“The greatest method of praying is to pray the Rosary.” ― St. Francis de Sales
“Pray the rosary every day.” - Our Lady of Fatima
“The rosary is not a spiritual practice to be perfected with effort. It is a devotion that reminds us of our connection to a Mother whose very body is our planet and our home.” ― Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose
The rosary is one of the world’s most well-known devotional prayers. Rosaries can be seen hanging from car mirrors, worn around necks, and sold at almost every religious bookshop.
It is a prayer beloved by young and old alike, the uneducated and the learned, by Catholics and even not a few non-Catholics. Countless miracles have been attributed to its recitation. Critics deride it as pointless repetition, medieval superstition, or worse, as some form of pagan idolatry. And yet, there is no denying its mysterious attraction and power to millions of human beings.
What is it about the rosary that captures so many hearts?
Many works have been written about the rosary in the traditional Catholic vein, so I will not repeat their themes here. I would, however, like it examine the esoteric depths of the rosary in the next few posts. For beneath its deceptively simple surface lie truths that approach the very depths of reality.
I will examine the rosary as a mystery of the Divine Feminine, the rosary as it relates to the numerology of the Kabbalah, and the rosary as a revelation of the universal spiritual path of purification, illumination, and union. In this first part, we will look at the rosary as a revelation of the Divine Feminine.
The Rose and the Divine Feminine
In Eastern traditions, the symbol for the divine image at the depths of every heart is the lotus flower. It is a symbol the heart chakra, which, as it opens, reveals the eternal divine presence at the center of each human being—the jewel in the lotus.
In the West, however, the flower that traditionally represents the blossoming of the heart is the rose. It is hard to say exactly when the rose first took on the symbolism of love, romance, passion, and the heart center, but it is everywhere recognized as the penultimate symbol of beauty and love. Perhaps human beings did not so much chose the rose to signify love as much as recognized it is a symbolic manifestation of transcendental Love.
Whatever the case, millions of roses are given each year to those we hold dear, to those we wish to express our heartfelt love.
Moreover, the rose has also always been connected to the feminine, and is frequently called the “queen of flowers.” In part because of its intoxicating scent and beautifully sensuous form, it has often been associated with eros and romance. In the ancient world, roses were highly treasured and associated with goddesses of love like Aphrodite. As but one example, in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the goddess Isis instructs the hero Lucius, to eat rose petals to restore his humanity after he was transformed into a donkey.
It is no accident, then, that the rose is the heart of the rosary, for the name “rosary” means a garland or circle of roses. Nor is it coincidental that the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on the Tepeyac hill with luscious Castilian Roses as her miraculous sign, or that at Lourdes in France, she appeared with yellow roses adorning her feet.
The Holy Mother, then, seems to have a special love for roses. Through the invocation of the name of Mary and Jesus, the prayers and meditations of the rosary weave a garland of roses for Our Lady, Mary-Sophia, the true icon of the divine Feminine.
This is not so much an intellectual fact as a heart-level mystery. For the rosary was never a devotion imposed by ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rather, it arose from the love of the faithful for their heavenly Mother. Inspired by the monks and nun who recite all 150 psalms, the faithful too wanted a prayer that expressed their fervent love, the sorrows and joys, 150 times. Thus, through the organic growth of centuries, the faithful began the recitation of 150 Ave Marias and 15 Pater Nosters.
What is the Divine Feminine?
The rosary is a prayer invoking the Divine Feminine. But what do we mean by the Divine Feminine? Perhaps it is worth clarifying.
In Genesis, God speaks to himself saying, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
It is interesting to note that God speaks in a self-referential way. Yet, when God speaks of making man (as in human beings, not biological males), he speaks of creating male and female, masculine and feminine. It is no great leap of logic, then, to conclude that the Divine is manifest not masculine only, but is both masculine and feminine.
Indeed, in the Kabbalistic framework, God in unmanifest form is Ein Sof—the boundless. In this form, there is neither male nor female. But in his manifest form, God polarizes into two forms or pillars, the masculine and the feminine, Boaz and Jachin. The masculine form of Divinity is Above, or Heaven, while the feminine form of Divinity is Below, or Earth.
Robert Powell, in his book, The Mystery of Sophia, summarizes this reality:
There [is] the Godhead, the original Primordial Being, who is neither masculine nor feminine—the Creator, who is the Primordial Being of all existence. At the moment when the creation begins, however, we find a polarization taking place within this Primordial Being of the Godhead, a polarization in to the part of the Godhead that goes into the Creation and that part of the Godhead which remains remains transcendental to the Creation. (location 1924 of 2350, Kindle edition)
The Divine Feminine, the Holy Trinosophia, is associated with the mystery of Creation, with created Being. The masculine Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is associated with transcendent Being.
It is no wonder, then, that one of the countless names for Our Lady is the Mother of All Creation, or that the title “Mother Earth” is so comfortable to the modern imagination. Sophia, the Mother, is mater, matter, the matrix from which all created being emerges. She is also present in all material forms—in the dark fecundity of earth, in the wetness of rain, in the surging greenness of grass, and in the wild fluctuations of water. She is viriditas, the greening, growing power of creation according to the great medieval mystic and doctor of the church, Saint Hildegard:
I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.
