Hand of Glory

Her strongest piece of evidence was that severed hand, the one found scattered in the dirt away from the body.

To Murray, it pointed to a piece of dark folklore called the Hand of Glory.

Traditionally, a Hand of Glory was made from the severed hand of a hanged criminal, dried and turned into a gruesome candle.

The wax was sometimes rendered from the dead person's own fat, and the belief was that anyone asleep in the house would stay asleep while it burned, leaving thieves free to rob the place.

To Murray, Bella's separated hand indicated a similar idea at work.

It doesn't close the case, but it does something the witches and the spies never managed.

It turns Bella back into an ordinary woman instead of a symbol, and it points at the plainest and saddest version of what likely happened to her.

So take your pick, a witchcraft ritual and a severed hand of glory, a wartime spy who knew too much, or something far more ordinary, a domestic murder, a private grudge that we'll simply never be able to name.

So apologies if I gabble.

Thank you for coming to day three of the Hand of Glory Folklore Festival.

My name is Bob Fisher.

I am your host all day.

Now, we can't come to Whitby without talking about one of its most famous residents.

And the name of the festival.

And the name of the festival, the Hand of Glory.

Which we've just been to the museum to see.

What interests me far more are the numerous occult connections that have become attached to the case.

So in this episode, we're going to look at the case itself, the Hand of Glory, two grimoires connected to the tradition of the Hand of Glory.

Margaret Murray is sometimes referred to as the grandmother of Wicca and her interpretation of the possible occult elements of the case alongside traditions and folklore surrounding witches, bodies and burial within trees.

So that is the strange and tangled path we are heading down today.

Over the centuries, this practice of trapping malevolent spirits blended with other folklore traditions, like the African diasporic bottle tree legend, where upside down glass bottles were placed on branches... to snare wandering entities in the night.

Whether it was a face-down burial in the soil or a spiritual trap hung from a branch, history shows us just how far people would go to ensure the dead stayed dead.

Murray claimed the hand was deliberately severed to create a hand of glory.

To understand why someone might hack the hand from a fresh corpse in Hagley Woods, we have to look to the darkest corners of European grimoires.

The End

And now, Orson Welles as Harry Lyme, the third man in The Hand of Glory.

I wanted to get away from gold and away from France.

On the boat for the Channel Crossing, all I cared for was being quiet.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Orson Welles returns in just a moment as the third man.

THE END And now Orson Welles as the third man continues with The Hand of Glory.

They were, to put it mildly, an odd couple, those two old gentlemen with their velvet smoking jackets.

The longer the case went unsolved, the more spectacular the theories became, transitioning from a local domestic dispute into international espionage and ancient black magic.

Theory 1 – The Hand of Glory When the war ended, an esteemed anthropologist named Margaret Murray proposed a terrifying idea.

She noted that Bella's right hand had been severed and buried separately, and that the body was entombed in a witch elm, a treat deeply associated with the occult.

Murray suggested Bella was murdered by a local coven of dark practitioners.

In old black magic, the severed right hand of a murdered person could be dried and used as a hand of glory.

A macabre candle said to render the inhabitants of a house paralyzed by the witch robbed them blind.

Theory number two, the cabaret spy.

What? Push it onto the head? Come on, just say it.

Hand of Glory is a bad thing.

We don't want that.

There.

The story is connected with a dingy, wizen-faced portrait in an oval frame, generally known by the name of Uncle Stephen, though from the style of his cut velvet it is evident that some generations must have passed away since any living being could have stood towards him in that degree of consanguinity.

The nurse's story, The Hand of Glory.

Malefica quidem auguriatrix in Anglia fuit, quam demonis horribiliter extraxerunt, et imponente super equum terribilem, per aera repuerunt, clamoresque terribilis, ut ferunt, per quattuor ferme miliaria audiebantur.

Nuremberg Chronicle.

As she spoke, the beautiful apparition held up her delicate hand.

From the tip of each of her long taper fingers issued a lambent flame of such surpassing brilliancy as would have plunged a whole gas company into despair.

It was a hand of glory.

Footnote.