Jean-Louis de Biasi - The Magical Use of Prayer Beads: Secret Meditations & Rituals for Your Qabalistic, Hermetic, Wiccan or Druid Practice

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

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The Magical Use of Prayer Beads: Secret Meditations & Rituals for Your Qabalistic, Hermetic, Wiccan or Druid Practice 2016 by Jean-Louis de Biasi.

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First e-book edition 2016

E-book ISBN: 9780738748535

Cover image: iStockphoto.com/19973242/burakpekakcan

Cover design: Lisa Novak

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Biasi, Jean-Louis de, author.

Title: The Magical Use of Prayer Beads : secret Meditations and Rituals for Your Qabalistic, Hermetic, Wiccan, or Druid Practice / Jean-Louis de Biasi.

Description: First Edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Publications, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000964 (print) | LCCN 2016002058 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738747293 | ISBN 9780738748535 ()

Subjects: LCSH: BeadsReligious aspects. | Prayer.

Classification: LCC BL619.B43 B53 2016 (print) | LCC BL619.B43 (ebook) | DDC 203/.7dc23

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Llewellyn Publications

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Manufactured in the United States of America

To my grandmother Monica de Biasi (Spadetto),
born in the city of Mosnigo, Italy, who unveiled
some of the Mysteries of the prayer beads for me.
(18981983)

Acknowledgments

This book is special to me on several levels. For a few years, I was lucky to have Donald Michael Kraig, a famous figure of the magick community, as editor. We exchanged hundreds of emails, talking about my writings. This book has been discussed with him, as have several forthcoming books you will progressively discover. Don gave his expertise to several chapters and commented on a few chapters before he died too young from cancer. It was his last work on a book in his life. I want to offer again my deep gratitude to himfor his advice, for the time spent to comment on and discuss the rituals and theory developed in my books. His invaluable understanding of spirituality and the occult world will always be remembered.

I would also like to offer my grateful thanks to Bruce MacLennan for his foreword. His knowledge and understanding of the Western tradition is well-known and I highly recommend the reading of his book The Wisdom of Hypatia .

I would also like to thank Larry Phillips and Brian Morrow for their expertise and help with various parts of this book.

Finally, I want to thank the initiates of the Aurum Solis working in several countries with ancient rituals. They had the chance to experiment with a few of these rituals and their feedback was (and still is) always useful.

Contents

: What Are Prayer Beads?

: Main Principles for a Successful Practice

: Consecration of Your Prayer Beads

: Qabalistic Tradition

: Hermetic Tradition

: Wiccan Tradition

: Druid Tradition

Foreword

We have made beads for a very long time. The oldest discovered so far are Middle Stone Age pierced shells that date back 82,000 years. They were transported more than 25 miles, some as far as 125 miles, inland from the North African shore where they were collected. These were no doubt precious possessions of the spiritual and temporal leaders of their communities, and are considered some of the earliest indicators of human symbolic activity.

What did our ancestors do with their beads? We cannot know, but we can make some reasonable guesses. No doubt they fingered them in moments of idleness, when worried, or when contemplating an issue, as people do now with their worry beads (Greek, komboloi ). The preciousness of the beads would reinforce the insights arising from a meditative state of mind and lead to the beads being understood as spiritual tools. And this is how prayer beads have been used, from Hindu malas in the eighth century BCE to prayer beads of all sorts in the present day .

Neoplatonic philosophy and Theurgy (which are the heart of the Western esoteric traditions) provide a framework for understanding how prayer beads work as spiritual instruments. According to Neoplatonic cosmology, as found in Plotinus, P roclus, Iamblichus, and others, the cosmos is an emanation of The Ineffable One, the ultimate principle of unity, through several levels of reality. One of these is the Cosmic Mind ( No s , in Greek), which is the realm of the changeless Platonic Ideas and the eternal gods. Below this is the Cosmic Soul, which animates the entire universe and unifies it as a single living organism. It governs the Cosmic Body, that is, the material world, which we experience through our senses. Therefore everything in the world exists in lineages or lines of descent from the gods and ultimately from The One. As a consequence, objects, properties, actions, and other things in the material world function as symbols (Grk., symbola ) and tokens (Grk., synthmata ) that can be used to draw down these divine powers. More correctly, as Iamblichus explains, when used in ritual they tune our souls so that our souls resonate with specific divine energies and draw us up to the gods.