Feast Every Day Examining the Sabbath in the New Aeon

Last year, I re-read The Ancient Practice Series and finished with Dan Allender’s contribution to the series, Sabbath. In the foreword, series editor Phyllis Tickle writes, “Interestingly enough, the discipline of keeping one day holy unto the Lord is the only one of the Abrahamic practices that is commanded as such. That is, of the seven, it is only Sabbath-keeping that was included at Sinai as a part of the decalogue or Torah.”¹Phyllis Tickle, foreword to Sabbath, by Dan B. Allender (Thomas Nelson, 2010), vii. // Earlier in her foreword, Tickle notes that all three of the Abrahamic communities, in their own way, “has adapted [the seven practices of] tithing, fasting, fixed-hour prayer, Sabbath observance, adherence to the liturgical year, sacred pilgrimage, and participation in the sacred meal” (vii).

I’d read this before, but it hit differently this time. Despite nearly two foundational decades in the church (not the extreme, political kind; more of the grounded, teaching kind), I’d never heard anyone emphasize this. I mean, I’d just been looking at tithing, just prior to reading this book, and noting how many loopholes exist. It’s almost optional most of the time if you squint hard enough. In the Torah, tithing feels more like a moral nudge (“Do you really want orphans and widows to starve?”) than an actual commandment. But the Sabbath is mandatory.

I’m always reflecting on how Thelema transforms principles from past aeons to the present. “Behold! The rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet!” [AL 2.5]—not everything is discarded; some things might be “purged,” or transformed, or transcended but included (there’s that integral principle again) for our continued use.

The Sabbath, for instance, is about setting aside a day of rest after a week of labor. It doesn’t matter if you call it work, passion, duty, or play. Six days, you do something. On the seventh, you take a break.

For the Abrahamic religions, this was a commandment—a designated day of rest, distinct from the mundane. But the Sabbath was also about connecting with the source of one’s spiritual grounding.

I would never suggest Thelema has strict commandments like the Abrahamic faiths, but it does offer clear injunctions. For instance: “Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy & beauty!” [AL 2.35]. This is an imperative statement. We have others. We don’t call them commandments, but we might as well.

This raises the question: how does the Sabbath look when refracted through Thelema?

In Abrahamic faiths, a day is set aside for rest and communion with God. I would go so far as to say the Book of the Law has transcended and included this previous commandment to give us a new one: “A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture!” [AL 2.42]. It’s another imperative statement. But there is a shift that I think is important to note.

Part of the reason for the Sabbath was intentionality. For the early tribal forms of Abrahamic faiths, having that singular day out of seven to retreat into a different mindset was important. It established separate spaces (and places): one for God and one for humanity, a division between the sacred and the ordinary.

And here is the key to what I was looking for in that aeonic transformation, that ‘transcends and includes’ part: Thelema removes the division between the sacred and the ordinary²One of the concepts that truly irritates me is this ridiculous nonsense from grifters about how you have to “get into the magical universe” or “develop your Ra-Hoor-Khuit consciousness.” I’m not talking about trying to “re-enchant” life. That’s about our experience of life. Life, itself, is no more and no less enchanted than anything else in the universe. It is our engagement with and meaning-making within the universe that creates that enchantment. (transcends) while maintaining the insistence on the intentionality of life itself (includes).

Sabbath is not a reprieve from life but the putting to an end of the restlessness that prevents deep engagement with it. […] Theologically understood, to be properly in a place is to be fully present and receptive to its gifts. A Sabbath orientation teaches people to be attentive and faithful to the goodness and grace that are the concrete expressions of God’s love. […] When faced with God’s care and creation’s goodness and beauty, the spontaneous response should be exuberant joy.³Wirzba, Norman. 2011. Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. Cambridge University Press, 46. (emphasis mine).

How does that section begin in the Book of the Law that starts the ecclesiastical calendar?

“Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy & beauty” [AL 2.35]. And just before that? “Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us” [AL 2.20].

I once wrote that the most significant missing piece in nearly all Thelemic writing is the emphasis on joy. I would add to that beauty here as well.

If one has never read the Book of the Law and felt the raw emotional content that just jumps out at the reader, then one is dead. The Book of the Law exudes emotions that range from disgust to lust, from passion to formal protocol, and from concrete to abstract. However, it is one of the saddest things for me to watch a Gnostic Mass or a Ritual of the Elements and see those who actually miss the point of that one little verse. It is “joy & beauty” that is the emotional contact with our traditions. So many point to beauty as an aesthetic concept—and it is such from one particular view—but then miss the point of beauty as an emotional concept.

Beauty in this sense is not merely a matter of symmetry or aesthetic proportion, nor even the cultivated refinement of taste. It is the lived recognition that the world, even in its fractured and jagged moments, is capable of stirring the heart into awe. It is the trembling inhale before a sunrise, the silent swell of gratitude in the presence of a friend, the sudden stillness that comes when a poem strikes some hidden chord within you. In Thelema, beauty is not a static ornament—it is a mode of perception, a discipline of seeing, in which the sacred is apprehended as already and always present. To experience beauty emotionally is to be pierced by the fact of existence, to be drawn into relationship with it, and to respond—not with possession or control—but with joy. Joy becomes the natural echo of beauty when it is truly felt, and this is the emotional current the Book of the Law bids us to keep alive in our rituals, our work, and our days.

Every day, for the Thelemite, is meant to be approached mindfully, intentionally, and willfully. Every day—every moment, if I really want to push my luck on this—is a renewal of our connection to the vastness of the universe around us, to the spiritual ground in which we exist, down to the finer details of our most banal moments.⁴In the past—both philosophically and psychologically—I have informally termed this a sense of “monotonous joy.” It is simply the joy of daily existence. Most of the Übermensch-type will try to conflate and mistake monotonous with mediocre which I think speaks more to their own mindset than reality.What does the Book of the Law say, using the personae of Nuit (from the poetic perspective of the ground of being)? “I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy” [AL 1.13]. Every moment is about joy, monotonous joy, ecstatic joy, wondrous joy, excruciating joy. Taken to the logical and liturgical end, we are back to “A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture!” [AL 2.42], not as “a reprieve from life but the putting to an end of the restlessness that prevents deep engagement with it.”

In Thelema, we’re not commanded to set aside a single day each week to commune with our spiritual core apart from our mundane existence. Instead, that spiritual ground is ever-present, surrounding us at all times, because we are it, and it is each of us.

For the Thelemite, every day is the Sabbath.

Love is the law, love under will.