For a long time now, a principal spiritual practice of mine has been the work of the Daily Office, a cycle of readings and prayers based on the time-sanctifying rhythms of monastic life in the Benedictine tradition.

Most spiritual traditions of the world have some way of weaving together prayer and time, and the Christian heritage is no different. Taking a cue from the practice of desert hermits and monks in the early centuries of the Christian movement, St Benedict of Nursia gave the West its characteristic form of the Divine Office, with attendant readings from scripture, refrains to be chanted, and prayers to be offered at set hours during the day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The rhythms of the Daily Office become a trellis on which can grow the wild tendrils of a soul entering into the fullness of love.

I’ve been praying the Office in some form or another since 2010, and my preferred form these days is a simplified version of the order given in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer. Toward the end of the order for Morning Prayer, the BCP gives two lists of suffrages, or petitionary prayers, that comprise several versicles and responses taken from the psalms:

Show us your mercy, O Lord;
And grant us your salvation

Clothe your ministers with righteousness;
let your people sing for joy.

Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;
for only in you can we live in safety.

Lord, keep this nation under your care;
and guide us in the way of justice and truth.

Let your way be known upon earth;
your saving health among all nations.

Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
nor the hope of the poor be taken away.

Create in us clean hearts, O God;
and sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

Unbidden, the thought struck me one morning as I made my way through them, chanting each versicle and response in my usual manner: these prayers make a maṇdala.

The thing about studying and practicing astrology is that it trains your brain to look for specific patterns as a means ordering our experience of the overwhelming quantity of sensory impressions we take in as we move through this world. In other words, it becomes difficult not to see two sets of seven without curiosity rearing its head. Given that seven is an archetypal number of cosmic perfection, and given the diurnal context of this set of prayers—after all, the seven days of the week take their name from the seven moving lights in a majority of cultures—I wonder: is the pattern here intentional?

I can’t say, and I don’t think that any such assertion could be proven directly. But what we can affirm is that the pattern of versicles and responses at the end of a prayed office is something with historical roots from a time when astrological consciousness was still shaping, in an overt way, the shape of private and communal prayer in liturgical Christian tradition.

The particular set of suffrages I have in mind (set A in both Rite One and Rite Two of the Order for Morning Prayer in the 1979 prayer book) is based on a set of suffrages contained in the liturgies of the Sarum use, an expression of Western Catholic ritual practice that developed around the traditions of Salisbury (Sarum) Cathedral in the late eleventh century and lasting until the English reformation, at which time Thomas Cranmer revised and condensed materials from the Sarum use into the first Book of Common Prayer.

According to Marion Hatchett’s commentary on the 1979 Prayer Book, the original set of suffrages on which these were based originate in the Sarum office of Prime, meant to be said in the first hour of the day. That said, Hatchett reveals that the version before us is a revision and expansion dating from 1979 (Hatchett, 124). So we cannot say that they are directly reflecting a historical reality.

However, I do think it is fair to say that the astrological consciousness present in pre-modern Europe—which is really nothing more complicated than an embodied awareness of the qualitative dimension of time, an awareness that we have lost in post-industrial modernity—is a through-line connecting the 1979 suffrages to their ancestors in Salisbury. This is, perhaps, an instance of what my teacher Cynthia Bourgeault would consider “imaginal causality, or the preeminence of archetypal pattern over historical facticity.” Bourgeault continues,

“According to this mode of seeing, the patterns that generate and organize the energy field of our visible world oringate beyond time (on a higher plane of reality and are transmitted largely through images (hence imaginal) impressed upon the still mirror of the contemplative imagination… In imaginal causality, the overarching pattern determines the field in which linear causality plays itself out. If a pattern can be shown to make sense of the data, to give energy and coherence to the field it is organizing, and to offer intelligent and useful directives for future action, then it is deemed to be true, whether or not it is, stricly speaking, historical” (Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 64).

