Use of Beads at Prayer

By Bob McIntosh, Ph.D.

Sacred Beads (in various forms and number) strung together are used by many people in a number of forms of prayer and devotions. The Catholic Rosary is in common use as an expedient tool to ensure a right count of the parts of their devotion occurring in frequent repetition. They can be made of materials ranging from common wood or natural berries to costly metals or precious stones; they may be blessed, and are in most cases, with prayer and holy water, thereby becoming sacramental. In this nature, they are prescribed by the rules of most religious orders, used by both men and women, to be kept for personal utilization or to be worn as part of the religious garb. This version is now mostly found in the form of the Dominican Rosary, or Marian Psalter; but Catholics are also familiar with the Brigantine beads, the Dolour beads, the Immaculate Conception beads, the Crown of Our Savior, the Chaplet of the Five Wounds, the Crosier beads, and others. In all these devotions, due to individual zeal or fostered by particular religious bodies, the beads serve one and the same purpose of distinguishing and numbering the essential prayers.

Research and focused criticism generally ascribes an Oriental origin to prayer beads. However, man's natural tendency to seek connection with the Spirit, especially via prayers, allowed the early spiritual trainers to show their students a process that kept a standard count. Many types of prayer may still safely be assumed to have spontaneously suggested fingers, pebbles, knotted cords, and strings of beads or berries as a means of counting, when it was desired to say a specific number of prayers. The earliest historical indications of the use of beads at prayer show a natural growth and development in their design and manufacture.

Beads strung together or ranged on chains are an obvious improvement over the well-known primitive method instanced, for example, in the life of the Egyptian Abbot Paul (d. A. D. 341), who used to take three hundred pebbles into his lap as counters and to drop one as he finished each of the corresponding number of prayers it was his desire to say daily. In the eighth century the rule books pertaining to penitents prescribed various penances of twenty, fifty, or more, patter. The strings of beads, with the aid of which such penances were accurately said, gradually came to be known as paternosters.

Archaeological records mention fragments of prayer beads found in the tomb of the holy abbess Gertrude of Nivelles (d. 659); also similar devices were discovered in the tombs of St. Norbert and of St. Rosalia, both of the twelfth century. The Bollandists quote William of Malmesbury (De Gest. Pont. Angl., IV, 4) as stating that the Countess Godiva, who founded a religious house at Coventry in 1040, donated, when she was about to die, a circlet or string of costly precious stones on which she used to say her prayers, to be placed on a statue of the Blessed Virgin. In the course of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, such paternosters came into extensive use, especially in the religious orders.

At certain times corresponding to the canonical hours, lay brothers and lay sisters were obliged to say a certain number of Our Fathers as an equivalent of the clerical obligation of the Divine Office. The military orders, likewise, notably the Knights of St. John, adopted the paternoster beads as a part of the equipment of lay members. In the fifteenth century, wearing the beads at one's girdle was a distinctive sign of membership in a religious confraternity or third order. If a certain worldliness in the use of beads as ornaments in those days had to be checked, as it was by various capitulary ordinances prohibiting monks and friars, for instance, from having beads of coral, crystal, amber, etc., and nuns from wearing beads around the neck, evidence is not wanting that paternosters were also openly carried as a sign of penance, especially by bands of pilgrims visiting the shrines, churches, and other holy places at Rome. Prayer beads were also prized as gifts of friendship. They were especially valued if they had been worn by a person of known sanctity or if they had touched the relics of any saint, in which cases they were often piously believed to be the instruments of miraculous power and healing virtue.

