`Hail Persephone’: Pagans Retool the Rosary

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Picking up her Catholic rosary, Meg, a 24-year-old from Maine, begins her prayers like this: “Hail Persephone, full of strength and beauty. … Blessed are you and blessed is the cycle of your life. Holy Persephone, queen of life and death, pray for your children now, and in the […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Picking up her Catholic rosary, Meg, a 24-year-old from Maine, begins her prayers like this:

“Hail Persephone, full of strength and beauty. … Blessed are you and blessed is the cycle of your life. Holy Persephone, queen of life and death, pray for your children now, and in the hour of our need. Blessed be.”


Meg calls herself a Christo-Pagan, a blender of traditional Christianity and pagan goddess worship. For her, adapting the Catholic rosary brings a peace that adhering only to the Christianity of her youth did not.

“It makes me feel very connected to God,” said Meg, who declined to give her last name because she _ like many pagans who aren’t open to their families _ still lives in what some call the “broom closet.”

“Going through this cycle of prayer, it switches your brain into recognizing that something holy is happening and God is with you,” she said.

Meg’s prayer is one example of how some neo-pagans (followers of Wicca, Druidry, Asatru and other forms of ancient goddess or nature worship) are retooling the centuries-old Catholic rosary and other prayer beads for worshipping Celtic, Norse, Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

No one knows how many neo-pagans use prayer beads. But there are now a sprinkling of pagan-oriented rosary Web sites, including http://www.sacredgrove.com and http://www.paganrosary.com, where people can find prayers for an “angelic rosary,” a “runic rosary,” and a “Celtic goddess rosary,” among others.

Yahoo has a “Mystic Rosary Group” where neo-pagans and others exchange information, prayers and support. The “pagan prayer beads” typically feature multicolored strands of beads with charms of a goddess figure, a tree, a pentagram, bones or other non-Christian symbols.

Praying with beads is a spiritual practice with a long history in most of the world’s religions, one that that neo-pagans are now rediscovering, scholars and practitioners say.


“It has been very common for contemporary pagans to regard Mary in some of her manifestations as a goddess,” said Chas Clifton, a professor at Colorado State University and author of “Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and paganism in America.” “Language and ritual have been transferred around from goddess to goddess in the pagan point of view, and the idea of having beads on a string is cross-cultural.”

Christopher Penczak, a witch who teaches how to construct “witches’ ladders” _ a knotted rope that he likens to a rosary used to count spells _ said, “It is about ritual. Pagans in general, when they find something that works in a ritual, they are very apt to borrow it.”

Tirgereh, a 35-year-old Seattle-based Wiccan, first used a rosary in college, when her Irish Catholic grandmother was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. The two women found common ground in the beads, and eventually, Tirgereh researched pagan prayers for her rosary and then wrote some of her own.

“There’s a very satisfying, tactile aspect to meditating with prayer beads,” said Tirgereh, who only goes by one name. “I would really miss the soft slide of metal and beads over my fingers were I to ever stop praying the rosary.”

Tirgereh’s handmade rosaries replace the crucifix with a more pagan-specific charm, such as an image of a goddess or tree. She also hands out copies of simple rosaries at pagan gatherings where she finds “a remarkable interest” in the beads.

“I’ve had folks who had always been curious, folks who had been raised Catholic but never knew how to incorporate it into their own practice and those just curious to see if I’m doing this from a place of respect and honor,” she said.


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Some pagans, like Tirgereh, use the Catholic rosary of their youth for new purposes while others are discovering the beads for the first time. One Catholic scholar said the distinction should be made clear.

“The neo-pagan `rosary’ has no connection whatever to the Catholic devotion … other than the use of beads and repetition,” said the Rev. Robert J. Wister, an associate professor of church history at Immaculate Conception School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

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Neo-pagans are not limiting themselves to Catholic rosaries. Many are making their own prayer beads with colors, symbols and numbers of beads that are meaningful to their own practice.

“It seems to have hit critical mass,” said Clare Vaughn, a Druid and co-author of “Pagan Prayer Beads,” a new book that describes the history and how-to of such beads.

Vaughn first saw pagan prayer beads at Midwestern neo-pagan gathering four years ago. “Now, when we go to a pagan gathering, there is always at least one vendor selling prayer beads,” she said.

Fuensanta Plaza, a follower of the Norse gods who lives in Carmel, Calif., says if her house caught fire, the only thing she would run back for would be her pagan prayer beads, dedicated to the god Loki and goddess Sigyn.


“They are extremely important to my spiritual life, and therefore to my life,” she said. Every day, she sits before her home altar and slips them through her fingers one at a time, “very much, presumably, as my Catholic grandmother used to say her rosary every day.”

Why the surge of interest? One explanation is that neo-paganism has simply grown up. Many contemporary pagans come to their faith after rebelling against the religion of their youth. They have now matured to the point where they can reach back and borrow practices that once worked for them.

“For a long time, pagans were exploring,” said John Michael Greer, Vaughn’s co-author on “Pagan Prayer Beads.”

“Sooner or later you say, `I have been talking about the gods and goddesses, maybe I should find a way to get in touch with them.’ One way you do that is through meditation and prayer.”

Many neo-pagans say more prayer is precisely what neo-pagans need if they want to be accepted as genuine people of faith.

“I really want to get pagans to pray,” said Raven Kaldera, a pagan who makes and sells pagan prayer beads via his Web site, http://www.cauldronfarm.com. “If paganism is going to find its feet as a religion and not just as a subculture, people need to actually believe in the gods and not just treat it as something you go to for fun. I think prayer is a part of that.”


KRE/LF END WINSTON

Editors: To obtain photos of Raven Kaldera making pagan prayer beads, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Also see sidebar, RNS-PAGAN-SIDEBAR, transmitted April 10, 2007.

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