The rosary: a Catholic prayer favored by grandmothers, or a subversive "stowaway" containing the secret Sacred Feminine wisdom of our pre-Christian ancestors? As with most things related to the Great Mother, the answer is both. On this episode, Clark Strand and Perdita Finn, co-authors of the new book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary, talk with me about apparitions, prayers to the Goddess hiding in plain sight, and how we can truly know if the love and presence of the Mother are real (here's a hint: we know her because we can feel her).
The Way of the Rose : The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary, is available via Amazon and other online retailers, or even better, your favorite local indie bookstore. I loved this book so much that I bought extra copies to give to people I know!
You can learn more about Clark and Perdita and the Way of the Rose community at their website, and you can also join their thriving community on Facebook.
Check out a few images of goddess figurines discovered from the Paleolithic era (why they're referred to as "Venus" figurines is an excellent topic warranting further discussion - more to come on this subject):
Also, here's a wonderful description from Clark describing the symbol for Venus and the ankh hiding in plain view in the shape of the traditional rosary.
Liz: [00:00:41] What do you know about the rosary? If you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have said not much, I might have also said something like this. Well, I know it's some kind of a Catholic prayer, but I'm not Catholic, and because I'm interested in understanding the nature of the sacred feminine, which really doesn't show up in Catholicism or in Christianity, I don't really need to know anything more about this rosary prayer. Well, I am so glad that I'm hosting the show today instead of a year ago because I've learned so much about the hidden sacred feminine that's present in Christianity, and I've learned so much about the Rosary and its origins as an ancient prayer to the great mother. And I can credit a lot of my education to my two guest on today's episode. You know, talking about the sacred feminine in conjunction with established religious traditions feels a little tricky. And in some cases, it even feels counterintuitive because lots of times she's either treated as a secondary figure in these traditions or even worse, as if she doesn't exist at all. But what I've been learning is I've traveled on this path of seeking her wisdom over the last several years. Is this she is everywhere. Even in spiritual traditions that have labeled her as lesser or ignored her contributions or even worse, have labeled her as evil. She's still there. In some cases, she's gone underground, but she's never been fully erased. As our guest will describe today. I hope you enjoy listening to today's episode as much as I enjoyed having this conversation. And hey, if you love this show, do me a favor. Go ahead and subscribe. Give us a five star review or tell all your friends about it. Even better, you can do all three. Thanks and enjoy the show.
Liz: [00:02:58] Hey, everybody, and welcome to the show. I am so excited to have here with me today. Clark Strand and Perdita, Finn Clark and Perdita are the authors of The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary, which is a new book that explores the incredible pre-Christian origins of the rosary. So while most people would think of this as a Catholic prayer, Clark and Perdita describe themselves, respectively as a former Zen Buddhist monk and a passionate feminist. So they may seem like the least likely advocates for a prayer so deeply identified with Catholicism. But they believe the rosary contained secret wisdom that's been passed down generation after generation from a time when our ancestral peoples were intimately connected with the spiritual presence of a great mother and with the rhythms of the Earth herself. Clark and Perdita are also the co-founders of the Way of the Rose and International Fellowship of Rosary friends who are dedicated to the Earth and to the lady, as they say by any name we wish to call her. And while not a formal organization, the group's motto is No priests, no property. Members of this fellowship gather in cities around the country and on Facebook. In a robust group that includes more than 4000 members. Clark and Perdita are also partners in life, and while this is the first book they have officially authored together, they each have published several books and articles prior to this, including from Clark, the book Waking Up to the Dark, which we may end up discussing today. And From Perdita, several children's books, including the My Little Pony series Much to My Children's Delight. Welcome, I'm so glad to have Speaker3: you here today.
Perdita: [00:04:45] Thanks, Liz. This feels really special to be here.
Liz: [00:04:48] Wonderful. Well, so I thought, you know, the best place to begin is to start at the at the beginning. And I think one of the big questions that people may have is how do the two people who have described themselves as a Buddhist monk and x Buddhist monk and a passionate feminist? How do you end up praying the rosary and not only praying the rosary, but writing a book about the importance of it?
Perdita: [00:05:17] Well, I think one of the things that's really interesting is that Clark and I had gone through a lot of spiritual practices, but a question that had become very urgent for us with the birth of our children way back in the nineties was what's happening to the Earth? Is there any adequate spiritual response to climate change? And so we were really asking that question for a long time, at the same time I was personally becoming quite disaffected by institutional religion. I've been involved in the Zen community. I realized that mothers were really sidelined, that the the whole program privileged people with disposable time and income who wanted to be away from their children. And I wanted to be with my kids. I experienced my kids as my spiritual practice. I didn't need to get away from them to have a spiritual experience. And I had no idea. What would always happened with me is I'd end up in a room taking care of everybody else's kids. So that happened to me at the Zen Monastery. Then it happened to me at the Episcopal Church. And then so finally, I decided I'm just going to be with my kids.And for reasons I honestly could not explain, I began, even though I was raised Catholic, praying the rosary. And I prayed it because it was a great prayer to stay in bed with my kids and I needed a mom. My mother had died. I had two small children, a lot of worries, and I honestly just like the feeling of holding on to it. I'd write about a lot in the book about kind of the bigger context for that, but I had no way to explain what I was doing. And I'm not even sure how much I understood what I was doing. I think I was a very busy, harried young mother, and I was mostly reaching out for something to grab on to. It didn't have a lot of ideology behind it, and I figured I would never have a way of explaining it, and I'd never have a way of doing this with other people. And now I have, as you said, thousands of friends doing this with me all over the world. But the first friend I had to do it with was Clark, and Clark's journey to the rosary is a little more dramatic than my own and it it broke through my own experience and, you know, really changed our family and changed everything, turned our whole reality inside out.
