Hand of Glory

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, 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. The method of making a hand of glory is described in "Petit Albert", and in the Compendium Maleficarum.

Etymologist W.W. 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. Skeat writes: "The identification of the hand of glory with the mandrake is clinched by the statement in Cockayne's Leechdoms, i. 245, that the mandrake 'shineth by night altogether like a lamp.'" (Cockayne in turn is quoting Pseudo-Apuleius, in a translation of a Saxon manuscript of his Herbarium.)