Resurrecting an old blog post with a few variations on prayers to the seven archangels by days of the week. I could have sworn I had a blog post about lorica here, and I was gonna introduce it in the context of the prayer we usually call the Breastplate of St. Patrick, since that is a type of lorica prayer. But I can’t find the blog post I could swear once existed. Maybe it didn’t make the livejournal-to-wordpress transition intact…
In any case, these are prayers for protection that are uniquely Irish in character and that work in remarkably somatic terms (like this angel protects my head, this one my left arm, etc.). And I find these fascinating not only as someone working with the points chauds system and interested in other emphatically *embodied* systems or methods of empowerment and initiation, but also as an erstwhile medievalist who is here to tell you that whatever you may have heard about how medieval Christianity denigrated the body and elevated the soul at its expense, privileged the spirit over the flesh at every turn, and was inherently and eternally Augustinian in its outlook towards the desires and the senses of the body, when it comes to Anglo-Saxon Christianity, whatever you may have heard is quite likely to be absolutely dead freakin’ wrong. (And by the way, people calling such views Augustinian don’t really understand St. Augustine all that well in the first place. But I suppose that is a rant for a different place.)
I first really got into them when I was writing my dissertation on Old English religious works that treated the relationship of the soul and body. You can definitely see Hiberno-Latin influence in many Anglo Saxon soul-and-body works, and a few elements of some of the works in the soul-and-body “genre” are quite lorica-esque once you know what you’re looking for. And then of course I had to fall in a rabbit hole of old Jewish and Coptic healing charms, and then you turn a corner and bam! There’s some kabbalah and they’re going to have to send someone in after you with a torch and rope. So I might not have had a lot of coherent sentences that made cogent arguments, but I definitely had a lot of *notes* on lorica, and I really, really thought I posted at least some of them.
But this post I’m reblogging is the closest I could get for now :)
I regret that I have not been writing as many informative or instructional posts lately as I’d like. If you’ve worked with me fairly closely over the years and/or been reading my blog for a while, you may know that I’m feverishly trying to finish my PhD dissertation and *get the heck out of graduate school* where I have been for far, far too long. So instructional/informative posts are not likely to be copious over the next few months.
But as part of my research I am working with a lovely Old Irish poem that I thought I’d share for you readers who work with, think about, and enjoy angels – it should be especially interesting for readers into esoteric prayer, working with the Seven Rays of the Archangels or any of the Rosaries of the Seven Rays, or those with a Roman Catholic or folk Catholic background – or…
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