La Mano Poderosa

La Mano Poderosa, artist unknown (Mexico) 1880

 
La Mano Poderosa

Combing the thieves’ markets for macabre trinkets of faith and death is one of Mexico City’s charms. 

There is no shortage of gruesome religious folk art curiosities in Mexican history. At the flea markets, if you find a treasure you can keep it and take it home. But you will also find an endless array of colourful and bloody saints, statues, and paintings in the nation’s churches and museums, situated around altars to God and fine art from master painters, among opulent gold-covered objects of worship. 

These small and plentiful pictures are testaments of devotion from the past, reflecting the syncretism of various folkways and Catholic traditions. The small paintings, usually oil on found scraps of tin or copper, are retablos, made for tables and walls surrounding altars, also known in Mexico as laminas. They proliferated in the 1800s but date back centuries before and remain popular now.

Collectors and scholars view laminas paintings as bearing authenticity because they were created by ordinary people or local talents rather than by trained, institutionally-commissioned artists. They are “bottoms up” from the grassroots of belief rather than “top down” works approved by the authorities. They show how real people approached faith, and like folk art around the world, they show how devotion, for common people, is usually a merging of old and new cultures, institutionalized storytelling mixed with folk beliefs in magic, old ways, and older religions.

This unusual laminas shows La Mano Poderosa, or the All Powerful Hand of God. It is a recurring motif that appeared occasionally in Mexican art during the 1800s. It depicts the hand of Christ crucified, emerging from the clouds, the wound a fountain of blood filling a chalice. 

Atop each finger and thumb is a member of the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Anne, and Joachim. These are Las Cinco Personas, or the Five People, sometimes known as Los Cinqo Senores, or the Five Lords. Drinking from the chalice of blood are seven lambs. The lambs represent the seven sacraments in Catholic Christianity, and the drinking of the blood specifically represents the Eucharist or mass, when believers in communion with God and neighbours consume bread and wine to symbolize the body of Jesus.

Like most laminas, this particular rendition of the Mano Poderosa is quite small, measuring ten by seven inches.

The significance of the imagery is easy to guess: a helping hand in times of trouble. God’s hand protects the devoted from evil, or it is used to petition assistance for complicated situations beyond the scope of human hands.

Meditation on La Mano Poderosa means asking God himself for help, with the handy assistance of his back up crew, intercession from the Holy Family. 

There is a novena that accompanies this ancient imagery:

Mano de Dios, ponderosa y pronta, liberal y benigna para los que se valieren de la intercesión de sus cinco Gloriosos Dedos. JESÚS, MARÍA,  JOSÉ, JOAQUÍN Y ANNA. Cuya novena ofrece para encender la devoción, un devoto de estos Santísimos cinco SEÑOR.
(Hand of God, ponderous and prompt, liberal and benign for those who are deserving of the intercession of its five Glorious Fingers. JESUS, MARY, JOSEPH, JOACHIM and ANNE. Whose novena serves to ignite devotion, a devotion to those five Holy LORDS.)

I have not been fortunate enough to find an original All Powerful Hand of God painting in my travels. On auction websites or in high end antique stores, they are valued in the thousands of dollars, well beyond my range. I did find a small reproduction in a nicho shadowbox that I treasure, and will be content with it until I stumble on the good fortune of an original. It has been suggested that I pray the novena and meditate on La Mano Poderosa, and make my acquisition request directly. But I am admittedly the type who feels one should ask God for genuine help and strength and not selfish favours.

I am so intrigued with this particular motif that I have often used it in my own artwork, collage shrines and mixed media urban expressionist works that are themselves syncretic amalgamations of all that I absorb. The maximalism of Mexican aesthetics and the macabre folk tastes that I blame on my German ancestry are two elements of many that fuel my work. The curious artifacts and imagery that humans use as amulets, talismans, and aids for devotion get quite a bit of airtime in my artwork, alongside all manner of creative and cultural objects from the great big world. 

The hand in particular is a recurring symbol for me, not just this specific manifestation, but more generally. The hand holds for me a wide spectrum of meanings. It represents both self-sufficiency, and relationship, because we act and do with our hands, as well as communicate with and connect to others through touch. That touch can be loving or violent. 

The hand is also magical, for me. It is how we most often express our divinely inspired creativity or do things that seem impossible. Hands are as much the source of art as our souls: indeed, we use the term “handicraft” or “handmade” to designate real art from the work of machines. Hands, for me, as an artist, and as an enthusiast of anthropology, archeology, and anthropology, are our magic wands.

That magic has always been in mind, or at hand, if you will, in my DIY ethos and my ecumenical symbolic interests. The hand appears again and again throughout the decades of my art, and in my collected artifacts such as the hand door knocker from Tunisia, as well as in the jewelry I wear. (Frida Kahlo also wore dangling hands as earrings, a gift from Pablo Picasso.) While I have never been convinced that the way the skin creases on the palm can tell the future, in another, more practical sense, the hand does indeed direct one’s fate. 

Of course, there are times when one needs a helping hand. And that aid might be the hand extended by a friend or neighbour. And it might come from the Almighty. 

The symbol of the hand of God appears at least 160 times throughout the Bible, signifying the array of suggested interpretations in this powerful folk art of the Mano Poderosa: divine authority and power, judgement, divine intervention, deliverance, guidance, help, creation, love, and God’s presence. 

While the idea of God’s protective hand is certainly a comforting one, you’re not alone if you find this particularly imagery disquieting, and suggestive of practices beyond the scope of the Church. It is perhaps no surprise that the Mano Poderosa as a folk motif has an array of ancient influences. The All Powerful Hand of God is sometimes used in brujeria practices, that is, Mexican witchcraft, or in Santeria, where Caribbean folk religions merged with Catholicism. It has been suggested that the hand’s use as imagery, or as three-dimensional sculpture or even as a candle in occult practices stems from macabre European black magic traditions of the hand of glory.

