Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/283

 Coj'rcspondence. 255

can slill trace in the modern practice the survival of the primitive use to which these rosaries were put.

I connect the bead with the knot, and see in the strings of beads another form of strings of k?iofs, which they have supplanted and almost driven out of use.

The feature common to all the rosaries is that they serve as an aid to memory. They are essentially mnemonic signs, intended to aid the devotee in a certain form of devotion, where numbers play an important part. Whether the devotee is to recite so many Paters, or so many names of Allah, or so many verses of the Psalms, or other mystical names and formulas among Buddhists and Lamaists, does not alter the fundamental character of the rosary and of the primary use to which it is put ; it is to keep the number and to aid the memory. It may have been used also to regulate the form of worship, as indicating the e.xact time when such and such a part of the religious ceremony was to be per- formed, — after so many Paters a genuflexion or a crossing, after so many names of Allah a prostration, or the intercalation of a special prayer, or the use of the censer, etc. In a word, the rosary is still used principally as an aid to memory. I contend that the use of a perforated stone or bone is a secondary stage in the development of the rosary. These have taken the place of an original much more simple contrivance, the knot, which in its turn may have taken the place of reeds or sticks marked off at regular distances by knots.

Traces of such practices have been preserved to our own day. It is still a common practice to use a knot in a handkerchief for precisely the same object, to remind the wearer of something. The knot acts as a mnemonic sign. In a slightly modified form the knot in a cord, run off a wheel, marks the distance traversed and the speed of a ship. The nautical knot is also a counter, just as the beads are used for counting and remembrance. Well known is the old system of the Incas in South America of keeping their historical records in the form of knots {quipus). No doubt there must have been a variety of knots, each one with a separate significance attached to it.

But I think that I have found in the Bible a survival of that ancient system, which is corroborated by a practice which is at