Clark: [00:07:31] Well, I taught Perdita the Rosary Lake back in the nineties. I had taught it to myself after a trip to Taos, New Mexico, where I saw, you know, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe everywhere I went and I came back from that trip, it was a teaching trip. I was teaching something I called meditation without gurus, which meant that there's a lot of work and didn't pay very well because there are no gurus, not even me, right? So I would travel around a lot to teach people this simple meditation techniques for the DIY approach to spiritual community. And anyway, I came back from that trip and I was fascinated with with the rosary, which I had, you know, seen in Taos. Rosaries were everywhere. Images of our lady were everywhere. So I taught it to myself and did it for all about maybe a couple of months. And I was amazed at how easy it was to pick up, like the average eight year old could learn it in an afternoon with no assistance, right? It was so simple. Was just saying a prayer on every beat like, no, you know, special posture, no technique, you know, to speak of, you know, no control, breathing, nothing like that. Just very, very simple. And yet it really worked. I found myself able to get into kind of a meditative state that previously I'd only been able to access by meditating four hours a day. So I was a little suspicious of that. I thought this must be like some kind of spiritual placebo or something. So. And you know, I had no intention of becoming Catholic, right? So it sort of didn't seem to go anywhere. So I abandoned it after a couple of months. And then on a particularly harrowing car trip, we were coming down a really steep road, gets a little nervous around heights and things like that, she said I need something, and she said, Teach me the rosary. I was so shocked. So I did. She proceeded to say the rosary faithfully for like 12 years after I gave it up.
Clark: [00:09:34] One of the things that was interesting for me is coming out of a zen tradition. I really treated the words of these prayers like koans. You know, those are paradoxical riddles that you kind of use to unlock the reality and the koan. I would say my koan for 12 years was mother of God. Which, you know, what is this what? What is this thing that's bigger than God, but more intimate than God simultaneously? You know, mother God, it feels impossibly abstract. Mother feels so personal and concrete, and I have to say I treated it as a koan, but the divine feminine was an idea. Still, for me, that mother of God was an abstract idea to me. It was something very stuck in my head until June 16th, 2011.
Clark: [00:10:30] Well, like I said, I didn't say the rosary for years. And in fact, on June 15th, 2011, I didn't have. I think I had one book in my vast spiritual library that one could characterize as being about the divine feminine. I didn't even know it was about the divine feminine, even though I'd read it twice: the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Any of your listeners who read that book is like the mother is there on every page. Somehow, I managed to read it and think that she was kind of like, I don't know, maybe a kind of an interest of Ramakrishna. Like, maybe oh yeah, he said a few prayers to the mother. He's like saying prayers to the mother, constantly talking about her every page. So that went right over my head. I just didn't have the muscles for it, right? I've been raised Protestant down south. You know, I didn't have any, you know, there was no Virgin Mary. I mean, the Virgin Mary and the churches I went to was a little more than a Galilean housewife. I just happened to birth God, right? That's why she was the mother of God, because she was the mother of Jesus. So, you know, I really was unprepared for this. I wasn't primed for it.
Clark: [00:11:37] Nothing. And then I got up to go on my usual nightly walk. You alluded to the book Waking Up to the Dark that I wrote about my habit of getting up for my entire lifetime and wandering around in the dark in the middle of the night. Well, I got up for my nightly walk. I had my hand on the doorknob and I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice and male voice said into my ear, Don't go out tonight. Remain inside. Be quiet and very, very still. And as people who read our book, The Way of the Rose will discover, I'd heard that voice once before, only once many years earlier, and the advice it gave me was very good. So I said, All right, I'll do that. So I got on the couch and I got very still. I mean, I've been a zen Buddhist monk and you had to do that part. So I got very still, and after about 45 minutes, I felt the presence of someone there in the room or right beside me. So I opened my eyes and there before me were two reed stalks blowing, moving as if an invisible breeze. And I knew something was up because the house had vanished. It was like I was in the middle of a marsh and then the reeds stalks vanished.
Clark: [00:12:49] And then their place was the face of a young girl about 17 years old. She had close cropped auburn hair, hazel eyes, freckles around her nose, and she had an x of black electrical tape over her mouth. And her eyes were very urgent and pleading, and I had no idea who she was. I'd never experienced anything like this before. My training as a zen monk had taught me to regard it as illusion. But her eyes were so urgent and so powerful. I, some part of me, knew that that she was realer than anything I'd ever seen before. So I removed the tape from her lips. She gasped. I started to ask the obvious question, Who are you? But she shook her head. Nothing could be said that night. After a while, the zen monk part of my brain sort of won out and I went back to meditating. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, she was gone. But the next morning I turned the house upside down, looking for that x of black electrical tape, but couldn't find it anywhere. The experience had been so overwhelmingly real I was convinced I would find it, and I didn't. So after that, I would hear her speak from time to time, and I saw her again now and then.
Clark: [00:14:04] About ten weeks passed and we were vacationing on Cape Cod. And then one night she woke me with the words, If you rise to save the rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer. I just happened to have bought a rosary on impulse at the flea market. You know why I couldn't tell you the day before, so I had a rosary, so I got up and I said it. Next morning, I woke up and I thought, Huh, well, I'm not Catholic, but I'm also not stupid. There's only one figure, right, that I've ever heard of who invites you to pray the rosary and makes promises based on, you know, whether or not you accept the invitation. So I was worried. I woke up. I thought, Oh my God, now I'm going to have to tell Perdita, we've got to become Catholic, right? Been there, done that. She'll tell you so. So, but apparently not. She didn't, you know, require that of us. What she wanted was for us to pray the rosary, for our heart's desire and to spread that devotion to other people, whether they were Catholic or not, religious or not. Virtually everyone. Wow. That's how it started. I have so it's amazing.
Liz: [00:15:18] So many questions, so many questions. So you're very clear in how you recount this story. And yet I have to think that there are some listeners here who like me have have probably most of us have never experienced anything like this before. And I'm wondering if your logical brain just completely kicks in when you have a vision like this, it's spinning with, who is this, and wanting to try and and make meaning to it?
