Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 21: in which we find we need to pray a whole new kind of rosary, a rosary untainted by religion

Beautiful Magicians,

Things are converging. Disparate things. Things that didn’t feel connected in any way when they were happening. But now, as I stand—and you stand—in this strange, exhausting, yet still exhilarating moment in time, I am beginning to see strands coming together. To create something new. Something different. Something holy.

Here are some of the strands I see. Perhaps you see some of them, too.

The first thing that happened was, of course, the stunning arrival of prayer artist. Didn’t see that coming. Didn’t ask for it. Couldn’t even imagine calling myself such a thing. But there it was. In the night. On my yellow pad. And there I was curled in the fetal position. How else could I—or you—respond to such a calling.

But I said yes anyway, and immediately radical new kinds of prayers started arriving. I began to offer prayer intensives. I changed my website. I changed everything. And here I am eight years later, and I can feel a whole new kind of prayer coming through. It’s exciting. And the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

But this time I’m not creating prayer by myself. My partner in all things witch, mystic artist and oracle, Cathy Stevens Pratt, is creating it with me. And so is White Cardinal. White Cardinal, AKA Tony, is a magnificent man, a man as open to radical prayer as Cathy and I are.

Our little trio is coming together carrying disparate strands and weaving them into the first new rosary in over a thousand years.

When I say rosary, you see in your mind’s eye the form it has had since the Middle Ages. And, whether you were raised catholic or not, you associate it with the catholic church. And therein lies the problem. Several problems.

I grew up saying that rosary on my knees around the dining room table. And hating every minute of it. It was just an obligation. There was no juice, no joy, no insight, no grace. So when I left the catholic church at 19, I left that creepy prayer behind.

So I was surprised, horrified actually, when I read a book in 2019 presenting the rosary not as a catholic prayer, but as an ancient divine feminine prayer. I liked that idea. I liked that idea a lot.

So I got out my mother’s crystal rosary and tried to pray. Immediately I had problems. I refused to say the creed at the beginning. I refused to touch the crucifix. I refused to say the hail mary with that bit about being a sinner. Lots of problems.

So I rewrote the prayers. I interviewed Neil Douglas-Klotz on what Jesus actually said in Aramaic that was mangled into what is called the Our Father. Line by line, Neil explains that the translation is wrong, right from the salutation to “our father.” Nice try, but abwoon d’bwashmaya isn’t a masculine term. It’s about birthing.

This is what a patriarchal religion in a patriarchal culture worshipping a patriarchal god does to prayer.

But I still wanted to say the rosary. Because, if it harkens back to a time of the divine feminine, I wanted to experience that. So with lots of alterations, I started to pray the rosary.

But more problems arose.

• I couldn’t stand the mysteries.
  They are just theology lessons and I don’t believe any of that so why in the world would I pray along with those stories.
• I didn’t want to watch empire murder a good man, a beloved rabbi.
  Really, why in the world does anyone want to watch that?
• The theology said it’s because god the father sent him to suffer for our sins.
• And we all know who god said sinned first. Why a woman, of course. Talk about a lie, the biggest lie of all time.
• What kind of god is that? What kind of father is that?
• And to make sure we remembered our sins, the church slapped a crucifix on the rosary.

I was confused. I wanted to say the rosary but I couldn’t bear the form.

I took my conundrum to the Masters and Teachers of the Akashic record who explained the rosary before religion and the rosary after religion. They explained that I was feeling a call to pray the before rosary, the one women prayed for millennia before the church squashed that and created the after. A form I couldn’t bear.

In a personal consultation the Masters and Teachers told me:

“The original purpose of the rosary was to induce a transcendental state of consciousness. The meaning was altered to take the power away by making it a way to serve the worship of a god.”

They described a group of men planning how to take the mystical power out of the rosary. (They didn’t say priests; they didn’t have to.) What better way to zap all the juice out of a mystical prayer than to tack on a crucifix, an instrument of torture, and make people recite a list of beliefs that reinforce the theology of violent atonement for sin—your sins.

To make the rosary meaningful to us, Cathy and I created a rosary around Joan of Arc, a mystic witch we both revere. We called it A Witches Rosary Circle, how adorable is that! But after two years, we were told we had to pray back inside the lines or leave. So we left.

