Hand of Glory


A Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a male person who has been hanged, often specified as being the left hand, or, if the man was hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed."
Old European beliefs attribute great powers to a Hand of Glory combined with a candle made from fat from the corpse of the same malefactor who died on the gallows. The candle so made, lighted, and placed in the Hand of Glory, would have rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented. 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 inspired short stories and poems in 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 main de gloire, 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 lamp"". Cockayne in turn is quoting Pseudo-Apuleius, in a translation of a Saxon manuscript of his Herbarium.

Powers attributed

According to old European beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a :wikt:malefactor|malefactor who died on the gallows, lighted, and placed 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 Petit Albert. 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.
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 Petit Albert, and in the Compendium Maleficarum.

Process

The 1722 Petit Albert describes in detail how to make a Hand of Glory, as cited from him by 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 "du Sisame et de la Ponie" 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, however, this reads as "..du sisame de Laponie..", 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 Petit Albert 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

In comics

In Hellboy's Box Full of Evil story and Being Human story, a Hand of Glory is used to paralyze everyone except the holder of the hand.
In The Invisibles by Grant Morrison large parts of the plot surround attempts from both the Invisibles and the Outer Church to obtain, and find out how to control, a Hand of Glory. In the comic, it is seen as having the propensity to open doors in timespace - i.e. open gates to other worlds and ages.
In Black Magick by Greg Rucka, a hand of glory is crafted from the corpse of a hanged rapist and murderer, Bruce Dunridge. The body was found washed on shore, missing his sinister hand.
In Marvel Comics, the Hand of Glory is a technique used by the Goddess of Death Hela to enhance her strength with mystical energy and kill anybody with her fist.

In crime

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 in the Wych Elm?", referring to the woman's corpse which was found inside a tree.

In literature

Severed hands in an occult context occur as early as Herodotus's "Tale of Rhampsinitus", 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 Discours exécrable de sorciers in 1590.
In 1832 Gérard de Nerval wrote the short story "La main de gloire, histoire macaronique". The same year Aloysius Bertrand published "L'heure du Sabbat". Guy de Maupassant made his debut with "La main d'écorché" one of his first stories in the Lorraine Almanac Pont-à-Mousson under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier. Marcel Schwob wrote an uncollected short story about it: "La Main de gloire", which was published in L'Écho de Paris 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!

Théophile Gautier wrote a poem titled "Étude De Mains" 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.
In the film 'A Canterbury Tale a pub called 'The Hand of Glory' is featured.