Perdita: [00:15:48] Well, that was me. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm just, you know. Clarke and I had been married for 20 years when this happened, and, you know, we live a very sort of practical, ordinary life as writers and parents, and this was very outside our frame of reference. And I think my first response was kind of like Cher and Moonstruck. You know, I wanted to slap Clark, Snap out of it. What are you talking about? And I mean, in the beginning, I said, you know. Who is she? Who is this? Is it a dead person? You have visions, you know what's going on? I have to say I was an agnostic in the beginning, he would tell me this was going on and honestly, we had a very sick child. We write about this in the book. I felt like I didn't have time for it. And. I didn't see anything, but what began to happen is the lady herself began to speak and I've worked with Clarke for 20 years as his editor. I know how he writes, I know how he composes. I know what he says. I know his vocabulary, his syntax, diction. This was like nothing I'd ever heard. And the messages that the lady had to share were what convinced me and they didn't just convince me that Clark was seeing someone. They convinced me that this person I'd been praying to for 12 years was real. And that's a real radical experience that this wasn't an idea. This wasn't Gaia who is the archetypal abstraction of the Earth. This was, there's a mother who loves you and holds you from the moment you're born. The moment after you die. And she's waiting and ready to answer your prayers. So that's a really, in my experience of that, was again, very concrete. We'd lost our jobs just as has happened. We had no money. We were freelance writers who lost our main client during the financial crisis. We had nothing. We were in danger of losing our house. We had a child with a mysterious illness no doctor could diagnose. We were stooped, we were exhausted and we began to ask for help. We had to ask for help and we had nowhere else to turn. And she began answering our prayers. Oh, wow. So it was she guided us. It was what she had to say. And it was what she had to offer. Yeah. And she said, again and again, if you want to know I'm there, ask me for something and I'll start showing up.
Liz: [00:18:29] Yeah, I think this is such an important distinction. Before I started this podcast, I had put out the question to my community, are there questions that you'd like to see explored here? And someone responded with, You know, my experience of... She used the language the divine feminine. I use the sacred feminine. And I do want to talk about who we're talking about it and whether we're talking about the same thing here. I think we are. But what she had said is that these experiences that she had had were very personal and they're not really reflected back in the mainstream, and so her constant question is she's questioning her sanity. How do I know that this is real?
Clark: [00:19:13] Yeah, yeah. You know, we at our book launch in New York City, somebody in the audience. When it came time for the Q&A, everybody asked my least favorite question about the operation. They said, basically, they set it up like, isn't it special to have an apparition of the Virgin Mary? You must be highly favored of our lady.
Liz: [00:19:39] So, so glad I did not say that. Yeah.
Clark: [00:19:43] What do you even say to that? I don't have any qualifications.
Perdita: [00:19:46] Well, I say that in my daughter says, Well, if Clark can be converted to the divine feminine, anyone can.
Clark: [00:19:54] So anyway, so I, you know, I was sort of stuck. I mean, where do you even say in response to something like that? So. But on a hunch, I looked around the room and on a hunch, I know it was kind of a risk at the moment because it could have backfired. But I just had a sense. And so I said, How many of you here in this room tonight are here because you have had an apparition or elocution or an intervention, or some way in which the lady manifested her presence and convinced you beyond any shadow of a doubt that she was real. And she was there for you. And over half the hands in the room went up. And I'm pretty sure that another at least 25 percent of the people were just a little too shy in a public setting like that, right?
Perdita: [00:20:47] Or maybe you you framed it specifically "the lady" and in their processing in their mind, voice showed up differently. I don'tKnow if that was right.
Clark: [00:20:55] Maybe it was by another name or, you know, another way of thinking about her another cultural context? Yeah, but I just had a feeling and it was true. And since then, every place we've gone around the country, yeah, people are just coming out and they tell us the most extraordinary stories.
Perdita: [00:21:21] Well, I mean, one of the things is to do we expect her to show up. Are we looking for her? You know, one of the things I realized when she began to show up was that she'd always been showing up in my life. And that's one of the really profound experiences when you look back on your life and you go, Oh, she was there then and then and there, she's always been there and and it's, you know, it's sort of like when you you learn a new word, suddenly you hear it everywhere and you realize, oh, everyone uses that word. And that's a little bit what it's like. But you know, you talked about who is she and and that that's a big question. And you know, I go back to that mother of God koan. She has a lot of different names. I think we all have special names for our mother. My mother was British, I called her mummy. But, you know, but nobody, none of my friends called their moms, mummy. Mm hmm. But but that word was my word. And. And we all have a special word for our mother and almost all those words for the divine feminine go back to some variation on the word mother. Mama Mary, Amma, Miriam they're all versions of it. But there are a lot of different names, and there are a lot of different ways she appears to us and I think that there used to be a lot of diversity in our experience of her, if you look at images of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, they're really diverse.
Perdita: [00:23:00] These artists were seeing her in lots of different ways. I don't think of her as Mary because Mary is a word with the Catholic Church of this kind and I call them the walium virgins. You know, their eyes are downcast, there are little girls getting with the program and their veils. And I'm not so much for her. And yet I do think it was the medieval lady, which is what she was often called. But I hear words and I love them. You know, there's a Greek woman who showed up and said the old women in her village called her Piniella. The Earth is all oh, beautiful. And yeah, there was a woman from Trinidad who showed up to a workshop we had recently who talked about her encounters meeting Mumma, mother the Earth. And how she had done a vision quest to meet her and had discovered her covered in mud, a being of mud with just eyes coming through the mud. And once she said she had met her, she said her whole life changed. How does she show up and some people see her in the trees? Some people see her in the mountains. Some people see her with certain names and certain images. She has a lot of variety, as much variety as here.
Liz: [00:24:24] Yeah, yeah. And you know, you're making me think, too, that if we you know one way that we would know she is real if we actually talked about these experiences that so many of us have so often
Clark: [00:24:35] That's the reason why we have these groups. People get together and they compare notes.
