Fitz
speaker
397 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Fitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Others stated that the hand must be smoked with herbs and hay for a month, then hung on an oak tree for three nights, then laid at a crossroads, and then hung on a church door whilst the maker kept watch in the porch, and only if they managed to stay the whole night without getting spooked and running away would the charm work.
Anybody following these recipes must have been a very determined person indeed. What they all seem to agree on, however, is that the hand must either hold a candle or the fingers of the hand must be doused in fat and wax to become candles themselves. I'll leave it up to your imaginations where the fat for the candles is supposed to be obtained.
In the latter variation, if any of the fingers refused to light, it was a warning to the thief that someone in the house was still awake, but once it was completely lit, the only thing that could put it out was milk or blood. Now, some great grisly folklore this may be, but none of this sounds in any way glorious, does it? So, where does the name the Hand of Glory come from?
Well, curiously, it's said to stem from the French word for mandrake, a plant that has centuries of folklore surrounding it, dating all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons. The 10th century Old English herbarium describes Mandrake as large and glorious to see. You will recognise it because it shines at night like a lantern.
The herbarium goes on to give detailed instructions for how to gather the Mandrake root. Necessary, so it says, because its power is so great and powerful that it wants to flee quickly when an impure person approaches it.
Later in history, complicated instructions for how to gather mandrake not only persisted, but evolved to the point where other people or animals had to be tricked into pulling up the mandrake as the plant cursed any who dared to pull up its roots, and the doomed gatherer would immediately drop dead upon extracting the plant from the earth.
I can only imagine that this is where some of the screaming mandrake folklore of later centuries originated from. But so far, none of this seems to have much of a connection to a disembodied hand.
Mandrake is famous for its twisted roots looking a bit like a human figure, for those with a good imagination anyway, and by way of sympathetic magic, this may be the reason it was reported to cure all manner of ailments, including headaches, sleeplessness, gout, earache and nerve spasms amongst others, according to the Old English Herbarium.
but none of the purported magical healing benefits seem to be associated with the hand specifically. According to the Oxford University Press' Oxford reference, the first reference to a hand of glory in English involved keeping a piece of mandrake root as a charm to make coins multiply, and dates from 1707.
Here, the French word for mandrake, mandragoire, from a corruption of the Latin plant name mandragora, has been interpreted into English literally, ma meaning hand, de meaning of, and gloire meaning glory.
But that still doesn't bring us to disembodied hands, and rather frustratingly, the closest we can get as to how the name of the herbal money-making charm made the leap to a dead man's hand is that according to folklore, mandrake plants were said to grow underneath gallows, which is exactly where you would find the main ingredient for the robbery version of the Hand of Glory charm.
My first thought was that maybe the term had evolved over time and gone from describing a money charm to a criminal's charm as the folklore travelled and took on local flavour. But the money charm referenced by Oxford University Press dates to pretty much the same time as the first editions of Le Petit Albert were printed.
And even more confusingly, this grimoire actually lists both charms, using the term the hand of glory for the disembodied hand in a manner that implies most people will have heard of it before, enlisting the good luck charm for gambling under a chapter titled Mandrakes.
That charm is made from white briony root, also known as English mandrake, and sounds very much like our 1707 Hand of Glory money charm reference. Le Petit Albert doesn't just describe mandrakes as a plant ingredient, though. It also uses the term mandrake to describe small goblin-like creatures who could be tricked into a person's employ, or convinced to assist one in finding roadside treasure.
It even gives details of one character who claimed to keep a soothsaying mandrake in a jar, but they were discovered to be a fraud. The whole topic is very confusing, could likely fill an entire book itself, and still get me no closer to how the disembodied hand in the small glass case in Panet Park Museum got its name.
Although I have now learned several recipes for charm making that involve watering things at sunrise with bat-infused cow whey, if I were so inclined. So every day's a school day, I guess. But it's time to move on now to other tales and other parts of Whitby, with just one more display of the Panit Park Museum that will take us on to our next destination, and a haunted house.
And in fact, it was a display that we've already mentioned, the wonderfully named Cabinet of Miscellaneous Curiosities. But more accurately, we should call it Dr. Ripley's Cabinet of Curiosities.
Just downhill from Whitby Museum, near the bottom of Westcliffe, between Panit Park and the Swing Bridge and Harbour, an unassuming late Georgian house sits right on the corner at the intersection of Brunswick Street, Baxtergate and Victoria Square.
Hemmed in by historic buildings on all sides, with St Hilda's Catholic Church in front of it, the Church of St John the Evangelist to the side of it, the Old George Hotel behind it and Old Bagdale Hall on the opposite side of the road
Dr Ripley's house, a squarish three-storey brick affair and the fourth house in a terraced row is certainly not the building you might have guessed to be haunted out of all the more obvious looking contenders surrounding it. But look a little bit closer and you might notice something odd.
Showing 101–120 of 397 · page 6 of 20
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