Whether or not the suggestion of astrological line-up is intentional historically, the sevenfold alignment is enough of a cue to suggest that imaginal causality may have been at play in the contemplative imaginations of the compilers of the 1979 BCP (and only contemplatives could have written Prayer C, as far as I’m concerned). And so my curiosity remains: what might the planetary correspondences reveal about the inner meaning of the versicles? How might these versicles in turn help us to better understand the sevenfold structure of the reality in which we live and move and have our being?

Is there something here that helps us to pray these more effectively, with deeper feeling, with deeper attention, to help us route the wellspring of divine energies we experience as eros unto the transformation of the one praying and the relationships of causality that bind people and planets together?

And perhaps this this line of questioning goes beyond merely understanding the structure within which our life unfolds in time. I wonder whether, in praying these versicles, we might be offering an invitation to the reflections of the planetary archetypes which live within us to manifest in a way that reflects the spirit of wholeness in which the cosmos unfolds.

How do these prayers shape our subconscious, imaginal, and causal reality? In other words, can these prayers be the basis for upaye (“remedy” in Sanskrit), and therefore a tool for remediating adverse conditions and inclinations reflected in a person’s nativity?

My wager is that the answer is “yes.”

Astrologers reading this might ask, “Why weekday order and not Chaldean order?” One, my jyotish-pilled brain defaults to weekday order, and if you simply lay the two orders next to the suffrages as given you’ll see how the weekday order corresponds more closely to the themes, as you’ll see below.

But there’s also a deeper level to this choice (whether consciously editorial or not): because this is a prayer that is meant to be said at the same time every day as part of a daily rhythm, the structure of consciousness within which these prayers live and have their intended effect is the pattern of days as we experience them here on earth.

(And besides, the weekday order and the Chaldean order are tied to one another anyway by way of the planetary hours, which themselves gave shape to the pre-Reformation forms of the Daily Office in use in the British Isles, but that’s an article unto itself.)

So, what I endeavor to do in what will be a series of posts is this: I want to take each of these suffrages, and unpack them from the level of kāraka, a Sanskrit word meaning “signification.” Each of the prayers carries its own energetic reality that reflects its planetary position in weekday order, an energy that the kārakas present in each line hold.

Another intention of mine is a desire to expand these suffrages to a nine planet scheme to include the lunar nodes (Rāhu and Ketu), as would be even more appropriate for an astrologer in my own contexts. How might the selection represented here inform how we might go about identifying appropriate verses for them? That’s what I want to find out.

Here’s the set of prayers, presented with their astral correspondences and their source texts in the Psalms. Curiously, the one that aligns with Mercury is a prayer that does not have roots in the Psalter, but rather draws from another part of the BCP. If you’re not familiar with them, just read them as given and get a sense for their feel, both individually and as a planetary maṇdala.

SUN (Psalm 85.7)
Show us your mercy, O Lord;
And grant us your salvation

MOON (Psalm 132.9)
Clothe your ministers with righteousness;
let your people sing for joy.

MARS (Psalm 122.7 & Psalm 4.8)
Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;
for only in you can we live in safety.

MERCURY (Based on the collect For Peace Among the Nations, p. 816)
Lord, keep this nation under your care;
and guide us in the way of justice and truth.

JUPITER (Psalm 67.2)
Let your way be known upon earth;
your saving health among all nations.

VENUS (Psalm 9.18)
Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
nor the hope of the poor be taken away.

SATURN (Psalm 51.10a, 12b)
Create in us clean hearts, O God;
and sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

(Here I am, standing at the confluence of the Jordan and the Ganges (and I guess the Thames, too), trying to hold it all together in what will either be a fool’s errand or an offering of bhakti for the divine energies revealed in reality. We will see!)

If you’d like to practice with them and experiment with the wager yourself as we make our way through the maṇdala, nothing prevents you. If you’re not already a practitioner of the Daily Office, you can simply begin by finding a few quiet moments in the morning, lighting a candle, centering yourself. Say the Lord’s Prayer, then quietly repeat each of the suffrages, then a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. See how that feels, and let me know.

(I’ll be cross-posting this whole series over on my personal website, too.)