Liz: [00:24:41] Yeah. I also want to go back to this idea of her being real, because this to me is a really important distinction. And I think it's something that some of us have trouble wrapping our heads around. Especially, you know, I can speak to my own upbringing in a Protestant Christian household where God and even Jesus, to a certain extent, they're very abstract. They are something that we we can't really touch, you know, they are, they're an idea. And it seems like from your book and both what you're saying here is that that is not that is not this lady at all. Quite the opposite.
Clark: [00:25:23] You know, one I think one of the, you know, most universal ways in which people perceive her is through touch. People will tell you like, we had a friend years ago who suffered a nearly fatal fall at the last possible moment, she felt somebody shoved her, you know, like one foot to the left so that the place she fell was into the water instead of onto the stone. She would surely have died. But as it was, she fell 30 feet into the water, just narrowly missing these stones. And she swore that that she felt a hand shove her at the last possible moment. And she later insisted that it was the hand of our lady. People will feel her touch. People will feel her presence. People will smell like sometimes, you know, a bouquet of roses in the middle of winter outside where they could not possibly be any roses. So there's this very sensual way in which she makes her presence known. It's really almost visceral. I will tell you that for me, there was really no moment after pulling the tape off of her lips, and I could actually feel the tape, you know, pulling from her skin. And there was really no going back after that. You know, I guess if I hadn't removed the tape, if I just looked at her, she could have remained kind of a vision or something like that. But that's sort of the moment for me when I thought, you know, no, there's no way back from this. I can feel it. I can feel that she was real, realer than me even.
Perdita: [00:26:59] But I think also, you know, religions around the world have taught us that our bodies are bad. Yeah. And particularly women's bodies are bad, right? Dirty. You know, blood is bad or menstrual blood is dirty. We need to go away. You know, we need to rise above our sexual desire, particularly if you're a woman.
Liz: [00:27:22] And isn't that the whole idea of original sin? We are born from like, you know, that whole process of coming through a woman's body makes you dirty.
Perdita: [00:27:30] Exactly. And I think that if we look at that and we look at the illness that that's created in the world it's created this kind of fantasy that our job is somehow to get out of our bodies and into our heads and away from the Earth and into this abstracted heaven. And that's allowed us to destroy the Earth and brutalize women around the world. And what happens when our bodies become holy again? What happens when the processes of our bodies are holy again, when our blood is holy, when even our excrement is holy, excrement creates dirt, you know, dirt where things grow and and all of this dirtiness messiness, that woman, that's pure mud. That's where life comes from. Right? And so to be back to have the lady be real is to let the Earth be real, to let ourselves be real. We say in the book, You know, an ocean isn't an algorithm. This kind of way we live. I, I often say to people, I don't want to read these spiritual books that don't have any concrete nouns. Right? Right there, all this, this disembodied language that gets people out of the bodies and the Earth.
Clark: [00:28:58] All right, you've also said you don't want to be the Dalai Lama. You want to be your grandmother. You're exactly the sort of spirit abstracted spiritual ideal. You want to be real and grounded and connected. Right?
Perdita: [00:29:11] Yeah. I mean, look at old women. We, you know, we've dismissed the spiritual wisdom of ordinary old women. I mean, they're the most devalued people in our culture. These are the people who've born babies who fed people with no money, who who eased the dying, cared for the sick, who know how to grow things. Ok, this is we have to refine. We have to really shift our emphasis on who. On who matters what?
Liz: [00:29:43] One thing that I hear you touching on, too, and I think is very clear, both in the Way of the Rose but also Clarke in your first book, Waking Up to the Dark is this connection between our lady and the Earth itself, and I wonder if you could speak to that because on the one hand, it feels like we are talking about the same thing. And on the other hand, it feels like there is a bit of a distinction there.
Clark: [00:30:09] Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, if you if you go to cultures all around the world and you go to archaeological digs, you know where they're uncovering artifacts and, you know, relics from the Upper Paleolithic like anywhere from like thirty thirty five thousand years ago through about maybe ten or twelve thousand years ago. Every place you go on the planet, they're going to be digging up the same figurines. They'll all be female, they'll all be women's bodies. Now, they'll be greatly varied and shape. Some will be like, Willendorf Venuses and others will be, you know, a little more slender and birdlike. But they're all female, right? They're all goddesses.
Liz: [00:30:54] And I have some of those little figurines. I'll put some pictures up with the show notes, so people could see them. Yeah, they're pretty remarkable.
Clark: [00:31:02] Yeah, they can just go on and, you know, Google images and just search Paleolithic goddess figurines and they'll see there's an infinite variety of them. So there are hundreds of these. No male figures have been found right. They're all female. And they're all fairly small. They're like the first rosaries, really, you know, like a one bead rosary. It's the mother you're holding. They're meant to be held, not to be put on an altar, and people took great care in fashioning them. They're very lovingly created these things. This was the spirituality of the Upper Paleolithic. This was who we worshipped, this was who we turned to for tens of thousands of years of our history. People talk now about sustainability and finding a sustainable way to live well. These people live sustainably in harmony with the Earth because for them, their mother was the Earth, right? This little, these little statues just gave them a way of holding the Earth that held them in their own hands. So it's a lot like a rosary. It gave them a way to connect to the mother in a very tactile, intimate sort of way. But they were aware that their mother was all around them. So, you know, along about the time of agriculture, people began feeding themselves instead of trusting their mother to feed them right. They began protecting themselves instead of trusting their mother to protect them. They began sustaining themselves instead of allowing themselves to be sustained on the planet. So it's no wonder that everything became gradually step by step, completely unsustainable until we've gotten to where we are now. But the mother and the relationship to the mother as Earth was the religion, if you want to call it, that is, even before religion is more primal than that for tens of thousands of years. This was what our ancestors believed, it's what what they practice, it's who they thought was real.
Liz: [00:33:02] Yeah. One thing that I thought of, as you were saying that to you and my gut on why so many of these sculptures and even those carvings outside of caves that you see in the Dordogne region of France, they don't have feet. And I have always wondered if that was representative of that deep connection with the Earth herself as well. Like that we almost imagined. Imagine those roots.
