Nine days, nine knots: each day hands over a different knot — pride, resentment, haste, loneliness — into Mary's hands, with the day's proper prayer, the day's Scripture and the Way of the Day. The devotion began with a wedding ribbon untied in prayer, in 1615, and took on a face in a painting from Augsburg that spread around the world. Pray with us, with a free companion book.
A marriage crisis in Augsburg, in the early 1600s, gave rise to one of the Marian devotions that has spread furthest in the world in recent years.
Around 1615, the German nobleman Wolfgang Langenmantel and his wife Sophia Rentz had a marriage so strained that they considered separating. Langenmantel sought out his former teacher, the Jesuit Fr. Jakob Rem, and met with him several times to pray before an image of Mary. On one of those visits, the priest asked him to bring the ribbon used on their wedding day — a local custom in which the couple's joined hands were bound with a ribbon during the vows. Before the image, in prayer, the priest untied the knots of that ribbon one by one: as the last one came undone, it is said to have turned entirely white, and the couple was reconciled.
About eighty years later, Langenmantel's grandson commissioned the Augsburg painter Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner to paint a picture that would keep this story: Maria Knotenlöserin, "Mary, Undoer of Knots" — an oil on wood panel that still hangs today in the church of St. Peter am Perlach, in Augsburg. In it, Mary stands on the head of a serpent coiled in knots and unties, with her own hands, a long white ribbon; the Holy Spirit hovers over her in the form of a dove.
The idea behind the image is far older than the painting: already in the second century, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that "the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary." It is this same image — the knot that faith unties — that crossed the centuries and reached, by different paths, Latin America: reproductions of the Augsburg painting spread across the continent, and today a shrine dedicated to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots, in Buenos Aires, draws pilgrims every month.
There is no single "official" novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots — nor a text with universal ecclesiastical approval. The most widely used version was written by the Argentine priest Juan Ramón Celeiro, and it is the basis of the tradition we publish here, with the source of every prayer documented in the book's opening pages. Each of the nine days hands over a different knot — pride, resentment, haste, loneliness — in light of a Gospel passage, with the day's proper prayer and the Way of the Day. The companion book in PDF carries the whole novena, ready to print and pray alone or with a group.
“The knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.”
It is this line of Saint Irenaeus, written already in the second century, that gives its name to the devotion pictured fifteen centuries later in the Augsburg painting. The image of Mary untying knots was not born of an apparition or a private revelation: it was born of this ancient theological image, that Mary's obedience undoes what disobedience bound. In the book, this origin comes documented, with the source of every prayer and every passage cited.
Nine days, one knot at a time: not a prayer to repeat from memory, but a guided surrender, one knot a day, into Mary's hands.
The Act of Contrition, the day's proper prayer, the Supplication to the Undoer of Knots and the closing prayer — with the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be in full, nothing cut.
Each day hands over a different knot — pride, resentment, haste, loneliness, the knot that steals our peace — in light of that day's Gospel passage.
In its opening pages, the book sets out the research into the sources: what is documented tradition, what comes from the most widely used novena, and what is our own translation.
The whole novena in PDF, ready to print and pray alone, with your family, or with your prayer group, one day at a time.
“Novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots” — in Kindle and paperback editions.
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