The Hand of Glory is the
dried and
pickled
hand of a man who has been
hanged,
often specified as being the left (Latin: sinister) hand,
or else, if the man were hanged for murder, the hand that
"did the deed."
According to old
European
beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a
malefactor
who died on the
gallows,
virgin wax, and Lapland sesame oil - 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 have
rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented.
The candle could only be put out with milk. (In another
version the hair of the dead man is used as a wick, also
the candle is said to give light only to the holder.) The
Hand of Glory also purportedly had the power to unlock any
door it came across.[1]
The
method of making a hand of glory is described in "Petit
Albert",[2][3]
and in the
Compendium
Maleficarum.[4]
Etymologist
W.W. Skeat
reports[5]
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,[6]
that the mandrake 'shineth by night
altogether like a lamp.'"[5]
(Cockayne in turn is quoting
Pseudo-Apuleius,
in a translation of a Saxon manuscript of his
Herbarium.)