Separation and Reunion, Manifestation and Reintegration
But why this polarization? Why this separation into transcendent Godhead and immanent Godhead, masculine Holy Trinity and feminine Trinosophia?
The purpose and end of any separation is none other than reunion in love. At a biological level, we see that masculine and feminine bodies are phenomenologically oriented toward blissful and fruitful reunion.
Likewise, through the principal of analogy, we can see the same is true between the masculine and feminine Godhead. The transcendent Father, Son, and Holy Spirit long for reunion with the Mother, Daughter, and Holy Soul hidden in the heart of Creation. And Saint Paul says that creation likewise longs for reunion with God, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). One day this longed for reunion will occur. This is the marriage of Heaven and Earth, the union of Above and Below, seen in St. John’s visions in the book of Revelation.
The first fruits of this marriage, this reunion, are none other that Jesus Christ and Mary Sophia. For Jesus Christ is the personification of humanized divinity, or the transcendent Godhead united once and for all to creation. These are the mysteries of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
And Mary Sophia is the personification of divinized humanity, or the immanent Godhead taken up into heaven and united to the Godhead. These are the mysteries of the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Coronation.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz, articulates the purpose of the separation and reunion of the Divine and Creation:
Everywhere in this world we notice action, and the reaction which is equal but contrary to it; departure and return; going away and coming back; separation and reunion. The separation always looks foreword to union, which is creative. All this is simply an image of the Blessed Trinity in the activity of creatures.
Union means love, creative love. Divine activity, outside the Trinity itself, follows the same pattern. First, God creates the universe; that is something like a separation. Creatures, by following the natural law implanted in them by God, reach their perfection, become like him, and go back to him. Intelligent creatures love him in the conscious manner; through this love they unite themselves more and more closely with him, and so find their way back to him.
The creature most completely filled with this love, filled with God himself, was the Immaculata, who never contracted the slightest stain of sin, who never departed in the least from God’s will. United to the Holy Spirit as her spouse, she is one with God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be predicated of any other creature. (Who Then Are You, O Immaculate Conception?)
The Prayer of Reunion
The Rosary is the prayer of reintegration. It is the expression of the longing of Creation for reunion with the Divine. Through the 15 decades, which meditate on 15 mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ and Mary Sophia, one travels the road of reintegration. Through the eyes of meditation, one witnesses Divinity united to Creation in Jesus Christ, and Creation is united to Divinity in the person of Mary Sophia. These are the mysteries of the rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious.
Above all, in the rosary, one experiences and takes into oneself the love of the Father and the Mother, divine paternal and maternal love. As our dear friend Valentin Tomberg notes,
…it is so with the rosary prayer, where appeal to the two aspects of divine parental love in the prayer addressed to the Father and the Mother is made during meditation on the mysteries of the Joy, Suffering and Glory of the Blessed Virgin. The rosary prayer is—in any case of the Hermeticist—again a masterpiece of simplicity, containing and revealing things of inexhaustible profundity…a masterpiece of the Holy Spirit! (Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 551, Kindle Edition)
In the next part of this series, we will look at the numerological significance of the numbers 5 and 10 and their relationship to the rosary.
Beautiful and deep reflections on the inner esoteric meaning that can be found in the rosary, and Mary-Sophia. I’m looking forward to the next installment in this series.
I don’t know if you were planning an essay about the specifics of the symbol of the rose, but the rose is both the more Christian symbol as well as the most cosmically/naturally true version of the symbol.
The red of the rose as love, sure yes, but the thorns of the rose are also an important part of the symbol. The crucifix (the cross with the Corpus on it, not just the empty t shape) is not a symbol of death, but a symbol of love, in fact it is the greatest symbol of love of all time. True love is inherently sacrificial, true love is a crucifixion, and we are called to take up our cross and follow Him because we are called to love, and that’s what love is.
Our Queen stood atop Golgotha watching her baby be tortured to death, can we call that anything other than “Her heart was crucified alongside her Son”? Consider the first time she held Our Lord, her baby, and the last time she held Our Lord, her baby. Swaddling her baby, laying him to rest in that stone box in the cave (mangers were made of stone and looked like sarcophagi, the ancient traditions say Christ was born in a cave, like where you put tombs).
Love requires one to open their heart to another, but was is an open heart other than a wound? Love MUST hurt.
The thorns of the rose and the Crucifix are both the answer to the Book of Job, the answer to the “problem of evil” (problem of suffering). The reason our world has not seen global peace like so many dream is due to the simple fact that getting over our egos, over ourselves, and humbling ourselves before The Lord and each other is just as painful as all the war and suffering we inflict on ourselves, but that pain is on the TV, getting over your ego is a personal pain. It’s grasping the stem of the rose with all its thorns.
Every rose MUST have its thorns.