Everyone has sudden flashes of perception and inside writers have a name of them -  Epiphanies. Epiphany is twelfth night - the 6th of January -  when Christ was visited by the three Wise men, and his divinity was revealed to the world. It derives from a Greek word, Epiphaneia, meaning "to manifest", and in pre-Christian times it was used to record appearances of God and Goddess. Traditionally the world has kept this specific religious association, but in our century, it was been secularized to refer to other, non-divine forms of revelation.

JOYCE'S SECULAR EPIPHANY

The principle writer to extend the meaning of the word as a secular term was James Joyce, who was interested in sudden, dramatic and startling moments which seemed to have heightened significance and to be surrounded with a kind of magical aura. The well known reference is in Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus is thinking to himself: "remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world including Alexandria. Someone was to read them thereafter a few thousand years".

The notion of the Joycean Epiphany was first outlined in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of An Artist as A Young Man) when a casual incident in Eccles street, Dublin strikes Stephen: a young lady was standing on the steps on one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentlemen was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely. This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies.

By an epiphany he meant: a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

"He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments" (Chapter 25).

Joyce, then, at this stage of his carrier as he explained to his brother Stanislaus noted "little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.

Epiphany in these instances, is Revelation. In some case epiphanies could be ironical, but they could also be lyrical and radiant.

Stephen explains in "Stephen Hero" that the apprehension of beauty involves:

·       The recognition of integrity

·       Wholeness, symmetry and radiance.

Joyce demonstrates the way in which the contemplated object is revealed: its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant.

Joyce is here extending definitions of beauty to cover areas that most people would not recognize as such.

The American writer Emerson employed the term Epiphany in a lecture of 19^th December 1838: a fact is an epiphany of God and on every fact of his life man should raise a temple of wonder an joy. For centuries writers and mystics have experimented sudden insights that seem detached from the flow of every day perception. In many of these experiences you reach the highest points of human experience and the focus of artistic production. Often, they have been on a borderline between the secular and the religious: what has been revealed in a mystical moment has been a sense of God of the whole shape of the Universe, of the unity of all created things.