Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - May 30, 2025


Pine Cones： Hand of Glory ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Spill the Tea Leaves #1 ｜ Hadestown, Beating the Bounds Spill the Tea Leaves #2 ｜ Sinners, The Ugly Stepsister, The Sleeping Beauties

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

125.14

Word count

1,909

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 hand of glory hand of glory let those who are asleep remain asleep in a sleep that is fast
00:00:14.560 and deep but those who are awake be wide awake
00:00:18.760 welcome to another pine cones bite-sized lore from rowan and pine today we're lighting the
00:00:33.720 wick on something a little sinister for all of you dark history fanatics a grisly relic from
00:00:40.820 the crossroads of folklore and true crime you may want to check your locks tonight this is the story
00:00:47.420 of the Hand of Glory. According to old European belief, a candle made from the severed, dried hand
00:00:59.040 of a criminal who had been hanged, known as the Hand of Glory, had supernatural powers.
00:01:05.520 This was no quaint superstition. The recipe for creating one is laid out in chilling detail
00:01:11.600 in The Secret du Petit Albert, a book of magical recipes translated from Latin into French in the
00:01:18.200 18th century and also in the Compendian Maleficarum. The hand was usually the right hand of a felon,
00:01:27.040 cut off while the body still dangled from the gallows. It had been harvested fresh before the
00:01:33.080 body cooled. Once removed, the hand was pickled or mummified, often using a mixture of saltpeter,
00:01:41.860 salt, fat and spices, and then dried under the sun or in an oven lined with horse dung.
00:01:53.840 In a tale from the Inglesby legends, published in 1905 by Richard Harris Barham, a witch gleefully
00:02:02.180 reciting her prayers backwards just like Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins warned us
00:02:07.400 creates a hand of glory from the remains of three hanged murderers. The text reads
00:02:14.700 and now before that old woman's door where not that's good may be hand in hand the murderers
00:02:22.700 stand one by two by three. Oh tis a horrible sight to view in that horrible hovel that horrible
00:02:30.500 crew by the pale blue glare of that flickering flame doing the deed that hath never a name
00:02:36.740 tis awful to hear those words of fear the prayer muttered backwards and said with a sneer tis awful
00:02:43.720 to see on that old woman's knee the dead shriveled hand as she clasps it with glee and now with care
00:02:52.160 the five locks of hair from the skull of the gentleman dangling up there with the grease and
00:02:59.060 the fat of a black tomcat she hastens to mix and twist into wicks and one on the thumb and each
00:03:07.580 finger to fix now open the lock to the dead man's knock fly bolt and bar and band nor move nor
00:03:16.980 swerve joint muscle or nerve at the spell of the dead man's hand sleep all who sleep wake all who
00:03:25.680 Wake, but be as the dead, for the dead man's sake.
00:03:41.640 Some versions of the legend say that the hand itself acted as a gruesome candle holder.
00:03:48.260 A wax candle would be placed between the posed fingers.
00:03:51.260 In the more common tellings like Barham's, the fingers themselves were each lit.
00:03:58.560 Each flame on a corresponding finger had meaning.
00:04:02.220 If one wouldn't catch fire, it meant that someone in the house was still awake.
00:04:10.020 And what was the hand used for?
00:04:12.840 Well, burglary.
00:04:15.440 Thieves believed that the hand of glory could render the residence of a home into a magical coma.
00:04:21.300 a sleep so deep they couldn't be roused.
00:04:25.140 Some versions even claim the hand could open locked doors,
00:04:29.000 freeze people in place, or reveal hidden treasure.
00:04:35.840 The name Hand of Glory comes from the French Man de Gloire,
00:04:40.780 which in turn may have been inspired by the mandrake root.
00:04:44.780 In folklore, mandrakes were thought to grow under gallows,
00:04:47.820 springing from the bodily fluids of the hanged.
00:04:51.660 They glowed in the dark and even resembled the shape of a hand.
00:04:55.980 They were dangerous, mystical and deadly,
00:04:59.140 just like the Hand of Glory itself.
00:05:03.400 The relic wasn't only legend.
00:05:06.280 The Whitby Museum in Yorkshire, England
00:05:08.240 has the only known surviving Hand of Glory.
00:05:11.560 It's a blackened, gnarled thing with outstretched fingers, 0.75
00:05:15.020 rumoured to still carry a malevolent charge and it wasn't the only grisly hand reserved for dark
00:05:21.040 purposes. At the haunch of Venison pub in Wiltshire a mummified hand was displayed for decades
00:05:28.100 alongside an old pack of playing cards. The local story went that it belonged to a gambler who was
00:05:36.180 caught cheating during a game of whist. In a rage a butcher chopped off the man's hand and hurled it
00:05:42.320 into the fireplace. The scorched relic was rediscovered during renovations in 1911 locked
00:05:48.640 in a glass case. That is until 2010 when it was stolen. Poetic. In Pomerania in 1834 a soldier
00:05:59.140 named Frederick Berger was arrested for the murder of a herdsman. The victim's corpse had
00:06:04.800 been mutilated and Berger confessed to cutting off a piece to make what he called a thief's
00:06:10.340 candle. He denied the murder itself, but was executed anyway. A decade later, a sailor named
00:06:17.000 Memel confessed to the crime. Berger, it turned out, had stumbled upon a fresh corpse.
00:06:24.240 In Germany, during the 1905 demolition of a fortified town in North Rhine, Westphalia,
00:06:31.240 workers found a hand preserved in limestone. It became known as the perjury hand,
00:06:37.060 said to have been severed from someone who broke an oath.