The Hand of Glory is a literal severed hand, a terrifying tool in the magician’s arsenal. The hand was believed to hold the power to make people invisible, open doors, put people to sleep, and provide light as a literal candle made from human fat, each fingertip a flame. The corpse’s hand had to come from a hanged and guilty man. Was this an inversion of Christianity, where Christ was hanged from a cross, and innocent?

It’s quite likely that the hand of glory is more legendary than practical. A few have been found but most are in stories and poems, with an early mention appearing in an artwork, The Elder Saint Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes by Pieter van der Heyden in 1565, during the witch craze heydays.

The origins of the All Powerful Hand of God are much older still. 

The Mano Poderosa was most popular in Mexico and Puerto Rico, but originated in Spain and Portugal, as most Catholic imagery in the Americas did. From there, things get convoluted, the way they usually do, because folk symbols have a life of their own. Every symbol tells a story of countless miles, untold centuries, and a wide array of souls. 

Throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa, there is another hand that has been extraordinarily popular and pervasive. The hamsa’s appearance is benign in comparison: it does not have the same severed, disembodied appearance, and it is not covered in bloody wounds. You’ve seen it a thousand times: an open palm splayed, sometimes ornately enameled, or covered in beads or other decorations. It is hanging in every home, rearview mirror, and market of anyone in or from the Mediterranean region. It is so commonplace that modern people may forget the ancient apotropaic symbolism inherent in these ornaments: they were amulets meant to protect the innocent from the Evil Eye. 

The hamsa is also known as the Hand of Fatima within Muslim cultures. Older Christian cultures call it the Hand of Mary. To a still older culture, the hamsa represented the Strong Hand of God to the Jewish people, a symbol associated with the Bible verse Deuteronomy 5: 15. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

But there are older traditions yet in the region. Do the hamsa and the Mano Poderosa motifs shake hands with even older gods? The upright open hand shows up on tombstones in Carthage, alongside inscriptions to the Punic goddess Tannit, dating back to at least 500 BC.

The mano figa, or fig hand, is another form of the goddess hand amulets. With fist clenched and thumb between the index and middle finger, the fig hand appears all over the world, still widely used as a symbol of protection in Brazil, with many modern homes featuring a statue of the upraised fist. The fig hand is said to symbolize the genitalia of the goddess as well as her helping hand, and has been used by seafarers all over the world for millennia. We can trace this hand symbol back to the Etruscans around 600 BC, but some experts believe the symbol goes as far back into history as 6000 BC. A tiny jade mano figa, a gift from a deceased lover, is one of the prize possessions in my collection of meaningful artifacts. 

Reaching even further back into the past is the Mano Pantea amulet, or the Hand of the All-Goddess, also a symbol of ancient protection against the Evil Eye. It goes back to about 3000 BC in ancient Egypt. This amulet had two upright fingers and two folded down. It is no coincidence that hand positions like these show up in sacred art depicting both Christian and pagan stories. In old Christian Orthodox art, Jesus is often making mysterious hand signals that we understand to mean peace or love, gestures often used in Christian blessings. In turn, the Hindu and Buddhist use of hand gestures as spiritual symbolism predates these depictions by millennia.

The Mano Pantea motif resurfaces in the region in an especially mysterious manifestation. Votive hands of various types were often used in Roman era cults, for protection and assistance, and none is stranger looking than the hand for the god Sabazios. 

Bronze hands in the two-fingered mudra were used in processions for this god, paraded atop long poles. Little is known today about the cult of Sabazios. He was one of numerous Roman deities, a horseman god and sky father god of Phrygian and Thracian peoples. Archeology has revealed a few stunning examples of this ancient type of Mano Poderosa, adorned with bizarre symbols: entwined and atop the fingers are lizards, an eagle, turtle, lizard, ram, branch, serpents, a pinecone, a horseman, and more.

Visually, this uncanny hand looks an awful lot like the grisly Mexican depiction of the Roman Catholic All Powerful Hand of God, with the Holy Family growing from the fingers instead of lizards and pinecones. 

Mexico is a long way from Sabazios…but on the other hand, Rome is not far from Rome.

Lorette C. Luzajic
 

Powerful Hand of God, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2024

Hand of Power, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2025

Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940. Frida is wearing the earrings gifted to her by Picasso.

from Les Devises Héroïques, et Emblemes, a book by Claude

Unusual khamsa pendants, silver and pearl, from Tunisia, Tunisian Chichkhana style. c. early 1900s.

Jewish Hamsa, silver. This one is possibly from Iraq. c. 1800s.

Mano Pantea, Sabazios, from Pompei c. 100 AD

The Hand of Tanit, Punic Goddess, dates back to at least 500 BC. The upraised hand symbolized protection. Her hand can be seen on many tombstones throughout Carthage in Tunisia, North Africa. This gravestone dates to 1 BC.

Ancient hand amulet, worn by the living or buried with the dead, for protection. c. 1500 BC.

Hand amulet door knocker. These knockers appear throughout Tunisia, the Mediterranean, Europe, North Africa, Mexico and beyond. I took this photo in Tunisia in 2017.

La Mano Poderosa motif used in magical rites.

La Mano Poderosa (Mexico) 1800s

La Mano Poderosa Sculpture, Caban Group Folk Art (Puerto Rico, USA) 1875-1925

My Manu Figa charm. Jade, sterling. Contemporary.