Theophany falls on the sixth of January, the date this rule records, the same calendar date the Western church keeps as Epiphany, but the Eastern churches that call the day Theophany, God's showing forth, center it on an entirely different Gospel episode, Christ's baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist, understood as the moment the Trinity was made visibly manifest, the Father's voice heard, the Spirit descending as a dove, and the Son standing in the water. This is closer to the feast's original, undivided ancient meaning, when January the sixth covered Christ's birth, baptism and early manifestation together in the early Greek speaking church, before the West's later adoption of December the twenty fifth for the Nativity left the January date free to be redefined, and the two halves of the early church's shared inheritance took different halves of that original combined feast as their primary theme.
The feast's central Eastern ceremony is the Great Blessing of Waters, performed at churches and, in many Orthodox countries, at rivers, lakes and the sea, where a cross is often thrown into open water for swimmers to retrieve, a practice particularly prominent in Slavic Orthodox nations even in the depths of winter. The blessed water is then carried home by the faithful for use throughout the year, a devotional practice with no equivalent in the Western Epiphany's own quite different focus on the visiting Magi.