Perdita: [00:33:30] They're also not meant to be stood up. They're meant to be held. Yeah. And I think that's the really big thing. They're meant to be the round spherical objects that almost all of them would fit in your hand. Yeah, they're all meant to fit in the palm of your hand. They're not big statues for display. They're holdable. And I think it was a way of knowing holding the mother was a way of knowing she was holding you.
Clark: [00:33:56] They were talismanic as well. They were magical. You know, they were amulets as well. I think that they evoked in people the sense that their mother was present, that she would intervene on their behalf. That to call her name was to activate her, her presence and her care and her intervention right to to pray for her blessings. I mean, the first mantras were probably just simply her name uttered as they held these little statues. That's the reason why we say these are the first rosaries. We don't have those prayers. Now, you know, they've been, you know, lost in the, you know, infinite permutations of language from our ancestors. But clearly they existed.They had names for them. They had names for them just as they had names for their mothers.
Liz: [00:34:46] And I was going to say, and we know to write from so many languages that the root Ma means, like there's some version of the word MA. You know, it gets formed into all different words for mother across all different kinds of languages. So I could imagine that very first mantra being simply Ma or some version of MA.
Perdita: [00:35:08] And you know, one of the things you know, you talked of going back to her being real. And Clark mentioned this earlier. You know, I do a lot of yoga and but you know, we'll do a Shiva mantra, a Kali mantra. And I don't think anyone in the room is expecting Shiv and Kali to walk through the door when you do those mantras. But originally that's what a mantra was for. You are calling the God or goddess to show up. There's the summoning charm. It was a summoning charm, you know? You know, and Harry Potter, what is it? Acheo, you know, come to me. That's what it means when you said Ave Marie said. Show up in my life.
Clark: [00:35:43] Acheo Kali.
Perdita: [00:35:45] I think of a mother who came on way of the Rose recently, her and she prayed through a very hard pregnancy and then her child, her infant, had to go into the hospital with a high, high fever. And if any mother's ever been there, it's a really scary moment. You know, you're putting your three month old on IVs and fevers going up, up, up. And she took a moment to go to the bathroom, and she was praying the rosary holding her child went into the bathroom. Did you see this?
Liz: [00:36:13] I did. I loved it so much.
Perdita: [00:36:16] She saw a picture, and then you saw that the artist's name written across the top of the painting was Lupe and Guadalupe, and she realized. Oh, I'm OK, you're here. My mother's here. She's got this, and she walks back into the hospital room in the baby's fever had broken, and I think that that's how real she is. We ask for help and she shows up. And I think she's asking us right now. To hold her hand, I mean, I think there are a lot of fevers breaking out around the world right now. You've experienced some of them yourself, I know with those fires.
Liz: [00:36:55] Yes, I'm in Northern California, where we've had yeah, it's been hot and a little scary the last couple of summers, for sure.
Perdita: [00:37:03] And I think that, you know, one of the things she always says in her message is and all her messages are available on her website for people to read is, a lot of change is coming. Hold my hand. I've got you. I'm there. She doesn't say things are going to be hunky dory and fine, and you will be and you're going to win the lottery. But she does say I'll get, you know, I can get you through anything. Yeah. And so I think in terms of her realness, we practice holding on to her hand so that when there's really terrifying moments come, we know that we know how to do it.
Clark: [00:37:49] You know, the rosary is like our umbilical connection, you know? And in one of her messages, our lady talked about the fact that in your world, she says you at birth, you experience a severing of the umbilical cord, right? So you become separate from your mother. But she says, I don't experience that. I don't experience any separation from you when you're born. It's just like a mother shifting a child from one hip to the other, she says the the mother sustained you before when you were in the womb. Now that you're on Earth, the Earth sustains you. So she says, it's the same mother, it's just a different hip. But the rosary is that kind of umbilical connection, that cord that allows us to find our way back to the security and the insanity of her embrace, right?
Perdita: [00:38:41] I mean, that's what I that's what I needed as a young mother, and I didn't even understand it. You know, coming out of these Buddhist communities that were telling me to let go, let go, let go. And what I needed was something to hold on to. And what you know, I would hold my rosary beads and my kids would hold on to my body in bed. Any mother knows, you know, they hold on to your hair, they hold onto your shirt. I want to hold on to you. We've survived because we can hold on. That's how we survive as as infants. We have this kind of insane ideas about separating from our mother that have been imposed on us by patriarchy and have wreaked such damage to mothers and children such damage, particularly to mothers and daughters. We have to learn how to hold on again once we're holding on to the right thing. We can let go of the things that are awful for us.
Liz: [00:39:36] So I feel like you kind of teed me up where I hoping to go. I'm thinking of the rosary itself, and I have to say that I'm fairly new, I don't know. Maybe I can stop saying I'm new to the rosary now. I don't know. I've been praying with it for about a year now. So maybe, maybe I'm I'm not a novice anymore. But one of the questions that I wanted to ask is, so if we think of the lady, she could be Mary, but we could know her by any number of names. As you've already said, why specifically did she tell you like, what we should be doing is praying the rosary specifically, and I understand it from the bead perspective and the literally holding on to something in the mantra perspective. I also know it, however, as something that has a lot of baggage because it's connected to the Catholic Church. And we all know that Christianity, I mean, maybe we don't all know, but if you do even a little bit of a cursory study of history, you will know that Christianity hasn't been particularly friendly toward women. The Catholic Church has not been particularly friendly toward women and the Catholic Church is full of all kinds of scandals that the vast majority of people probably know about. So I'm really curious about the rosary specifically as something to hold on to in that regard.
Perdita: [00:41:05] Well, one of the bait and switches that most people aren't aware of, and then I'm going to turn over to Clark for a minute. It's all of Christianity, it's all religion is an attempt to demonize the feminine. That's what we've been talking about, right? Hmm. But Protestantism, one of the biggest things that happened was that statues of the mother were burned and beheaded. And it was a real attempt to excise the last vestiges of the pagan goddess worship. From Christianity, because in truth, Catholicism, which was the only Christianity in the beginning, had to graft itself under the rootstock of pagan religion.
