[Main Blog Post] Thoughts on the "Way of the Rose"

[jprussell]

So far, I keep on with getting a blog post out for each week, if only barely. This week, my thoughts on the book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. I found it helpful in thinking about my work on a "Heathen Rosary", and I think anyone who thinks the Rosary might be helpful or at least interesting, but is not all that Catholic, might find this book worth checking out.

Comments

[jprussell]

I'm glad you found it helpful and motivating! I agree, there are definitely pluses and minuses, but overall, I appreciated its attitude of "just do the work".

I have to confess, I had no idea you could make beads out of roses - how does that work? Is it the stems? Buds?

And thank you for the kind offer! So far, I've been "feeling it out" with the beads - the main beads are yew (or at least claim to be), which I chose because some folks associate the Germanish World Tree (Yggdrasil) with the yew, the spacer beads are a dark-ish green jade, chosen because it looks a bit like green apples, and between each "nonade" (nine-bead grouping, equivalent of a decade in a traditional rosary), I have blue lapis lazuli beads, chosen for a color reminiscent of deep wells. So, as you can see, so far I don't have a ton of plant-based beads, but maybe that's something I ought to reconsider.

Do you have any recommendations for learning more about plant-based beads besides wood?

Thanks,
Jeff

[prayergardens]

The petals only. Search DIY rosary beads and there are a ton of easy tutorials. However, most of them use a blender and after some Magic Mondays I was concerned about cutting with knife blades if that cut the energy so I deep-googled to find an old 'simmer for many days recipe' that's literally been on my backburner all this week. The traditional is medieval Catholic originally.

I haven't been down the tree path much but the Mary Gardens database has quite a few (Olive, Pine, etc) but interesting nothing about Yew/Taxus. I hope to extend the database to a comparative religions setup when I got it done so I could note interesting things like this, but I'm not there yet.

I haven't found much more about plant based beads yet beyond the rosary. I was going to start experimenting with a mashup of what I can grow and what is the ENM to see where it goes. I can't recall if JMG's book covers it and my copy is in storage (to be dug up soon). I wonder if beads could be made of tree leaves/evergreen needles. IDK! Historically, the branches were turned on lathes for beads. However, there is a modern Catholic tradition where funeral flowers or wedding flowers are mixed with a polymer or resin to make beads if the material is not enough or not suitable for the rose method. I haven't done more than bookmark some links so far.

One interesting historical note is that apparently when rosaries were the rage in England, there was a whole street outside of St.Pauls Cathedral, Paternoster Row, where there were bead making guilds that specialized in various material so the bone guild was different than the rose guild and such. Different religion for you but I think it would be very interesting to learn more about the technologies in use there.

[jprussell]

Wow, I had no idea about making beads from flower petals, thank you for sharing this!

From my own reading of Pagan Prayer Beads, there's a brief discussion about what kind of symbolism you might consider when choosing/crafting beads, but if I remember right, the default assumption is that you'll be buying beads, and very little (if any) space is given to the idea of crafting your own with Natural Magic-informed processes.

As a brief aside, I have a bracelet with beads for the Runes which I made out of "Holy Land Olive Wood" (a company sells Israeli olive wood for beads and other purposes for its symbolic significance). In my case, I wasn't exactly going for the Christian significance, but the Runes are traditionally supposed to be carved on fruit-bearing wood, I was a Classics major in college, and I've always appreciated Athena, who gifted the olive tree to the Athenians, and I figured any Judeo-Christian holy associations wouldn't be hurtful. Perhaps more important than all of these considerations, olive wood has stunningly lovely striations and is dense and hard, making for very good-looking and long-lasting features.

Lastly, that's fascinating to hear about the different bead guilds. Those kinds of specialist technologies are exactly the kind of thing I'd like to learn more about - and I'd be interested to hear about the "alternative" social/business/political organizations of folks involved as well (what made guilds work when they did? What changed that displaced them? What have we lost in following "progress"?)

Oh, lastly, I'd love to hear how your DIY rosary beads turn out.

Thanks,
Jeff

[prayergardens]

Olive wood is an excellent choice! I have considered getting a rosary made of wood b/c my only one is made of roses and too fragile for daily use.

When I was doing my deep dive, I found a few other links. This woman started a website https://paternoster-row.medievalscotland.org/ and I believe she published in an SCA journal. I tried tracking it down but hit a dead end but it makes sense that SCA would figure this out. I didn't know they published research but this will be a road I go down eventually. There's a deadlink on her about page. I believe I still have borrowing privileges at the university where I did graduate work and was going to look into this but, realistically, it will take me a while to get to it. If you go down the path - let me know!

My rose beads were a nice first try but a miss. Too lumpy. I was hoping the long boil method would break things down more since blenders are not historical. Turns out I need a more abrasive mortar and pestle as a first step pre-boil, since my little one was too smooth and couldn't break down dry petals. My best modern guess is one of those mexican guacamole mortars and I'll work on getting one of those next.

[jprussell]

Thanks very much for sharing this, that may be a good source to look into, and is one I also hadn't considered.

I'm sorry to hear your first try at the beads didn't turn out too well, but I look forward to hearing how future attempts go!