The Hand of the Mysteries, and the two men who read it

An open right hand stands against a field of night. A key sits on the little fingertip, a lantern on the ring, a sun on the middle, a star on the index, a crown on the thumb, and in the palm a fish swims inside an oval of flame. J. Augustus Knapp painted it in 1928 for Manly P. Hall, and Hall printed a credit line under it that most reproductions cut away: Redrawn from an early 18th century water color. (Artist unknown.)

Redrawn is the word to hold on to. The picture is a copy, and the thing it copies had already been read by somebody else, in print, with the same seven signs in the same seven places. That older emblem circulated in the seventeenth century under the name of Isaac Hollandus as Die Hand der Philosophen. Hall knew it and says so.

So there are two decodings of one picture, roughly two and a half centuries apart, and they do not agree. That disagreement is the most useful thing in this archive, and it is worth going through slowly.

Where they agree

Exactly one place: the palm.

The fish is mercury and the flame-bounded sea in which it swims is sulphur.

Manly P. Hall, 1928, the caption to the plate

The older hand says the same, and goes further: the fish is mercury and it is the beginning. Two readings separated by two hundred and fifty years, working from the same drawing, land on the same two substances in the same oval. On every other part of the hand they pull apart.

Where they part

For Hollandus the fingers are a shelf. Saltpetre, vitriol, sal ammoniac, alum, common salt. They are things you can weigh out, and the text is blunt about who is allowed to know which is which: nobody understands the hand, he writes, without first taking the philosophers' oath.

the crownthe starthe lanternthe keythe sunthe fishthe eye

For Hall the same five fingers are not substances at all. They are grades of light.

The key is the Mysteries themselves, without whose aid man cannot unlock the numerous chambers of his own being.

Hall, on the little finger

The lantern is human knowledge, for it is a spark of the Universal Fire captured in a man-made vessel.

Hall, on the ring finger

Every word in that second line is doing work. It is a spark and not the fire. It is captured and not given. And the vessel is man-made, which is Hall telling you what he thinks human knowledge is worth and what it is worth against. Then the middle finger carries the sun, the light of the world; the index carries a six-pointed star, the Universal Light; and the thumb carries the crown.

Absolute Light, unknown and unrevealed, whose power shines through all the lesser lights.

Hall, on the thumb

Read the two lists side by side and the difference is not a difference of opinion about symbols. It is a difference about what kind of thing the picture is. Hollandus is describing a procedure with materials in it. Hall is describing a mind with faculties in it. The drawing did not change. What a reader was expected to be looking for did.

What Knapp added

Knapp's plate carries two things neither text mentions. Four eyes, set in pale roundels at the corners, and the wings that frame the whole picture and run down both sides. Hall's caption names neither.

So the archive marks the eyes and leaves the wings unmarked, and says on the page that it is leaving them unmarked rather than guessing. There are readings available for both. They are somebody's readings, and nobody who wrote them was in the room.

Hall does not agree with himself either

The other thing worth noticing is that Hall reads the whole hand three ways in one caption and never chooses. It is the hand of the philosopher extended to those who enter the Mysteries, which is an offer. It is a Master Mason's grip, which is a test. And it is the four worlds of the Qabbalah laid on one body, which is a diagram. Those are three different pictures.

This archive does not choose for him. Whether they are one idea or three borrowed ideas laid over the same drawing is not answered by anything held here, and the record says so.

A symbol is a place where readings pile up

Both texts reach a reader at one remove, and the notes on the plate say so line by line: Hall's caption here is a transcription not yet checked against the printed 1928 page, and Hollandus arrives through an English translation made in 1986. Set that aside and look at what has actually moved. The picture has not, not since 1928, and not since whoever painted the watercolour behind it. Everything that moved was brought to it by readers. A symbol holds no fixed meaning waiting to be looked up; it collects them, one man and one book and one year at a time, and the hand on that plate has been collecting for a century.