For quite a few years now I have been interested in what for want of a better phrase `the magickal preparation and use of relics', i.e. the magickal use of preserved/prepared, in part or whole, animals (including human) , The Waters of the Moon, The Cronnekdhu, Hand of Glory, the use of Skulls and Bones etc. By and large I have often found the historical records and even contemporary reports of the preparation rites and use of these implements to be rather incomplete. But here I think I have found a real gem, containing as it does both the preparation rites and the rite of Claiming.
Though the relic in this case may be different in nature, it may, I suspect be of particular interest to students of the `One'. It's a summery of a rite found in a manuscript book compiled By George Calvert of Kerby Moorside, North Yorkshire, in 1823, now stored at the Whitby museum in Yorkshire, enjoy.
"Cut the hand from a criminal hanging in chains on a gibbet, by
night. Keep it for thirteen days in complete darkness in a strong salt pickle mingled with the urine of man, woman, dog, stallion and a mare; turn it over every night. Take it out, and dry it in sunlight for three days. Then bend the fingers round a stick, so that a candle thrust between them will be tightly gripped, and hang the hand on a wire a good way up inside your chimney, where it must stay for a (Luna) month.
During this time burn no coal on your fire, only wood. On each of the first thirteen nights of the month, throw a bundle of moist herbs and mown grass onto the fire, to give off `a goodly steam and fume'. The herbs should include Sage, Rue, Green larch, Ash, Oak, Ragwort, Nightshade, Colts foot, and field Yarrow. By the end of the month the hand should be hard and brown, ready to be `claimed'. Great care is needed in `claiming', otherwise it all fails.
Drive a nail into an ancient Oak, and hang hand there three times overnight; for another three nights lay it at midnight at the centre of a crossroads and leave it there for one hour. If neither man nor beast has moved it from it's place on the Oak and on the crossroad, you can proceed to the third rite, which is to hang it over the keyhole of a church door and keep watch beside it in the porch all night till cockcrow, `and if it be that no fear hath driven you forth from the porch…then the hand be true won, and it be yours'.
To make a supply of candles, take three pounds of tallow from three types of animal (but not Sheep or Pig), mix with a few drops of a man's blood and a pea-size lump of fat from the body of either a man or a woman. The wick must include a few strands from a hangman's rope. Only milk or blood can quench it and break the magic sleep it has caused."
Benna'sywes
JackDaw
