Hand of Glory

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.

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.

[11][12] 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.

[13][14] The Petit Albert also provides a way to shield a house from the effects of the Hand of Glory:[9] The Hand of Glory would become ineffective, and thieves would not be able to utilize it, if you were to rub the threshold or other parts of the house by which they may enter with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, and the blood of the screech-owl; this substance must be compounded during the dog-daysAn actual Hand of Glory is kept at the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire, England, together with a text published in a book from 1823.

[15] In this manuscript text, the way to make the Hand of Glory is as follows:[16] It must be cut from the body of a criminal on the gibbet; pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, then laid at a crossroads, then hung on a church door for one night while the maker keeps watch in the porch-"and if it be that no fear hath driven you forth from the porch ... then the hand be true won, and it be yours"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 down the Wych Elm?

[19] Guy de Maupassant made his debut with "La main d'écorché" ("The Flayed Hand") (1875) one of his first stories in the Lorraine Almanac Pont-à-Mousson under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier.

[23] A Hand of Glory appears briefly and is mentioned by name in the 1973 classic British folk horror film The Wicker Man.