00:06:40.560 It was kept in a wooden box at St Brigida's Catholic Church
00:06:43.880 as a warning to would-be liars.
00:06:50.640 Several stories of this terrible hand
00:06:53.180 are relayed in Henderson's Folklore of the Northern Counties of England.
00:06:57.640 Here is one of them.
00:06:59.320 One dark night, after the house had been closed,
00:07:03.160 there came a tap at the door of a lone inn
00:07:05.600 in the midst of a barren moor.
00:07:08.880 The door was opened and there stood without,
00:07:12.660 shivering and shaking a poor beggar,
00:07:15.160 his rags soaked with rain and his hands white with coal.
00:07:20.220 He asked piteously for lodging
00:07:22.420 and it was cheerfully granted him,
00:07:25.480 though there was not a spare bed in the house,
00:07:28.200 he might lie along on the mat before the kitchen fire and welcome.
00:07:31.940 all in the house went to bed except the servant lassie who from the kitchen could see into the
00:07:39.400 large room through a small pane of glass let into the door when everyone saved the beggar was out
00:07:45.760 of the room she observed the man himself draw himself up off the floor seat himself at the
00:07:52.420 table extract a brown withered human hand from his pocket and set it upright in the candlestick
00:08:00.020 he then anointed the fingers and applying a match to them they began to flame filled with horror
00:08:08.440 the girl rushed up the back stairs and endeavored to arouse her master and the men of the house
00:08:14.180 but all in vain they slept a charmed sleep and finding all her efforts ineffectual
00:08:21.360 she hastened downstairs again looking again through the small window she observed the fingers
00:08:28.800 of the hand flaming, but the thumb gave no light. This was because one of the inmates of the house
00:08:35.820 was not asleep. The beggar began collecting all the valuables of the house into a large sack.
00:08:44.160 No lock withstood the application of the flaming hand. Then, putting it down, the man entered an
00:08:51.000 adjoining apartment. The moment he was gone, the girl rushed in, seizing the hand, attempted to 1.00
00:08:57.900 extinguish the quivering yellow flames, which wavered at the fingers' ends. She blew at them 1.00
00:09:04.120 in vain. She poured some drops from a beer jug over them, but that only made the fingers burn
00:09:09.720 the brighter. She cast some water upon them, but still without extinguishing the light.
00:09:17.520 As a last resource, she caught up a jug of milk, and dashing it over the four lambent flames,
00:09:23.200 they went out immediately. 1.00
00:09:27.000 Uttering a piercing cry 0.98
00:09:28.520 she rushed to the door of the room the beggar had entered 0.94
00:09:31.560 and locked it.
00:09:33.440 The whole house was aroused
00:09:34.960 and the thief was secured and hung.
00:09:37.400 even in 1880s america the myth lingered at georgetown medical college a janitor with
00:09:59.200 eccentric habits stole a dissected hand from the anatomy lab his partner a poor illiterate woman
00:10:06.860 from the south had begged him to take it she believed it would bring her luck or help her
00:10:12.780 find treasure a hideous echo of the old superstition still alive and bright in the new world
00:10:19.900 some scholars believe the hand of glory is connected to ancient lightning myths
00:10:30.660 sabine baring gould always good for a spooky theory likened it to magical objects that could
00:10:36.720 break through stone and iron like Solomon Shamir, Scandinavian springwort, German luckflower
00:10:43.620 or Arabian sesame. All of them tools for unlocking secrets and most of them plants.
00:10:53.240 The dead man's candle was said to contain Lapland sesame as if the earth itself was
00:10:59.220 conspiring with the hanged man, as if the boundary between execution and enchantment was paper thin.
00:11:06.720 a thief's relic a witch's tool a warning a wonder a hand of glory burned through folklore
00:11:13.600 like a cursed torch lighting the way to both treasure and horror
00:11:20.320 but if you do find yourself the victim of a burglar with an enchanted hand
00:11:25.760 the petit albert also provides a way to shield a house from the effects of the hand of glory
00:11:30.880 it's said that the hand of glory would become ineffective and thieves would not be able to
00:11:39.200 utilize it if you were to rub the threshold or other parts of the house by which they may enter
00:11:44.620 with it with a combination of the gall of a black cat the fat of a white hen and the blood of a
00:11:51.160 screech owl the substance must be compounded during the dog days
00:11:55.540 these days the hand of glory occasionally shows up in horror fiction art video games and dark
00:12:15.860 fantasy stories as a symbol of forbidden knowledge or cursed power you'll find it in tabletop games
00:12:22.840 like Dungeons and Dragons, TV like Supernatural or indie horror films. In tattoo culture,
00:12:30.320 the Hand of Glory has found a new kind of permanence. Often inked in bold traditional
00:12:35.460 styles, it's become somewhat of a gothic emblem, a symbol of mystery, rebellion or the thin veil
00:12:42.640 between life and death. It's become a shorthand for folk magic at its most chilling. The idea
00:12:50.740 that death can be weaponised, that justice can be twisted. In that sense, the hand still
00:12:57.200 reaches into the modern world, if only through art and stories.
00:13:14.460 This was another Pinecones, short folklore episodes from Rowan and Pine.
00:13:20.740 If you enjoyed it please leave us a review, rate us on your platform of choice or check out the
00:13:27.520 Patreon where you get early access and bonus content. Until next time, keep your locks bolted
00:13:35.700 and anointed, stay away from hanged men and never ever piss off a witch. 1.00
00:13:42.420 thanks for listening and fuck yeah 1.00
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