Use of Beads at Prayers

Beads variously strung together, according to the kind, 
order, and number of prayers in certain forms of 
devotion, are in common use among Catholics as an 
expedient to ensure a right count of the parts 
occurring in more or less frequent repetition. Made of 
materials ranging from common wood or natural berries 
to costly metals a precious stones, they may be 
blessed, as they are in most cases, with prayer and 
holy water, thereby becoming sacramentals. In this 
character they are prescribed by the rules of most 
religious orders, both of men and women, to be kept for 
personal use or to be worn as part of the religious 
garb. They are now mostly found in the form of the 
Dominican Rosary, or Marian Psalter (see ROSARY); but 
Catholics are also familiar with the Brigittine beads, 
the Dolour beads, the Immaculate Conception beads, the 
Crown of Our Saviour, 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 constituent 
prayers.

Rationalistic criticism generally ascribes an Oriental 
origin to prayer beads; but man's natural tendency to 
iteration, especially of prayers, and the spirit and 
training of the early Christians 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 by Christians 
show, in this as in other things, a natural growth and 
development. 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 wont to say daily. In the 
eighth century the penitentials, or rule books 
pertaining to penitents, prescribed various penances of 
twenty, fifty, or more, paters. 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 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 processionally 
visiting the shrines, churches, and other holy places 
at Rome. From their purpose, too, it is natural that 
prayer beads were 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. 
At the present time chained beads have almost entirely 
taken the place of the corded ones. To facilitate the 
counting or to mark off certain divisions of a 
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 Marys, fifteen 
Our Fathers, and three or four beads corresponding to 
introductory versicles 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 paters in honour 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 paters in honour of the years 
of Our Lord on earth and five aves in honour of His 
sacred wounds. In the church Latin of the Middle Ages, 
many names were applied to prayer beads as: devotiones, 
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 name ave 
beads and 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 
Rudr=E2ksha 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 or less 
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 Buddhistic 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 108x10x10 formulas in all. 
Among the Japanese, especially elaborate systems of 
counting exist. One apparatus is described as capable 
of registering 36,736 prayers or repetitions.

The 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 or 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 Buddhistic 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 travellers; 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.

JOHN R. VOLE Transcribed by Janet Grayson

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