Beads were generally strung either on a straight thread, or cord, or so as to form a circlet, or loop. In recent times, chained beads have almost entirely taken the place of the corded ones. To facilitate the counting or to mark off certain divisions of devotion, sets of beads (usually decades) are separated from each other by a larger bead or sometimes by a medal or metal cross. The number of beads on a chaplet, or Rosary, depends on the number of prayers making up each particular form of devotion. A full Rosary consists of one hundred and fifty Hail Mary's, fifteen Our Fathers, and three or four beads corresponding to introductory vesicles and the "Glory be to the Father," etc. Such a "pair of beads" is generally worn by religious. Lay people commonly have beads representing a third part of the Rosary. The Brigittine beads number seven patters in honor of the sorrows and joys of the Blessed Virgin, and sixty-three aves to commemorate the years of her life. Another Crown of Our Lady, in use among the Franciscans, has seventy-two aves, based on another tradition of the Blessed Virgin's age. The devotion of the Crown of Our Lord consists of thirty-three patters in honor of the years of Our Lord on earth and five aves in honor of His sacred wounds. In the church Latin of the Middle Ages, many names were applied to prayer beads, such as devotions, signacula, oracula, precaria, patriloquium, serta, preculae, numeralia, computum, calculi, and others. An Old English form, bedes, or bedys, meant primarily prayers. From the end of the fifteenth century and in the beginning of the sixteenth, the name paternoster beads fell into disuse and was replaced by the names ave beads, Rosary, chaplet, or crown.

The use of beads among pagans is undoubtedly of greater antiquity than their Christian use; but there is no evidence to show that the latter is derived from the former, any more than there is to establish a relation between Christian devotions and pagan forms of prayer. One sect in India used a chaplet consisting generally of one hundred and eight beads made of the wood of the sacred Tulsi shrub, to tell the names of Vishnu; and another accomplished its invocations of Siva by means of a string of thirty-two or sixty-four berries of the Rudrksha tree. These or other species of seeds or berries were chosen as the material for these chaplets on account of some traditional association with the deities, as recorded in sacred legends. Some of the ascetics had their beads made of the teeth of dead bodies. Among some sects, especially the votaries of Vishnu, a string of beads is placed on the neck of children when, at the age of six or seven, they are about to be initiated and to be instructed in the use of the sacred formularies. Most Hindus continue to wear the beads both for ornament and for use at prayers.

Among the Buddhists, whose religion is of Brahminic origin, various prayer-formulas are said or repeated with the aid of beads made of wood, berries, coral, amber, or precious metals and stones. A string of beads cut from the bones of some holy lama is especially valued. The number of beads is usually one hundred and eight; but strings of thirty or forty are in use among the poorer classes. Buddhism in Burma, Tibet, China, and Japan alike employs a number of more complicated forms of devotion, but the frequently recurring conclusion, a form of salutation, is mostly the same, and contains the mystic word OM, supposed to have reference to the Buddhist trinity. It is not uncommon to find keys and trinkets attached to a Buddhist's prayer beads, and generally each string is provided with two little cords of special counters, ten in number, in the form of beads or metal disks. At the end of one of these cords is found a miniature thunderbolt; the other terminates in a tiny bell. With the aid of this device the devotee can count a hundred repetitions of his beads or 108 x 10 x 10 in all. Among the Japanese, especially elaborate systems of counting exist. One apparatus is described as capable of registering 36,736 prayers or repetitions.

Moslems use a string of ninety-nine (or one hundred) beads called the subha or tasbih, on which they recite the "beautiful" names or attributes of Allah. It is divided into three equal parts either by a bead of special shape or size, or by a tassel of gold or silk thread. The use of these Islamic beads appears to have been established as early as the ninth century independently of Buddhist influences. Some critics have thought the Mohammedan chaplet is kindred to a Jewish form of one hundred blessings. The beads in general use are said to be often made of the sacred clay of Mecca or Medina.

Among travelers' records of prayer beads is the famous instance, by Marco Polo, of the King of Malabar, who wore a fine silk thread strung with one hundred and four large pearls and rubies, on which he was wont to pray to his idols. Alexander Von Humboldt is also quoted as finding prayer beads, called Quipos, among the native Peruvians.

Sacred beads and bones (strung together) become a traditional tool for people seeking contact with holiness or spiritual congress with their God. Each newly made string turns into a personal tool and by its use in prayer or devotional chants become more scared. Some people use them as a badge of belonging or award, but regardless of the utilization they usually do their job and bring the human spirit closer to the power of their universe. That is all you can ask of a tool made by human hands.

Dr. Bob McIntosh is a faculty member at Olympic College, Shelton, WA, father of six children and ten grandchildren. He is (also) a designer and maker of sacred beads and other spiritual neck-ware. You may contact him via email at: bob.l.mcintosh@att.net.