The Hand of Glory

The Hand of Glory: what was it used for?

A thieves’ charm: lit in a house at night, it was said to stupefy the sleepers and open every lock.

The Hand of Glory: what does modern science say?

A relic of folklore. Sabine Baring-Gould in 1868 retold a hand-of-glory tale he had from a labouring man in the West Riding of Yorkshire; Grose in 1787 gave the recipe as a foreign belief, “firmly believed in many parts of France, Germany, and Spain.”

The Hand of Glory: what did the older authorities say?

Sabine Baring-Gould

Gives the recipe, citing Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal: the hand pickled with saltpetre, salt, and long pepper, dried in the sun in the dog-days, and made to hold a candle of the fat of a hanged man, virgin wax, and Lapland sesame.

Francis Grose

In his Provincial Glossary (1787) prints the recipe from an account he says a judge gave, who had heard criminals confess under torture to using the hand, and the counter-charm: the threshold anointed with an ointment of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, and the blood of a screech owl.

A Yorkshire tale

Baring-Gould had it from a West Riding labourer: at a lone inn on a moor the servant girl watched a beggar light a dead hand, found that the sleepers could not be woken, and at last put out its flames with a jug of milk; he says it is the same story Delrio gives in 1593.

The Catholic Encyclopedia

The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the scale of the persecution the charm belongs to: in Scotland “3400 persons perished” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Howell wrote in 1648 that “near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the major part executed, in Essex and Suffolk only,” and Cotton Mather “gives an account of 19 executions of witches in New England.” Against the craze stood the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, “who in 1631 published his ‘Cautio criminalis’ and who fought against the craze by every means in his power.”