Clark: [00:41:47] Yeah. So the rosary, you know, our daughter, Sophie, calls the rosary a stowaway hidden in the hull of the Catholic Church, right?
Liz: [00:41:55] Oh, I love that.
Clark: [00:41:58] It was a devotion to the ancient Earth mother that was smuggled down through the centuries and hidden in plain view, which was actually the only place you could hide it to really protect it, right? It had to look Christian, right, even though at its core, it really wasn't. So let's just unpack, you know, just some of the few of the secrets of the rosary so that we can sort of distance it a little bit from, you know, those people who would like to use it to fight abortion, for instance, or to fight communism. And that's been, you know, misused politically in the modern era for all kinds of reasons.
Perdita: [00:42:31] But one of the reasons it's been misused in the recent era is actually as a war against feminism and as a way of dethroning the Virgin Mary. The Catholic Church has always been fairly anti rosary. It doesn't seem like that, but in fact it has because it was a private devotion practiced mostly by women and it was filled with pagan. Worship, and it was really one of the things that was such a surprise to me was to realize that in the Middle Ages, when the rosary is emerging, most people were barely Christian. We think that they, you know, Europe was Christian, but in fact, you have people living that said, imagine them, you live in your little village. Your people have been living in that little village. We even know this from DNA for eight to ten thousand years. Ok, so you have routines and rhythms and spiritual practices that are older than we can possibly imagine. This new religion comes in. Nobody can read and write, not even the priests. And they say the great mother is now called Mary and you go, OK, and the baby, you used to call Horus or something else is now called Jesus. You go, OK. And then you go back and they say, and we want you to use these words instead of those words and you go, OK? And then you go back to calling on the mother for help to get you through the day the way you always, always have. And yet you hide things, as Clark said, in plain sight, and he'll show you what they hid in plain sight.
Clark: [00:44:21] Yeah, this is a podcast. I won't be showing it. I'll describe it.
Liz: [00:44:26] You can. You can paint a picture with your words.
Clark: [00:44:28] You can imagine it. So if you take, you know, if you go and you find a Catholic restroom. Ok, so find a Catholic rosary. Or just imagine what? Ok, you know what it looks like? It looks like a circle, right? And then it has this little pendant dangling down from the bottom of that circle. At the end of it is a cross. Ok, what other symbol can you think of that has consists of a circle with a cross at the bottom of it, right? Most people don't have to think very long before they realize, Oh, the gender sign for a woman. Well, that comes from the sign for Venus, right? So if you take that same rosary and you let it droop a little bit so that now it forms an oval with the cross of the bottom instead of a perfect circle, and it looks like an ankh, which is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for life and the symbol carried most often by Isis, right? Mm hmm. Ancient Queen of Heaven. All right. So Isis was worshipped throughout the ancient world, as was Venus Aphrodite. There were all these great mother figures, right? Going all the way back to Inanna. Well, you get to the age of the rosary. Right? Rose is the flower that is sacred to Mary, which most people don't know now. But these pagan people that Perdita was referring to certainly knew was that before the rose was sacred to Mary, it was Isis's flower, right? It was the flower most closely associated with her. Before that, you know, it was Inanna, so it goes back further and further and further. These medieval people had this one custom that they all observed all across the middle, all across Europe, Central Europe, throughout the Middle East and northern Africa.
Clark: [00:46:15] They would weave crowns of roses every spring into summer to crown statues of the lady, statues of the goddess. So when these European Christians came through and they tried to convert everyone, they said, Well, you can't do this practice anymore, right? This is a pagan practice. You can't observe this ritual. Somebody came up with the idea of substituting beads for flowers and saying Hail Marys. And in this one very famous legend, a young boy whose custom is to weave one of these crowns for the Statue of the Virgin and his village church every day, right, this pagan practice, he's basically doing what his people have done for thousands of years. He goes into a monastery right, thinking that he'll get to do this even more. And they forbid the practice because it's pagan. So he decides to leave. And on his way out, the Virgin appears to him and says, No, don't worry, don't worry, just say Hail Marys instead. And you can make a crown of prayers for my head instead. So he starts saying the Hail Mary and the flowers, the actual roses come out of his mouth, and the Virgin Mary takes these and weaves them into a crown. So she gets the last word and the goddess gets crowned, after all. Well, this story spread all across Europe and everywhere it went. The practice of the rosary went with it. And these people knew that they were re-enacting this ancient ritual that went back in their communities for thousands, thousands of years. They knew that they were praying to the mother. They knew they were praying to the lady. It didn't matter what the priest called them. Right. So the rosary is a continuation of a very, very ancient practice, devotional practice to the great mother.
Perdita: [00:48:02] And one of the things that is where it leads us kind of a trail of beads that like it leads us in back into the forest and it also leads us to our European indigenous pagan roots. It's a direct line. We're not making them up. They've been hidden in there for us. They're real and there are old. These are these are a direct connection. To ritual ceremony and wisdom that we don't have to appropriate from another culture that we don't have to invent out of thin air, but that we have can have as a birthright.
Liz: [00:48:41] That is such a powerful idea to me to and I think it's a really important one I can say for myself, as a white woman of European descent whose family has nonetheless been in this country, the United States, for, in some cases over 400 years. And so the idea of trying to find what is what is my heritage somewhere, it's there, right? Somewhere I have a connection back to the sacred feminine. But trying to find that in my ancestral line has felt, well, almost absurd at times, you know, like, why even bother? You know, I just I'm going to have to look somewhere else, or I'm going to have to go way, way, way back. And so I think that's one of the beautiful things to me about reconnecting with the rosary. Now I come from a long line of Baptist, so...
Perdita: [00:49:35] But where did this Baptists come from? Well, exactly because there was a time when, you know, if you were anywhere in the Europe, the Mediterranean or northern Africa, you're praying the rosary.