A wild thing happened when we walked away from that rosary group: prayer after prayer after prayer emerged, faster than we could absorb them. We were grinning at each other all the time. And creating prayer practices. And loving every minute. We had stepped into a magical world of prayer and suddenly prayer artist had deeper and even more delightful meaning.

I tucked the rosary Cathy had made for me into a bag she crocheted. I left it in that bag for several years and proceeded to forget about it.

Until last week.

Cathy has been working on a portrait of time that depicts 35,000 years of matriarchy starting in the Upper Paleolithic (oh those caves!) and moving through Paleolithic and Neolithic Goddess cultures, culminating in 1500 years of creativity and peace in the Minoan culture on Crete.

But when the Bronze age warriors who worshipped invisible angry gods swept down upon matrilineal peoples, everything changed.

Patriarchy had arrived.
And with it, came hierarchy, domination…
all five crimes of patriarchy.

In Cathy’s timeline, “The Song of the Morning of the World,” Cathy depicts the five thousand years of patriarchy in grey tones. It looks small next to the 35,000 years of nature and art and symbols of devotion. And it’s ugly. Cathy put in symbols of patriarchy: a falling skyscraper, bomb, shackles, crown, piles of money, barbed wire, filthy river, prison bars. Against all that grey, two drops of blood.

An accurate portrait of patriarchy.

We are living that portrait right now. Ukraine, Gaza, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Ebola breakout, concentration camps across America, unfathomable greed. These are the real sorrowful mysteries. Not the blood of one holy man; this is the blood squeezed out of everyone around the world by the powerful avaricious few. They relish watching the whole world suffer.

Cathy's timeline gives us great hope, though. The grey section fades as the green of “Her Garden of Reverence” emerges brimming with life: bees and frogs and flowers. And Cathy’s signature, a Dandelion. Why? Because dandelion is so powerful, so determined to live, that it can break right through cement.

• So one strand of our new prayer practice is Cathy’s timeline.
• When the name surfaced, I somehow knew we needed to pray a new rosary also called “The Song of the Morning of the World rosary.”
• But this rosary cannot look or feel anything like the existing format.

The Masters and Teachers said that the original rosary with its transcendental power had to go underground until it “finally disappeared from its original intent and purpose.”

But then they said, “now, it’s surfacing thanks to souls like yourself.”

So what is this new rosary that holds the original transcendental grace of the original?

Well: it has:

• no theology
• no story of empire executing a man
• no sex-less pregnancy
• no placid mother
• no virgin birth
• no creed
• no hail mary or our father
• no mention of sin
• no mysteries

So what prayers does it include?

• 7 paired statements of our original masculine-feminine partnership
• 2 moments of transcendental silence
• 5 prayers that transmute the crimes of patriarchy for women
• 5 prayers that celebrate the original holy nature of men

And the rosary itself will look different:

• your personal symbol—no crucifix in sight
• 7 beads for the exchange of masculine-feminine partnership
• 7 beads in each set, not ten
• beads that mirror the healing of patriarchy in their crystals and colors

Cathy and Tony and I are still deep in ART 7 Dragon, which will end in June.

So our new prayer will begin in July.

We had no idea how perfect that timing would be. Astrologers are quite clear that we are entering a summer of massive upheaval. Some even call it the summer of collapse. I’ll try to gather enough information about the astrology to be able to talk about the summer in a way that we non-astrologers can understand.

Suffice it for now to say that this summer, July in particular, is a time for prayer, real prayer, prayer that infuses our world with strength and grace and renewal. We can’t see Her Garden of Reverence just yet, but we know we’re on the threshold.

So all summer long we are going to pray. It will be dark, but we will be Praying in the Dark.

Watch for news next Sunday on when Praying in the Dark will be ready for you. Cathy is taking preorders for The Song of the Morning of the World portrait and rosary from members of The Witch Sequence intensives in the next ten days. Then I'll open it to the whole newsletter list. Because this is a prayer we all want. And need.

Life is fragile, handle with reverence
And beautiful, holy, mystical prayer

Janet

PS Here is my interview with Neil on the Aramaic Our Father

I've written six newsletters about the crimes of patriarchy. here's the first one that lists the crimes

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