Bead Attitudes

In my last post I mentioned les tricoteuses, the ladies who knitted at the site of the guillotine during the French revolution. I stumbled onto an interesting study connecting the activities of the knitters with the use of worry beads.

Worry beads are, of course, fingered by people in times of great stress to calm the nerves. For me, this immediately conjures up images of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, reaching into his pocket for some small stones to handle during his examination on the witness stand.

The use of worry beads is an ancient practice common in many parts of the world. In Arab cultures they are called misbaha. They are prayer beads, with particular prayers recited for each fingered bead. The misbaha have either 33 or 99 beads in them; to correspond to either the number of years in Jesus Christ's life on earth (multiplied by the Trinity) or, in ancient Sufi tradition, to meditate on the names and attributes of Allah.

Roman Catholics, of course, are very familiar with prayer beads. The Catholic Rosary in its current form, with 59 beads in five "decades" of Hail Marys, seems to date back at least to the 13th century and St. Dominic; the saying of the rosary (the word is derived from "garland") is central to Dominican worship. The true origins of the Catholic rosary are somewhat lost in the mists of time, but the use of stones to count prayers had been used by mystics for many centuries.

In the Buddhist tradition prayer beads or rosaries are called japa mala. They are frequently worn as bracelets and have 108 or 111 beads for the repetition of a mantra.

The use of worry beads is also common in Greece; the Greek name is komboloi. They have no religious connotation, and are simply for the alleviation of stress.

All of the beads previously mentioned tend to be made of natural materials such as amber or coral or polished stone, or polished wood or ivory, perhaps because these feel better to the hands and would not impart a metallic smell when handled, as minerals might do.

So, back to the study about the knitters at the French Revolution. It is generally thought that they were so callous and unaffected by the terrible things they witnessed that they placidly worked their needles and gave their opinions (typically, "Off with their heads!"); their archetype certainly is Madame Defarge from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

The study, however, was intended to determine if the use of the hands in a visuospacial task during a traumatic event would help over time to keep the terrible images from being encoded into memory. Results showed that keeping the hands busy at a repetitive task (using a keyboard to repeat a pattern while watching videos of horriffic car crashes) reduced the number of intrusive memories afterward, as compared to a control group.

So, perhaps the knitting of les tricoteuses calmed them, and helped keep them calm, rather than being an indication of how unfeeling they were. Perhaps they did not have vivid memories of what they had seen because they used their hands to knit. Perhaps that is why worry beads (or prayer beads) have been used to calm the mind during times of great stress for many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

It is interesting that it took a 21st-century scientific study to recognize what the mind/body has probably always known. And, considering the times we live in, maybe now would be a good time to put those beads to work.

Or take up knitting.

Update: From the Strange Little Coincidences File - After I finished this writing, about two hours later I turned on the television. Turner Classic Movies was on, and a movie was starting in about five minutes - The Caine Mutiny.