"Hand of glory"

Recently, I got an e-mail update from Bandcamp. "Dear folks, Sons of Perdition will be performing a bit over half an hour of songs from almost all of our albums at the Hand of Glory Folklore Festival in Whitby, England. We aren't playing anything from Gathered Blood, because it was a bit difficult to adapt to an acoustic duo, which is how we plan to perform. It's a three day festival of folkloric weirdness, but we're playing on Saturday, May 2. Hopefully we'll see some of you there. If so, please say hi because I still have no idea who listens to our miserable dreck." In an e-mail Zebulon Whatley lowers the expectations. "Hopefully not a complete failure. A series of small failures is an acceptable outcome. I haven’t played live in around a decade and we haven’t practiced much so a lot can go wrong." I think Zebulon Whatley got this. He is experienced and judicious. It's wise to keep it simple when you're performing as an acoustic duo. And, it isn't the Glastonbury festival. The "hand of glory" refers to a mummified severed human hand. It was given to Whitby Museum in 1935 and is the only alleged hand of its type known to be preserved. A "hand of glory" was supposedly the carefully prepared and pickled right hand of a felon, cut off whilst the body still hung from the gallows and used by burglars to send sleepers in a house into a coma from which they were unable to wake. A gruesome history and perfect setting for a folklore festival.