Hand of Glory

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A hand of glory on display at Whitby Museum

A Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man, often specified as being the left (Template:Langx) hand, or, if the person was hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed."

Old European beliefs attribute great powers to a Hand of Glory. The process for preparing the hand and the candle are described in 18th-century documents, with certain steps disputed due to difficulty in properly translating phrases from that era. The concept has inspired short stories and poems since the 19th century.

History of the term

Etymologist Walter Skeat reports that, while folklore has long attributed mystical powers to a dead man's hand, the specific phrase Hand of Glory is in fact a folk etymology: it derives from the French , a corruption of mandragore, which is to say mandrake. Skeat writes, "The identification of the hand of glory with the mandrake is clinched by the statement in Cockayne's Leechdoms, i. 245, that the mandrake 'shineth by night altogether like a lampTemplate:'". Cockayne in turn is quoting Pseudo-Apuleius, in a translation of a Saxon manuscript of his .

Powers attributed

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A hand of glory holding a candle, from the 18th century grimoire Petit Albert

According to old European beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a malefactor who died on the gallows, lighted, and placed (as if in a candlestick) in the Hand of Glory, which comes from the same man as the fat in the candle, would render motionless all persons to whom it was presented. The method for holding the candle is sketched in . The candle could be put out only with milk. In another version, the hair of the dead man is used as a wick, and the candle would give light only to the holder.

File:Main de gloire, detail of print (cropped).jpg

A hand of glory on a mantlepiece, in a detail of the 1565 artwork The Elder Saint Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes by Pieter van der Heyden

The Hand of Glory also purportedly had the power to unlock any door it came across. The method of making a Hand of Glory is described in , and in the .

Process

File:Paper mache "Hand of Glory" Folk Lore Superstition by the Kuriologist.jpg

A papier-mâché hand of glory

The 1722 describes in detail how to make a Hand of Glory, as cited from him by Émile-Jules Grillot de Givry:

De Givry points out the difficulties with the meaning of the words zimat and ponie, saying it is likely "ponie" means horse-dung. De Givry is expressly using the 1722 edition, where the phrase is, according to John Livingston Lowes "" and de Givry notes that the meaning of "ponie" as "horse dung" is entirely unknown "to us", but that in local Lower Normandy dialect, it has that meaning. His reason for regarding this interpretation as "more than probable" is that horse-dung is "very combustible, when dry".

In the French 1752 edition (called , i.e., "New Edition, corrected and augmented"), however, this reads as "", that is, in Francis Grose's translation from 1787, "sisame of Lapland", or Lapland sesame. This interpretation can be found many places on the Internet, and even in books published at university presses. Two books, one by Cora Daniels, another by Montague Summers, perpetuate the Lapland sesame myth, while being uncertain whether zimat should mean verdigris or the Arabian sulphate of iron.

The also provides a way to shield a house from the effects of the Hand of Glory:

An actual Hand of Glory is kept at the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire, England, together with a text published in a book from 1823. In this manuscript text, the way to make the Hand of Glory is as follows:

Cultural references

A Hand of Glory was proposed as one of the motives for an unsolved murder that occurred in wartime England some time in mid-late 1941. The case was made more mysterious by numerous graffiti that appeared later stating "Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?", referring to the woman's corpse which was found inside a tree.

Severed hands in an occult context occur as early as Herodotus's "Tale of Rhampsinitus" (ii, 121), in which a clever thief leaves a dead hand behind in order to avoid capture. They also appear in early stories of lycanthropy, such as Henry Boguet's in 1590.

In 1832 wrote the short story "" ("The Hand of Glory, a Macaronic Story"). The same year Aloysius Bertrand published "" ("The Hour of the Sabbat"). Guy de Maupassant made his debut with "" ("The Flayed Hand") (1875) one of his first stories in the under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier. Marcel Schwob wrote an uncollected short story about it: "" ("The Hand of Glory"), which was published in on March 11, 1893.

The second of the Ingoldsby Legends, "The Hand of Glory, or, The Nurse's Story", describes the making and use of a Hand of Glory. The first lines are:

Now open, lock!
To the Dead Man's knock!
Fly, bolt, and bar, and band!
Nor move, nor swerve,
Joint, muscle, or nerve,
At the spell of the Dead Man's hand!
Sleep, all who sleep! -- Wake, all who wake!
But be as the dead for the Dead Man's sake!

wrote a poem titled "" ("Studies of Hands") on the subject of the hand of the poet-thief Lacenaire, severed after his execution for a double murder, presumably for future use as a Hand of Glory.

See also

• Order of the Occult Hand
• The Monkey's Paw

External links

• The Hand of Glory and other gory legends about human hands – Edited by D. L. Ashliman.