Word: myrrh
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...Chrysostom and St. Augustine there were twelve, but tradition soon narrowed them to three-presumably because of the three gifts they brought. As far back as the and century, the church assigned symbolical meaning to the gifts: gold for Christ's kingship, frankincense for his priesthood, and healing myrrh for his suffering and his role as physician to mankind. The Wise Men, or Magi, may have been members of an occult school in Media and Persia that specialized in astrology. No one knows how or when tradition turned them into kings and gave them names and ages. Caspar, King...
...great and wide as in our own day." He tells why experts now think that Bronze Age drummers lugged oaken sample cases through north European forests, and how the Egyptians of 4,000 years ago rowed their galleys 4,000 miles south to the Zambezi River to fetch myrrh, frankincense and gold. The eleventh of Hercules' twelve mythical labors-to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides-suggests to him that the Greeks may have sailed into the Atlantic by 1400 B.C. The giant Atlas, who gave Hercules such a timely hand, may have been "the gigantic snow-capped...
...then, P. & G. admits to only two documented instances of cakes that sank-probably because the air bubbles had been squeezed out during storage.) In church one day, Harley Procter, a son of the founder, found a name for the new product in Psalms: "All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad...
...street wears its usual mask of myrrh and mink; crowds still complain about the crowds; but padlocked boxes have replaced Salvation Army tambourines. Inside the big stores, cheese cloth cherubs still butter among the silvered spine boughs, but it now costs a quarter to see Santa Claus...
Hangover preventives have been peddled since the days of Pliny. His favorites were screech-owl eggs, roasted boar's lung and powdered pumice. Pliny also quoted an Assyrian who had good results with a swallow's beak, ground up with myrrh. (He gave no directions for catching the swallow.) Bitter almonds had a legendary reputation in the Middle Ages, but Sir Thomas (Religio Medici) Browne, checking up in the 17;th century, sadly reported: "That antidote against ebriety . . . hath commonly failed." Later came raw eels, thoughtfully suffocated in wine. Present-day self-treatments include yeast, yoghurt, lime juice...