Hand of Glory

A Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man, often specified as being the left hand, or, if the person was hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed." Old European beliefs attribute great powers to a Hand of Glory combined with a candle made from fat from the corpse of the same malefactor who died on the gallows. The candle so made, lighted, and placed (as if in a candlestick) in the Hand of Glory would have rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented. 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. The concept inspired short stories and poems in the 19th century. History of the term 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 , 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 . Powers attributed