The Dickenson County Herald

THE WHY of SUPERSTITIONS
By H. IRVING KING

THE HAND OF GLORY

PUBLICATION of the American Folk-Lore society states that the negroes of Georgia "believe in the hand of glory just as it is described in British Folk Lore." The hand of glory superstition is peculiar to European races and the Southern negroes must have imbibed it from their white neighbors. If it is more prevalent today among the negroes than among the whites the reason may be looked for in the lower general culture among the negroes. But it is not entirely extinct among the whites of the country who also retain superstitions of an analogous nature evidently derived from the hand of glory superstition. Nor is it entirely extinct in Europe in its original form.

A few generations ago this superstition was very prevalent. As late as 1853 cases in which the hand of glory figured were before the courts of the British Isles and there are many old criminal cases on record in which it played a part. As not so very long ago the hand of glory was admissible as legal evidence it is not strange that it should linger today in modern folk lore. It is a magic pertaining to thieves and midnight marauders.

The hand of glory is the hand of a man who has been hanged and in former times it was pickled in a certain prescribed manner. It is supposed when carried by burglars to cause the inhabitants of the house about to be burglarized to fall into a deep sleep. Generally, in old times, a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also been executed, was placed in the hand as in a candlestick. This increased the potency of the charm and rendered it impossible for the sleeping persons to move. The idea, as is shown by Sir James Frazer, is one of sympathetic magic. By sympathetic magic the hand and candle communicate to the inhabitants of the house the quiescence of the dead from which they are derived. A malefactor is using them, therefore the dead from whom they are taken must be a dead malefactor to strengthen the chain of sympathy. It is the same principle as that upon which the lover among certain East Indian tribes acts when he takes a handful of earth from a grave when he goes wooing at night and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house just above the place where her parents are sleeping that they may sleep "as sound as the dead," and not disturb his love making: or that which caused the ancient Greeks to use a brand from a funeral pyre to put out of commission the watch dogs when they went burglarizing.

(© by McClure Newspaper Syndicate.)