The Secret History of Witches & Witchcraft, Part 4: Hand of Glory

     Today’s entry reminds me of a Dungeon’s and Dragon’s campaign I ran many years ago. It was about an ancient wizard’s magically preserved hand and the quest to retrieve it from an evil necromancer (wizard of the dead).  I really had no clue that the Hand of Glory was a real thing, I always just assumed it was made up by the D&D guru’s but just like most things in any Fantasy novel or game from D&D to Harry Potter are steeped in real ancient myth and legend.  Wait until you read what these hands were used for! It is hard to believe some of this stuff is real, but it makes things so much more fascinating. I am going to get right into what the Encyclopedia od Witches & Witchcraft has to say about Hand of Glory, remember this is a real thing that was done not too long ago in the past.

Hand of Glory: The severed hand of a hanged murderer, magically preserved, once used as a charm in black magic spells and was believed to aid burglars in breaking into homes and buildings.

The hand of glory was the right hand of a murderer, ideally severed while the corpse still swung from the gallows or cut during an eclipse of the Moon. It was wrapped in a shroud, squeezed of blood and pickled for two weeks in an earthenware jar with salt, long peppers and saltpeter. It was then either dried in an oven with vervain, an herb believed to repel demons, or laid out to dry in the sun, preferably during the dog days of August.

Once preserved, the hand was fitted with candles between the fingers. The candles, called “dead man’s candles,” were made from the murderer’s fat, with the wick being made from his hair. In another method of curing, the hand of glory was bled, dried and dipped in wax, so that the fingers themselves could be lit as candles.

With the candles or fingers burning, the hand of glory supposedly had the power to freeze people in their footsteps and render them speechless. Burglars lit hands of glory before breaking into a house, confident that the charm would keep the occupants in a deep sleep while they plundered the household. If the thumb refused to burn, it meant someone in the house was awake and could not be charmed. According to lore, once a hand was lit, nothing but milk could extinguish it.

As a counter-charm, homeowners made ointments from the blood of screech owls, the fat of white hens and the bile of black cats and smeared it on their thresholds.

Hands of glory were linked to witches during the witch-hunt centuries. In 1588 two German women, Nichel and Bessers, who were accused of witchcraft and the exhumation of corpses, admitted they poisoned helpless people after lighting hands of glory to immobilize them. John Fain, who was severely tortured in his witch trial in Scotland in 1590, confessed to using a hand of glory to break into a church, where he performed a service to the devil. (The Encyclopedia of Witches & Witchcraft, 2^nd edition,  Rosemary Ellen Guiley)

     So, there you have it. I think this may be one of the more interesting things I have found in recent weeks and I feel like I will have to do some more research on this. I wrote about Australian aborigines using Bone Pointing as a method of execution and how their absolute belief in the ritual made it work psychologically, so it is very possible that folks in the medieval ages truly believed the power of these charms and spells. These people really believed this stuff worked and with the right amount of luck and a little skill, I could see how a successful burglar could have imagined that his hand of glory helped in his break in. Just having something like the hand could give a person more confidence and as I have stated in previous posts, the power of suggestion and ancient beliefs can go a long way. An enterprising person could have robbed graves and made hands of glory to sell to nefarious folks for a pretty penny. As long as the people believed they were getting a real deal murderer’s hand they couldn’t care less. The hands just gave these criminals that little boost of motivation they needed. You have to remember this is the stuff these people believed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years and even after the church cracked down a lot of common folk still believed in the stuff, they just did it quietly. Of course, the witches caught would say anything under the duress of torture and witch-hunters and inquisitors would often force them into horrifying confessions. The torturer would say something like, “You used a Hand of Glory to break into the church, correct?”  The tortured witch would reply, “Yes,” and so now the inquisitors than had the fodder they needed to fan the flames of hate and ignorance. I’m certain medieval burglars used severed hands dipped in wax to assure a good plunder, but we also had homeowners butchering poor little owls and cats just to smear blood or bile on a doorway in hopes of stopping the powerful hands of glory because as with any sort of magic or charm there is a counter measure. The power of belief and ritual goes both ways as we have seen in previous posts as well. So, we have a thief walking up to a house, ready to light his hand of glory and do his thieving until he sees the screech owl blood and black cat bile smeared in the doorway. He decides the home’s magic is more powerful then his own and he moves on down the block to look for a dwelling that isn’t protected. Much like now a days, a thief will case his potential target and if a home has a sign saying protected by such and such security, they will move onto the next house.  Owl blood and cat bile was the Brink’s Home Security system of the Dark Ages, I suppose.

In conclusion, not only was today’s post interesting and brought forth a lot of intriguing ideas, it once again shows just how much faith and belief the people of the dark/middle ages had and how much they actually believed in superstition and magick.  I often wonder how these beliefs come to be. Who was the first witch or burglar to use a murderer’s severed hand as a candelabra and why did it become such a powerful and well-known tool for witches and thieves?  These are the kind of things that make this research fun and intriguing. I am going to dig more into these hands and I’ll try to track down just were it could have come from. Until then, I hope you all enjoyed this post and look forward to sharing many more with you all. Have a great day and I shall return soon with another weird and wacky witch post! PEACE!