Liz: [00:49:45] Exactly. And so it's been a beautiful, beautiful connection for me to see that, ah, it's a way to honor my ancestors' spiritual traditions and also reclaim the feminine for me.
Perdita: [00:49:59] We had a Baptist minister, a woman, come to our way of the rose circle the other day. So who knows what can happen, what kind of cross fertilization?
Clark: [00:50:09] But she'd really taken to it too. She loved it.
Perdita: [00:50:13] You know, this is one of the other things, is that part of connecting with the divine feminine and the realness of the divine feminine is connecting with the realness of our ancestors and our ancestral grandmothers and grandfathers and not denying their wisdom and their experience. They were really they were being persecuted, but they were hiding a lot for us and they were keeping it alive for us, and I don't want to reject the work they did. Absolutely.
Liz: [00:50:42] So I'm imagining there'll be people who are listening who are Catholic or at least know something about the rosary itself, but I'm wondering for those that are not familiar with it and maybe wandered here because they're more interested in the divine feminine. If you could walk us through it a little bit, what the what the prayers are actually are. And I'm going to say one more thing because I want to see if there was a wonderful thing that you have mentioned elsewhere that I'm hoping you can weave into this conversation about the the maiden and the mother and the crone because it's this beautiful connection back to the pre-Christian tradition, too.
Perdita: [00:51:17] There are two prayers. The rosary is is just two prayers. It's a prayer to the mother and a prayer to the father. And you alternate them, and that's how simple it is. One bead, one prayer. It's mostly mothers. There are a few dads. That's how simple it is. It's as Clark said, you know, a child could learn it in the afternoon. One of those fathers, one of those prayers is the our father. People know it. They may not realize how radical a prayer it is, I always say it's the prayer of the hunter gatherer. Give us this day our daily bread. That's a really radical thing. We are constantly putting things in our bank accounts and our cupboards for tomorrow. It's really the hunter gatherers live for today on some really radical. But the Hail Mary
Clark: [00:52:07] And we yeah, the our father prayer is like a prayer of ecological sobriety. That's really the best way to think about it. It's really about living in harmony with one another and with the Earth, right, living with living, basically according to the solar carrying capacity of the land you're living on. I mean, literally just that, making it that concrete, being able to live on on the energy that the Sun provides, right? Not fossil fuels. Because back, it's that ancient. And I think Jesus understood it that way. Way even, you know, he had a very, very naturalistic, really, you know, pagan understanding. I think of the father. The Hail Mary is a prayer that is about the cycles of birth, death and rebirth that all things are going through. And Perdita is going to talk a little bit about the maid and the mother and the crown that are sort of enshrined within that prayer.
Perdita: [00:53:09] For these four, for these ancient people, the the goddess, the to the great mother in three aspects, which was the triple goddess and the trinity of Christianity, was a deliberate, conscious attempt to replace the goddess. And, you know, there's a father and a son and a holy abstract spirit that has, you know, which has nothing to do with what people understood they saw what they were worshipping was the Moon. And they way told the their time was the Moon. And how did you tell time when you followed the Moon? The moons were what guided you through the seasons. The moons were guided you from one day to another and the Moon was in three aspects. She was growing fuller. She was young, she was powerful. She was that 17 year old girl who like Joan of Arc or Greta Thunberg, can change the world and do anything she wants, you know, and that's the young maiden enthroned in the beginning of the Hail Mary. She's the 14 year old Virgin Mary, who says I'm going to defy patriarchal law and risk being stoned to death, to birth joy into the world the way I choose. It's a powerful, defiant act.
Perdita: [00:54:27] It's courageous, it's defiant, and we praise her with the words of the angel. Hail Mary, full of Grace The Lord is with thee and the Lord is with you, the Lord. If the Earth, if the mother is the Earth, the Lord is the sunshine. And when the sunshine and the Earth come together, we get life. There they are. You know, it's this, it's this marriage, it's romance, it's erotic, it's beautiful. It's the God and God is coming together. The alchemical marriage sun and moon. Mother and father. Light and dark. But then the Moon is full. She's the mother. Blessed art, thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. There she is, swollen, pregnant, full at the height of her power. She's the mother Moon. Those two lines come from the Bible, but medieval people added a third line and it came out of folk tradition and it came out of the memory of the triple goddess. And they knew that there was an aspect of the mother not present in scripture, and that was the crone. And that's the dark moon. That's the Moon. That's the darkness to which we return when we die.
Clark: [00:55:38] Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen. So what you get with this this mantra, because it really is a mantra, right? It's the prayer that's repeated over and over again. Our fathers are, you know, are never repeated back to back in the rosary. They come at intervals. The Hail Marys are all contiguous, so you have 10 of them in a row before you have another father. So they're the mantra. And in this mantra, we rehearse eternally the drama of coming and going from this world, only to return to it again. That maiden, mother and crone is really just birth, right? The fullness of life, death and then resurrection. You reached the end of that prayer and it just starts over. So we're living in a circular ecological time, redemptive time, rather than in a linear, in time scenario like you find in the New Testament with judgment and hellfire at the end.
Liz: [00:56:38] Yes, it changes everything, doesn't it? If we think of time as a circle as opposed to time as a line, it changes everything.
Perdita: [00:56:45] Actually, I think it I think it's the most important thing of all. I really do believe if we if we know that we had enough time to work with that one life isn't all there is. Yeah. And I do believe that is the ecological wisdom hidden in the rosary. Is that it's a circle.
Clark: [00:57:02] The rosary is a crash course in planetary ecology and a guide to the soul moving from one lifetime to another through deep time. That's really what it's for. It's the user's manual for the soul.
Liz: [00:57:15] That is really beautiful. I would ask you to. I would ask you to repeat that again, I don't know if you can. That was so beautiful.
