Pabst and the lesser ritual of the rosary

The Cathars were a Gnostic sect emerging in France during the early 13th century, they held to a dualist cosmology that led to their belief that only the spiritual was good, and all material was inherently evil, as it was a construct of the demiurge. They believed in reincarnation and rejected the Real Presence of the Eucharist. They also believed that Christ was an alien being that emanated from the Monad, coming to earth to inspire gnosis and everything in the Gospels was allegorical.

While this is all fascinating, it was also heretical and so Dominic Guzman, a Spanish priest, led mission trips to France to combat this heresy and preach the Orthodox teachings of the church.

He was not successful.

Demoralized, he fled to the forests of France and prayed to God for help in fighting this Gnostic movement. He was visited by three angels in a ball of fire and then spoken to by the very Theotokos, who instructed him to preach her Psalter, which with the help of the already ancient prayer beads the rosary was developed by monastic order of Cistercians and the priest Dominic Guzman became a saint.   

The Cathars in a strange way led to both the founding of St. Dominc’s order, the Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition which would ultimately eradicate them.

There are Christian occultists that practice the LBRP to strengthen their connection with the Trinitarian God, and while I am not suggesting this is wrong or right, I can only admit to being a spiritual purist. I don’t like blending elements, just ask all my high school art teachers who saw my color work.

All blues looks the same! 

There are magical practitioners that can hold the tensions between different modalities better than I can, but I feel Christianity has more than enough opposing forces that require reconciliation and balancing. In any case, the LBRP done in addition to a Christian practice does not a non-Christian make. However, the Christian tradition is an entire system working to purify the self, make contact with God, and unite with Him. That is what a Christian practice is supposed to do: Theosis brought about through catharsis (purification) and Theoria (vision of God).

Again, your mileage may vary, but I see the LBRP as a part of a different system of magic and while it shares elements of a Christian framework, I believe the union with God within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is different than the union with God within Christian mysticism.

Now, it should be noted that Christ, the apostles, and St. Paul all in some way explain to followers of the Way that they are not ready for higher spiritual truths,

“brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations?” (1 Corinthians 3:1-3),

and again,

“We have much to say that is hard to explain, since you have become sluggish in hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness” (Hebrew 5:11-13).

The Bible is a subtle system, pointing at deeper spiritual truths, while being a sort of beginning for the path, wherein we are directed “like newborn infants, [to] long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—” (1 Peter 2:2). This is how we build a practice, longing for God, our beloved. The prayers that have been passed down from generations of Christian practitioners hold with them an energetic channel that provides us solid food, of which the New Testament only hints at, and even then, it is for those with eyes to see.

That is why ritual and prayer is so valuable to the Christian mystic, because it unites us to centuries of the same prayers being uttered by our spiritual ancestors, as such it connects with a horizontal eternity and in turn fixes us on course to a vertical union with God.

Christian mysticism can be summed up in the symbol of the cross.

The rosary is a most effective tool in the process of purification and spiritual warfare; the meditations on the Mysteries, the Hail Mary’s, Our Father’s, and Glory Be’s, visualizations, and utilizing breathing techniques mirror the practice of the LBRP. The rosary is mechanically similarly complex to the LBRP. Both develop the conscious mind’s discipline and concentration skills while at the same time the Mysteries are cultivating a relationship with our inner most self, where God meets us, completely.

(A lot more can be said about the Mysteries.)

I have seen magician’s talk about ritual magic compared to Divine Liturgy, too… To which I want to be clear: the LBRP wishes it could do what Liturgy does. It does not even come close, Divine Liturgy is the highest form of ceremonial magic, full stop.

Comparing Liturgy to the LBRP would be like comparing the speeds of a washing machine and a racecar. 

Through the practice of the rosary, we are walking with Mary, praying that “we may imitate what [the mysteries] contain, and obtain what they promise.” The fifteen promises of the rosary are like the benefits of the LBRP but formalized and given to St. Dominic. Listed below are a few of interest:

1. Those who faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.

2. I promise my special protection and the greatest graces to all those who shall recite the Rosary.

4. The recitation of the Rosary will cause virtue and good works to flourish. It will obtain for souls the abundant mercy of God. It will withdraw the hearts of men from the love of the world and its vanities, and will lift them to the desire of eternal things. Oh, that souls would sanctify themselves by this means.

8. Those who are faithful to recite the Rosary shall have, during their life and at their death, the light of God and the plenitude of His graces; at the moment of death they shall participate in the merits of the saints in paradise.

10. The faithful children of the Rosary shall merit a high degree of glory in heaven.

11. By the recitation of the Rosary you shall obtain all that you ask of me.

13. I have obtained from my Divine Son that all the advocates of the Rosary shall have for intercessors the entire celestial court during their life and at the hour of their death.

14. All who recite the Rosary are my beloved children and the brothers and sisters of my only Son, Jesus Christ.

The first promise is talking about being granted signs, whether explicit or subtle to those who pray the rosary, found on goodcatholic.com, the author explains:

“A signal grace may be a simple sign in daily life that answers a question made in prayer or points towards God’s will. For example, seeing a rose after finishing a novena to St. Therese of Lisieux could be considered a signal grace. Signal graces are often subtle or seemingly coincidental.”

The eleventh and thirteenth, though, are of great importance, because we see that by praying the rosary, we are both being given access to a synergistic relationship of manifestation between us and the mother of God and we are granted audience with a celestial court, intercessors, angels and archangels, the cloud of saintly witnesses. The LBRP is only hinting at this type of promise.

The second and eighth promises are more in line with the process of theosis, but they all inform one another in this way. Additionally, the second promise is crucial when pathworking the world of spirit, because as previously mentioned transformation is scary. Change is difficult and it hurts a lot of the time. The stripping away of our ability to rely on the self and the humbling aspects of spiritual practices that provided plenty of evidence that one need to rely on God feels like the world is turned upside down.

It is a promise that the mother of God is with us on our journey, whatever we may face we are not alone, our mother is with us, our brother Jesus Christ is with us, and the entire celestial court is with us and by God’s grace we will come out the other side, “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

On that note, I find the rosary a much more effective tool in what the spiritual seeker, magician, and mystic is trying to pursue. There is power in the LBRP, yes, of course. It rules. But for me, the rosary rules harder, because it is a process wherein we take part in the Mystery of the Incarnation, becoming purified and spiritually stronger through our relationship with God.

It is the conscious connecting with the subconscious, the conscious mind bringing awareness to what speaks to the subconscious: the rhythmic recitation and the visualizations transforming our inner worlds, “Deep calls to deep” (Psalm 42:7).

Not only that, but I am interested in speaking with older intelligences than those associated with the Golden Dawn. I want to commune with the Theotokos, with Christ, with my spiritual ancestors, the heavenly court, and from there allow myself to emerge from being with God.

Finally, I’m not trying to say that one is better than the other, what works for one practitioner may not work for another, however, to recap, the LBRP was a syncretic ritual constituting elements from Jewish mysticism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and Freemasonry… The rosary came to us from an angelic ball of fire and the words of the mother of God.

Which one sounds more magical to you?

Si comprehendis, non est Deus