate punishment for the Greeks for their excesses in the course of conquering Troy. To the Greek audience, this appearance of two deities in the very first moments of the play must have been somewhat shocking - particularly in light of the socially and politically critical theme of the play (which may be read as a rebuke to the Athenians for their behaviour in the Peloponnesian War, particularly with regard to the people of Melos, which was conquered in 416 BCE).
Earth: Final Conflict Episode: 420 Season: 4 Airdate: 2001-04-30
Synopsis:
The Taelons' impending death stasis sparks a battle of wills between Da'an and Zo'or.
Details:
Zo'or tells Da'an, Liam, Renee, Hubble Urick and Tina De May, a new protector, that the Taelons are about to enter death stasis because they do not have enough energy to survive. It will now be up to the human race to uncover the secret of Taelon core energy and save them. Liam starts having hallucinations of his father Ha'gel, and Dr. Curzon informs him that his immune system is failing.
Da'an has previously obtained enough core energy to last a millennium during his attempted joining with a Jaridian, but he decides to enter stasis with the others. As the Taelons prepare to enter the stasis chamber, Zo'or announces that Da'an has been keeping his excess energy a secret, and orders his storm troopers to take him into custody. Liam portals Da'an away to the Embassy to keep him safe.
Meanwhile, Renee finds that Tina has filed a report suggesting that Liam be relieved of duty because of his illness. Liam faints again, and Dr. Curzon discovers that a Kimera strand of his DNA became toxic when Liam became fully human. The only way for him to survive would be to use the Taelon stasis technology he had stolen without Da'an's knowledge. The conversation between Liam and Dr. Curzon is being secretly monitored by Tina.
Da'an reveals to Liam that Zo'or is his son, and that Zo'or is so afraid of stasis that he would die before entering it. Tina interrupts, telilng Da'an that Sandoval was leading an assault against the Embassy and that Liam has stolen Taelon technology. Da'an is furious, relieves Liam of his duties, traps him in an energy field and flees with Tina. Of course, Tina leads Da'an straight to Sandoval and his men, and vanishes into thin air.
Renee frees Liam, but Sandoval and Da'an get away. Back on the Mothership, Zo'or drains Da'an's energy and puts him in stasis. Liam refuses to use Taelon technology to heal himself, and dies. Renee is about to portal him away to the stars, obeying his final request, when he suddenly revives. He had seen his father Ha'gel, who explained that Tina had been chosen to push him to the point of ultimate despair, and to teach him that he was the agent of his own salvation.
Liam boards the Mothership to share this lesson with the Taelons. He ends the death stasis, and Da'an reclaims his energy from Zo'or and distributes it to all of the Taelons. They will live, but without enough core energy to re-enter stasis. They now have only months to find a way to save themselves.
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Epiphany celebrates the Manifestation of Christ on Earth.
At the end of the twelve days of Christmas (or January 6th for those of you trying to count on your toes), the Epiphany festival begins for Protestants, Roman Catholics, and many other Christians. This is a season that extends through the Carnival and Mardi Gras festivities right up to Ash Wednesday, when Lent begins. Because various sects interpret the Bible differently, Christmas, and in turn Epiphany, may occur earlier or later in the season.
According to the Bible, upon news of his birth the wise men travelled to Jerusalem to see the newborn Christ. During their travels, a star appeared to guide them. Epiphany marks the arrival of the wise men and the appearance of this star as a symbol of Christ's appearance to the Gentiles. The festival of Epiphany also celebrates Christ's baptism by water as well as the marriage in Cana, where Christ performed his first miracle by turning water into wine.
In many countries, Epiphany means Christmas celebrations, including the traditional gift-giving and feasting. Some cultures celebrate Epiphany with symbolic gifts of the gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the wise men gave to baby Jesus. Some use the day to take down their Christmas decorations (tree, lights, etc). Others bake special cakes, go caroling and parade through the streets. Primarily, this season of adoration is celebrated within the church.
2005.8.15@14:25 doyle says re Epiphany: Ithink that the Wise Men didn't see an infant Jesus--it took a couple of years for them to get to their destination (Bethlehem? Jerusalem?). I didn't believe this either, until I read it--in the Bible. Cheers!
Epiphany is a Free web browser for Unix-like systems, designed to be a lightweight, easy-to-use browser conforming to the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines. The project was started in 2002 as a fork of Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti, who originally created Galeon to be an easy-to-use browser with better integration with his Gnome desktop than the Mozilla project. Over time, Galeon grew mountains of features and preferences, targeting power users rather than his original goal of simplicity; forking to create Epiphany gave both camps the freedom to create the browser they wanted. Epiphany is now the official browser of the Gnome desktop, although every distribution I'm aware of uses Firefox by default at the moment. This is kind of a shame, but it's probably inevitable given the recognition Firefox has among normal people. (It turns out that work on Galeon has now pretty much ceased, with some of its features being brought to Epiphany as extensions. This is probably good news from the point of view of reducing duplication of effort.)
Epiphany supports everything you would expect a modern browser to support, either out of the box or via a collection of around 20 official extensions. So, you get tabs, pop-up blocking, cookie and password management, advert blocking, stylesheet switching, a sidebar, etc. Epiphany extensions are written in C or Python, and the user interface is built with Gtk, so Firefox extensions – written in JavaScript, using the XUL toolkit – aren't supported. That said, a port of the marvellous Greasemonkey ships with the official extensions, as do equivalents of most of the useful Firefox extensions I've seen, with the notable exceptions of Firebug and the web developer toolbar. (Not being a web developer, this doesn't affect me, but it might make folks who are cry.)
Epiphany's bookmark system is worth mentioning. Rather than providing a folder hierarchy in which to arrange your bookmarks, you assign them to tags, rather like del.icio.us. (There's an extension to sync these tags with various social bookmarking sites, if you're into that kind of thing.) If you put a bookmark into the magic Search Engines tag, it appears in a drop-down list below the address bar; typing some text into the bar then choosing one of the bookmarks causes the string %s in the bookmark's URL to be replaced with the text you entered. For instance, I have a Search Engine-tagged bookmark for http://everything2.com/e2node/%s, giving me easy access to any arbitrary node directly from the address bar.
Traditionally, Epiphany has used Mozilla's Gecko engine, just like Galeon, Firefox, Seamonkey and friends. As of recently, you can choose instea
