Epiphany, the celebration of the coming of the Magi, is the great feast which closes the Christmas season. Septuagesima is the seventy-day season which leads up to Easter, incorporating the forty days of Lent. The intermediary period in the calendar is variable, Epiphany being fixed, Easter moveable. Each day there are scriptural readings incorporated into the Mass. Their sequence, recorded in the Missal, is set out in Table 1 (see pages 46–7). The Gospel texts for the first three Sundays after Epiphany relate the Baptism, Christ and the Doctors in the Temple, and the Marriage at Cana, and these provide the subject-matter of York Cycle pageants XXI, XX, and XXIIA respectively. The general theme of the season, and the shift in focus to the adulthood of Christ, is reinforced by the accompanying readings from the Epistles which highlight the nature of human society and, specifically, man's relationship with the Deity as it was established through Christ's life. The first of these Epistles, paired with the Baptism, from Romans 3: 19–26, concerns the difference between divine and human law, the second and third deal with examples of the symbiosis of human society, invoking the imagery of the members of the body to describe universal co-operation as an ideal. When we look at the texts written for the pageants which deal with these episodes from the Gospels, their emphases and preoccupations seem broadly characteristic of this transitional liturgical season.