Virtual Nativity - The Wise Men Depart

Very limited artwork seems to depict the departure of the Magi. However, a panel on a set of bronze doors in Monreale cathedral, Sicily, Italy was signed and dated (1186) by Bonannus of Pisa. Old Testament and New Testament scenes are portrayed and the panel depicts the departure of the Wise Men.

The Magi have a short but memorable place in the Nativity story. After Jesus was born, the Magi follow a star to Bethlehem, offer the new-born king their three gifts, and then return home without revealing to Herod where they found Jesus. At that point they drop out of the story.

The final four lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” reflects on the end of their journey: 

‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.’

After the trip was ended, they returned to their places. In attempting to settle back into the lives, they once knew and loved, they were ‘no longer at ease’, everything had changed. They felt uncomfortable in a world where ‘alien people clutched their gods’; the Magi had seen the true God.  

The final line states that the speaker would be glad to die, inferring a final journey to rest alongside God.  

But that is not the end of their story!

Originally found in Persia, the bones of the three kings are said to have been taken to Constantinople in the 4th century by St Helena. St Helena was the mother of Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.

The bones were later moved to Milan, and finally to Cologne, Germany by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I in 1164. They have remained enshrined in the cathedral ever since.