with a pin in the grass blades, so many rents will there be in the face of the thief.
Wild and varied as I know the superstitions of my native county to be, I must plead guilty to some astonishment at discovering among them what Brand calls “the foreign superstition of the Hand of Glory, once firmly believed in many parts of France, Germany, and Spain.” Sir Walter Scott brings it forward as a foreign charm. It is the German adventurer, Dousterswivel, who is conversant with it, and who (in The Antiquary) describes it thus racily to the assembled party among the ruins at St. Ruth’s: “Why, my goot master Oldenbuck, you will only laugh at me. But de Hand of Glory is very well known in de countries where your worthy progenitors did live; and it is a hand cut off from a dead man as has been hanged for murder, and dried very nice in de shmoke of juniper-wood; and if you put a little of what you call yew wid your juniper it will not be any better—that is, it will not be no worse; then you do take something of de fatsh of de bear, and of de badger, and of de great eber (as you do call de grand boar), and of de little sucking child as has not been christened (for dat is very essentials); and you do make a candle, and put into de Hand of Glory at de proper hour and minute, with de proper ceremonish; and he who seeksh for treasuresh shall never find none at all.”[1]
Dousterswivel asserts that the monks used the Hand of Glory as a spell to conceal treasures, Southey places it in the hands of
- ↑ The Hand of Glory is the hand of a man who has been hung, and is prepared in the following manner: Wrap the hand in apiece of winding-sheet, drawing it tight so as to squeeze out the little blood which may remain; then place it in an earthenware vessel with saltpetre, salt, and long pepper, all carefully and thoroughly powdered. Let it remain a fortnight in this pickle till it is well dried, then expose it to the sun in the dog-days till it is completely parched, or, if the sun be not powerful enough, dry it in an oven heated with vervain and fern. Next make a candle with the fat of a hung man, virgin wax, and Lapland sesame. The Hand of Glory is used to hold this candle when it is lighted. Wherever one goes with this contrivance those it approaches are rendered incapable of motion as though they were dead.—Colin de Planey’s Dictionnaire Infernal, 1818. See also Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, p. 1027. There is a Catalonian ballad to the same effect in Ferd. Wolf’s Proben Portug. u. Katalan. Volksromanzen, Wien, 1853, p. 146.—S. B. G.
