The Hand of Glory
In the days before a formal health system, when superstition was widespread, many people resorted to consulting a local wise-woman or wise-man, roughly a mixture of a quack, white witch, and herbalist. They could be consulted on minor medical matters, from warts to hair loss, and were also authorities on everything from the weather and livestock to romance. Their remedies and divinations usually involved the creation of a mixture of everyday items procured on significant days of the year to give them magical properties. Such remedies were usually benign, but a notable exception in folk magic was the Hand of Glory.
The Hand of Glory was a hand cut from a criminal hanging on a gibbet, which was pickled in urine for thirteen days and then dried out in the sun. It must then be nailed to an oak tree for three days and nights. When it was ready, it could hold a candle or the fingers themselves be lit as candles. When lit, the Hand of Glory was supposed to render all nearby people motionless. The Hand, therefore, was popular amongst thieves, who would use it to rob houses unmolested. It could not, however, stop thieves from being traced.
William Henderson, a folklorist writing in 1866, tells the tale of a thief who used a Hand of Glory at the Old Spital Inn, Yorkshire. In Henderson’s narrative, the Hand’s spell only worked when people were already asleep, and a suspicious cook had remained awake to keep an eye on the furtive guest. Having quenched the candle with milk (the only way to put it out, possibly due to milk’s association with new life, the opposite of death), thus waking up the sleeping innkeepers, the cook locked the robber in a room he was plundering, and he was hanged.
It would be simple to attribute the Hand of Glory to the fevered imaginations of uneducated peasants, were it not for a surviving example. At Whitby Museum, North Yorkshire, a Hand of Glory from nearby Castleton is on display. Found in 1935 in an old house, it is worth noting that Hand of Glory superstitions are strongest in the folklore of the North of England. This particular example was concealed within a wall – either a thief’s hiding place, or perhaps to turn the spell on would-be robbers. The Hand of Glory is also recorded in Continental European folklore.