http://www.geocities.com/snsfarm/rosary.html

http://www.americancatholic.org/Newslet … ay0504.asp

I hope this can answer a few of your questions

In a nutshell, yes. When doing the mysteries, you think about that certain mystery for that decade (group of ten Hail Mary beads.)

One of the problems people have in discussion of Religious ideas, most of all with Catholic and Orthodox ideas, is they think in the terms of the 21rst Century, and the vocabulary of the 21st Century. If we think of Mystery as only a puzzle to be solved, or something that we can’t find an answer to, we are thinking in modern terms. If we include in the definition of Mystery the traditional meaning in religion, that beyond the outward appearence there are greater truths, as we grow spiritually we understand, and will know fully when we see God face to face in heaven.

With regard to mysteries of the rosary or religion in gereral, we can look at the Incarnation. To our human eyes we see a baby born. The mystery here is that God Himself became incarnate, and came to the world as Truly God and Truly Man in the person of Jesus. Not 50% God and 50% Man. Not as simply God taking over the body of a man. But the incarnation of the creator of the world. Over years of study and prayer we come to understand better this mystery, with the promise of knowing and understanding it fully when we see God face to face in heaven.

Traditionally the “full” rosary is praying 15 decades. A decade consists of ten Hail Mary’s, one Glory be to the Father, and one Lord’s Prayer. In recent times five more mysteries where added the Lumenous Mysteries, however these can be included or not depending on the individual’s desire to include them or not.

There have been many ways that prayers have been counted, a pocket full of pebbles is one, beads and knotted rope are others.

The most popular form of the rosary (the Dominican Rosary) is composed of 15 decades, wgich represent the 150 Psalms.

There have been various rosary like prayers, both Pagan, Jewish and Christian. The most common of the Catholic forms of the Rosary, (Dominican Rosary) was composed around 1100, the modern form in Lay people who didn’t have copies of Scripture or the Breviary and lay people and religious who were illiterate would substitute 150 Pater Nosters (Our Fathers) or Aves (Hail Marys) in place of the 150 Psalms they could not read.

The prayers were originally counted by transferring pebbles from one bag to another, but soon enough Christians began to tie a rope with knots on which to count. Desert monastics were in the habit of reciting a specified number of prayers daily and such a method of keeping track of them is natural. In the life of the Egyptian Abbot Paul (d. A. D. 341), we read that he used to collect three hundred pebbles every day and throw away each one as he finished the corresponding prayer he was accustomed to recite. This evolved further into using beads or pieces of wood in place of the knots, and this soon came to be called the “Psalter of the Laity.” Around the end of the first millennium, Rosaries contained the present five decades (sets of ten beads), with the Ave beads shaped like white lilies for the purity of the Virgin, and the Pater beads shaped like red roses for the wounds and Passion of Christ.