Clark: [00:57:22] The rosary is a user's manual for the soul. It's just really is. It's just, you know, and and you can feel that, you know, you start praying the rosary and the knowledge of it gets into you through your through your fingertips and it's on your lips. It's in your heart. It's not a theological delivery system like the church would have us believe, right? It comes to us from the ground up through our, you know, from the dirt through our feet.
Perdita: [00:57:51] And through our hands.
Clark: [00:57:54] It's tactile. It's embodied. And it's ancestral, it comes to us from the Earth and from our ancestors.
Liz: [00:58:03] So I know that you've said elsewhere or that it's been written elsewhere. I'm not super up to speed on on other apparitions, and I know that Mary has shown up through different periods of time. But I think one thing that you have said in other places is that she often shows up during hard times or before difficult times.
Clark: [00:58:25] I'm afraid so.
Liz: [00:58:27] And so I'm wondering if that's your understanding of why she is here with us now.
Clark: [00:58:35] She's been pretty explicit about that.
Perdita: [00:58:36] Yeah, the mother of the Americas shows up in the midst of the worst genocide and ecocide on our Earth's history 100 million people dead and Mesoamerica whole species going extinct within the first decades of the European arrival on this continent. And she shows up and says, Take my hand, I'm here, and that's what she does. You know, Clark and I have often said, you know, when she appeared at Medugorje in Bosnia before the genocide there, you know, she had 10 secrets. And Clarke and I always say, you know, what are those secrets? Well, all of the climate scientists know them. Yeah, they're not so secret.
Clark: [00:59:15] All the the not so secret secrets. Wildfires that can't be contained, right? Depleted aquifers. Ocean acidification. Storms that are more powerful than any we've seen before. Endocrine disruptors in our water and the list goes on and on.
Perdita: [00:59:30] You know, what we're looking at, what gives us somebody recently was talking in a way of the rows about what gives us the courage to bear witness to the full sorrows that are happening around us and still live within sight of joy. And that the rosary is that's what it's teaching us how to do and and that how do we how do we really take in the catastrophes that are mounting around us, not turn away from them, not imagine somehow that, you know, Jeff Bezos is going to take care of it with this $10 billion that he donated to climate change? Well, he's still making sure that the engine of capitalism is running at full speed.
Liz: [01:00:15] I saw that too and thought, Well, how about all those cardboard boxes?
Perdita: [01:00:19] Exactly. 10000 pieces of plastic nobody needs, right? So there's so we're in the midst of a catastrophe. We're not going to think our way out of. But she can get us out of this and get us through it. What we forget is Homo sapiens have dealt with catastrophes before. 70,000 years ago, a super volcano called Mount Toba erupted and covered the whole world in volcanic ash. There's some thought that human beings were reduced to, you know, 5000 family units in the Horn of Africa. Just the world is dying. And what did people do during that period? They made beads.
Clark: [01:01:10] The earliest beads come from come from periods of great climate disruption.
Perdita: [01:01:16] Ice ages. Those figurines, those goddess figurines were being made through ice ages. Yeah, the climate was changing. The food sources were changing. The way people had to live was changing, so they had to hold on to their mother and they needed. You know, it's just like when you've got your kid in the parking lot and you say, Hold my hand, don't you let go of my hand? You know, the mother knows how to get the kid through, but you know that kid without holding to the mother's hand is in terrible danger. We need to hold on to a hand more than ever. And the thing is we need to let her be in charge. Us in charge has not been working out very well.
Liz: [01:01:58] So I want to ask you this one last question, because we're almost out of time and I'm curious how you'll respond, but I'm still thinking of OK, so one of the things that I would like to do with this particular podcast is to help people really reconnect with the sacred feminine in a way that feels real and feels tangible and is actionable in their lives where they are right now. So we don't have to go off to a meditation retreat or do anything special or spend lots of money. So I'm imagining if I ask you, what's one way that people could do that, I'm guessing you're going to say, Pray the rosary. Yes?
Perdita: [01:02:38] You know what? I wouldn't start there.
Liz: [01:02:40] Yeah. Ok, that was going to be my question, is what might else you say, though? Because for some people, there might be some initial barriers to getting to the rosary.
Perdita: [01:02:47] Here's what I would I do. I would find an image of the mama that you love. Now, maybe it's a stone. Maybe it's a picture. Maybe it's a little statue, but it just makes your little heart sing. It's some picture of her. Find it. That's how our path started. That's how our path started. Find her and then figure out what you call her. What's your name for your mother? There are names that resonate with all of us in different ways.
Clark: [01:03:15] Pick flowers for her.
Perdita: [01:03:18] Pick flowers for her like your ancestors did, or find a tree that is her for you. And go to that tree and hold it and touch it.
Clark: [01:03:29] Make a connection.
Perdita: [01:03:30] Make a connection to her. Find her for real in your life
Clark: [01:03:35] And then ask her for something.
Perdita: [01:03:37] Then ask her for something. Ask her for some help.
Clark: [01:03:41] And see if she doesn't respond.
Liz: [01:03:44] Beautiful. I was even going to say my guess is if you're listening to this and you're wondering, well, how do I find that picture or that tree, I might even go so far as to say it's just, it will find you
Clark: [01:03:57] Exactly how it tends to happen.
Liz: [01:03:59] She's really good at that.
Perdita: [01:04:02] Look at you. Look at your story. Yeah, I found you. You found us. I mean, that's the stories we hear is the moment you say, Are you? Are you there? I'm ready, she says, Well, I've been waiting.
Liz: [01:04:18] Or I've been here all along. Exactly. Here I am. Yeah. Oh, wow.
Clark: [01:04:25] Thank you so much, iz
Liz: [01:04:27] Clark and Perdita, thank you so much. So Clark Strand and Perdita Finn's Book is the Way of the Rose. The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. Their Facebook group is fantastic. I highly recommend it. It's really robust. I think you guys are getting close to 5000 members now.
Liz: [01:04:45] The conversation is just really beautiful and powerful, so I'll put links in the show notes to how you can find the group where you can find the book. And thank you so much, and until next time, we'll talk to you again soon.