10/17/2024
Is the Hail Mary a prayer, a mantra...or a spell?
The other night in the midst of a really scary family medical crisis, after a day of doctor's phone calls and frantic internet research, and testing and more testing, and more internet research....I found myself memorizing this crazy old prayer to St. Rita, patroness of the hopeless and the impossible. A friend I trust very much had sent it to me. I had a lot of resistance (more on that later) but no small part was how insanely hard a piece of writing it was to memorize. It was filled with words and sentence constructions that confounded my brain. "What? You want a spell to be easy?" said Clark. "These are words that have assumed their own magic because of all the people who have uttered them through the centuries...."
Abracadabra. Wingardia Leviosa. Hail Mary Full of Grace.
Those last words have been whispered by my ancestral mothers for...well, millennia...in France, in Ireland, In Poland, in Germany, in England....my ancestral mothers infused those words with their faith, their desperation, and their confidence. They muttered them together around candlelight and death beds. They saw children into the world with those words--and they ushered out their loved ones with those words.
I ushered out my parents with those words, unbelievers that they were, until the end. Pray for me, were my mother's last words to me, my mother the pagan atheist. Pray for me.
The Hail Mary is one of the most well known mantras in the world. it is a string of syllables that connects us direcly to our ancestral mothers. Hidden within its words are old spells and old magic and old wisdom (so old) those mothers wove into it, under the beady eyes of church fathers who did not want them to worship their Great Mother anymore.
We'll see about that, they must have thought.
The Hail Mary is a three-part prayer that pays tribute to the Triple Goddess.
Like all mantras it begins with an invocation to the deitiy. Hail, Full of Grace the Lord is with thee. The Lady and her Lord, the earth and her sunlight, the divine union that gives birth to life. Hail our ancestral Mother and her Lord. (Although this is her prayer...don't you forget that.) These are the words that the angel Gabriel speaks to Mary in the Gospel of Luke. He says these words to a MAIDEN, all powerful and capable like the virgins Diana and Athena, of bringing forth LIFE from within herself.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. These words are Elizabeth's, another woman miraculoursly pregnant to her cousin Mary, also carrying LIFE within her. They too come from Luke. But read ahead the words of these two MOTHERS and they speak of revolution and social justice and change together. Two women, one old and one young, united in their power to change the world. (The word "Jesus" after fruit of thy womb is added later to the prayer, some people leave it out I add the world "LIFE.")
Now the last part of this mantra/spell/prayer comes from oral tradition. It wasn't written down anywhere...it came from the hearts and mouths of women who knew what they were doing with this prayer. Holy Mary, Mother of God (how's that for upeneding God's power?) pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Whew. She is now the Great Mother, biggger than the universe, older than god....and the Death CRONE who will guide us out of this world and into the next. Our ancestral mothers knew who she was and completed the tri-part construction. This is the true Trinity and they hid it in plain site of a Church that would murder them if they knew what they were saying.
We can make up spells. We can say words we don't understand. And we can unite our voices with the voices of ancestral mothers and grandmothers and seek the true power of these ancient words.
They aren't about aligning ourselves with piety and doctrine (see Elizabeth and Mary and their discussion), they are about invoking the ancient power of the Triple Goddess and the devotion of our mothers and grandmothers to her.
Some new made-up prayers become very powerful and are said out of the blue by millions of people (see the Serenity prayer) but don't mistrust the old words. Don't mistrust the little old women holding their beads in the back of churches. Those old women knew about prayer. Their grandmothers had passed down their beads to them like a handful of magic seeds. The Hail Mary may be much older and much more magic than we know.
Perdita Finn is the co-author with her husband Clark Strand of Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.
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