The Blackberry Walk

I'm writing this article on Sunday, the first day of the week. I was previously under the misguided belief that Monday was the first day of the week, a belief which I hope in this article I will be able to dispel for yourselves also. We'll begin with the concept of what a week is. Unlike years, which are astronomical to the sun, days, which are astronomical to the earth, and months, which in our calendar are nearly astronomical to the moon, weeks have no cosmic anchoring. The Classical world hadn't a conception of the week, and had to discuss specific days as 'the 28th of July' when discussing them. After all, there is no astronomical reason for a cycle of seven days to roll on and on, independent of the months and years which gird them. Weeks, as you may imagine, originate in the Bible, from the seven days of creation. On the first day of creation, God said "Let there be light" which is now honoured as 'Sun-day', the day of light. Other Semitic peoples like the Babylonians inherited the seven day week, associating each day with a deity. And these deities miraculously roughly map onto the deities from our calendars also! These deities take the names of Roman pagan gods in the Romance nations and of Germanic pagan gods in the Germanic nations - well, nearly all of them are Germanic gods. All bar one: Saturday. Saturday comes from Saturn, the father of Jupiter, and is seen as one of the original gods of Rome before Hellenic influence. Saturn - not to be confused with Satan, as some excitable armchair etymologists have claimed, was the deity worshipped in Saturnalia, the great winter solstice festival of the Romans. Saturnalia was a kind of Carnival, where the chains of social rank and duty were unbound, and there was gift-giving abound. Slaves ate at with their masters at the same table, and the streets were filled with rowdy drinking and merriment. In the Classical Ages of Man, Kronos ruled over the world during the Golden Age, a halcyon, Edenic age where the Earth gave bountiful food, and needn't work, cultivating wisdom. The Golden Age of Saturn were the Days of Rest. The seven days of creation were, during the great online Theist v. Atheist conflicts of the noughties an itchy rash that never healed. The theist tribe could never concede that a literal seven days and seven nights reading Genesis is a very difficult pill to swallow - one not even many of the church fathers wished to swallow - and the atheist tribe could never accept there's a narrative truth which might transcend and possess more value than the autistic categories of geological time. But such days of yonder are remembered fondly with all their naivety and cringe. "Days of yonder". "Days of Rest". Even in English we have this usage for the word 'days', so as to mean a period of time rather than a single day. According to many biblical scholars, Hebrew also has this sense of the word days, even when it isn't pluralised! Each day of creation in the Bible is a long period of time, rather than a twenty-four hour period. And here we see a kind of concordance. The Golden Age of Saturn, is the seventh day of creation. Saturday is the last day of the week. I haven't yet brought in the most incisive piece of evidence. Jews, to this day and before the time of Christ, have commemorated the Sabbath on a Saturday, because Saturday is the seventh day of the week, and thus the seventh day of creation. If only I'd started with such a simple argument! But the question then becomes, why Sunday? Sunday is in some Christian denominations understood as the Sabbath - although I would say this is a misunderstanding, based on what I've read thus far. Sunday is not the Sabbath, but rather the Lord's Day: the first day of New Creation.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. - Matthew 5:17

Jews in the time of Christ, and orthodox Jews to this day, keep the Sabbath very strictly. Orthodox Jews today dare not even turn on a light bulb, for it is construed as lighting a fire. However Christians do not, for Christ fulfilled - meaning filled to the point of overflowing - the commandments on the Sabbath. In the Passion, Christ was crucified on Good Friday, and spent Holy Saturday, the Sabbath, dead; and in resting to the point of death, the Sabbath was fulfilled by Christ. Christ rising again on Easter Sunday is Christ rising as the light (as in the first day of creation), of a new creation, ushering in a new era under Christ's reign. Each Sunday is therefore a commemoration that we are living within this new creation, and at the start of each week we must attempt to change and align ourselves ever so slightly more with Christ's image. Sunday at the end of the week turns new creation and God into a kind of afterthought, rather than a new-week's resolution. Why does all this matter, then? Why can't the week start with Monday? There is a kind of fracturing in the weekend now if we start with Sunday - it feels as if there aren't two consecutive days of rest in the same way before the next working week starts. And in part, such vague and indescribable feelings are the point. The mental shapes and filters through which we see the world affect how we perceive reality; a good example of this phenomenon is with colours. In Japan the colour green and the colour blue were, for the longest time, considered one and the same, with the name ao. That's why there is aokigahara the blue forest, because forests were blue. Undoubtedly the wavelengths of light were the same, but where the very essence of colour, the qualia, perceived identically? I'd argue not. Without words, without forms to project from our mind, we will see the world, in a very real way, differently. Our thoughts, our minds, change how we view the world. And to view Sunday as being at the beginning rather than at the end of the week is to view God as the week's start rather than one's nine to five job. Letting Monday begin your week places work as the leader of your life. And that is> topsy-turvy.