Hello. Every so often we like to address one of history's more bonkers legends. You may have seen
our earlier video where Kyle talks about witch bottles as a means of defense against witchcraft,
well i'm here today to talk to you about using black magic to commit a burglary. Yeah. Black
magic in the form of a Hand of Glory. It's THE must-have criminal gadget of the 17th century.
So what is it? Well a hand of glory is an embalmed, nay mummified hand of another criminal that
is said to bestow magical assistance from beyond the grave, although if i was looking
for assistance, I'd probably not be looking for the assistance of somebody who was previously
caught for his crimes, and previously executed. But, anyway, once you've got your pickled hand
it can be used as a candle or a candle holder and it was said to have magical powers which included,
depending on which books you read, the following: Giving light only to the holder whilst others
are left in darkness or alternatively it can make the holder invisible. Being able to burn forever
once alight without being consumed and having the power to open any lock in the vicinity. Now as you
can see these are properties that would assist a thief to enter a house without opposition, however,
it doesn't stop there and there are further powers that crop up in pretty much all the legends. Using
this as a candle you light each of the fingers and each burning finger will keep one sleeping person
in the dwelling asleep no matter what you do to wake them. You can make as much noise as you like.
If a finger will not light then what that tells you is for each finger that doesn't light there
is a person that is awake in that house. So you have an alarm (ish). The trouble is there's
a major flaw in this plan. Can you see it? Well in fact there are several. First the hand doesn't
differentiate between three people asleep in a house or five people in the house, three of whom
are asleep. As pre-burglary intelligence goes this is not filling me with confidence and
certainly not eliminating sufficient risk for me to go to the trouble, and revulsion, of making one.
Secondly, you know, a couple of rumoured witches aside, hands only have a maximum of five digits
which is going to make the hand of glory useless when attempting to gain entry to a reasonably
wealthy family dwelling. Once you've got a husband, a wife, three children, and a man servant with a
blunderbuss, I start to get uncertain about who's awake. So not exactly the best gadget but they're
still there. So how does it work? and I'm going to use the word 'work' very lightly here. It's what's
known as sympathetic or imitative magic, and it's a cast iron belief in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. If something shares the characteristics of something else then it has the powers and
properties typical of those characteristics. You see this a lot in early folk medicine
where red plants are considered good for the blood, or daisies being good for poor eyesight and you
see it go on through time through the legends of voodoo etc, this is all sympathetic magic,
and what better to give the superstitious criminal the edge than the powers of another criminal? The
darkest of criminals, and the darker the soul the more the darkness will be your friend. Getting this?
Yeah. So how do you make one? Well there are manuals believe it or not. One of the earliest records that
we have for the hand of glory comes from the Compendium Maleficarum or the 'Book of Witches'
which is a ponderous term written in 1608 by Italian priest Francesco Guazzo.
It is entirely in Latin but don't let that worry you. There was a complete translation done by a chap
called Montague Summers in 1929, and he is a very interesting fellow, as well because he did a lot of
work in looking at witchcraft and the occult. If we take a look at his list of prior works we have
"The History of Witchcraft and Demonology", "Geography of Witchcraft", "The vampire in Europe", "Witchcraft and
Black Magic" and then, bizarrely, in the middle of all this he writes a biography of Jane Austen.
Go figure, but i digress. While the Compendium Maleficarum mentions them it is a witch hunter's
manual so it's not going to teach you how to make one. For that recipe we need to turn
to an occult grimoire known as the "Petit Albert" from 1706, or to give it its full title, "Secrets Merveilleux de la Magie Naturelle
et Cabalistique du Petit Albert" catchy eh? This tells us how to make a version that gives light only
to the beholder and keeps sleeping people asleep. So first of all "take the right or left hand of a
felon". Hang on! There are other hands? anyway, "take the right or left hand of a felon who is hanging
from a gibbet beside a highway. Wrap it in part of a funeral pall and so wrapped squeeze it well"
and this makes me sure it's all dried out there's no blood in it etc.
"then put it into an earthenware vessel with zymat (which is copper carbonate) nitre (which is saltpeter)
salt and long peppers (which you can buy from amazon), the whole well powdered. Leave it in this
vessel for a fortnight then take it out and expose it to full sunlight during the dog days until
it becomes quite dry." For those of you are not initiated with that, the dog days are basically the
days of summer between mid-july to mid-september. "Next make a kind of candle from the fat of a
gibbeted felon, (probably use the same felon that you were using before) virgin wax, sesame and ponie"
Ponie being horse-dung because this is the 17th century and it's got to involve some
form of bodily waste or then it's just not going to work, and virgins wax is just beeswax by the way.
"and use the hand of glory as a candlestick to hold this candle when lighted and then those
in every place into which you go with this baneful instrument shall remain motionless."
This version has it holding it in a candle but if you're going to use it to determine
the number of people in the house then you simply just dip the fingers of it in the wax and light
them accordingly. Simple and multi-purpose. Helpfully the Petit-Albert also tells us how
you can defend against this sort of thing which, in typical fashion, is just as grim. It states
"the hand of glory would become ineffective and thieves would not be able to utilize it
if you were to rub the threshold or other parts of the house by which they may enter with an oil
composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, and the blood of the screech owl
and this substance must be compounded during the dog days. I'll confess once having done this the
thieves might not be able to get in but i can imagine any of my family and friends are not
going to want to come in either, and plus since I'm spending the summer rendering chicken fat
owl blood and cat guts i'm fairly certain they're not going to want to come around beforehand either.
Now like many curious books of history we can look through the Petit-Albert online we will put
a link to it in the description. There is an English version and it not only contains this
recipe but other supposedly useful cons scams and potions etc. It will teach you how to turn
lead into gold, how to create fake money with tin, and how to create imitation pearls and there's an
uncanny resemblance to the sort of stuff and style that you could get out of the "Anarchist Cookbook"
in the 1970s and it shows i think beautifully that things don't really change. So did these things
really exist? Well yes they did. There are people confessing to making them throughout the Scottish
witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, although those confessions given the level of
torture available are probably not that reliable, but for good evidence of an existence of a hand
of glory you could, at least until lockdown came in, go and see one they have one in the collection
of the Whitby museum. it's fairly grotesque but it is still in existence. So when everything opens up
please go and see it because you're not going to find one of these anywhere else. So there you have
it, if you want to become a much better burglar or you want to go in for a more unusual method
of home security, you now know how it's just a shame we haven't gibbeted a criminal since 1832
but, you know, them's the breaks. Stay safe. Don't have nightmares. Thanks for watching. Bye