The Symbolism of the Hand by Daniel Meurois

“He seals the hand of every man, that all men may know His work.” (Job 37:7)

This sentence from the Old Testament (Job 37:7) has often caught my attention. Indeed, it is unnecessary to be a theologian or even an exegete to guess all that it means—because it implies a lot!

It talks about a permanent seal of the Divine Presence in each human being, a real heritage which merges with the entire human hand, and which engraves a certain memory. In fact, this seal describes an inalienable legacy summarizing both our origin and our destiny.

A seal officializes authenticity and expresses dignity by nature. The one who breaks it penetrates a secret place of intimacy. Of course, when we look a little at this statement from the Book of Job, we think of palmistry, this art which, they say, allows to read the destiny of an individual in the lines of the palm. Yet, all things considered, I think it would be a shame to stick to this approach because those who embark on a path of inner research know very well that it is not about knowing your fate that enriches the heart and makes it progress, it is about the journey, experiences, and choices along the way. Taking you deeper into the divinatory aspect of the palm of a hand, and what that can offer, is not the purpose of this written study. Predicting what tomorrow will bring is one thing but understanding how the Divine works in us at every moment and how It seeks to speak to us through certain parts of our body is another, which is much more essential to our fulfillment.

Our hands alone can act as doors. They invite us to penetrate further into the Life movement in us.

This is seen in a few expressions, which all trace a sort of common thread between the palpable power of the incarnation and that, more subtle, of the soul which beats in the hollow of our breasts, and which our culture seems to perceive. When we offer a helping hand to someone, aren't we doing something concrete from our heart to another heart?

And after the reverent hand-kissing of yesteryear, doesn't tradition—although in free fall today—still require a man to ask for the loved woman’s hand in marriage, thus promising him to walk hand in hand with her? In fact, it assimilates the heart and the hand to one another as if both translated the silent words, making them accomplices to express love and the strength that this love generates. The human values then merge with the divine dimension or translate the proximity of the Eternal with the Temporal.

The principle of the blessing, for example, which translated by a gesture of the hand, is one of the most obvious expressions of it, as is that of prayer performed with hands joined. Here again, the hands make up a bridge between the world of the profane and the sacred world.

The hand is a channel of communication that can transfer healing through the laying-on of hands. This knowledge was recognized as a gift, and has been used by the kings of France, among others, to heal victims of scrofula using this technique. It is also interesting to note that the sovereigns who claimed to be "of divine right" are represented by a "hand of justice" with a scepter, which prevented them from controlling many things.

As for the oaths of fidelity or truth, our society has always understood that we should raise the hand as if to guarantee the authenticity of our heart.

All of this, one might object, brings us back to our Judeo-Christian Occident, and even to its roots—since always in the biblical order with which we began our reflection—the symbol of a certain Myriam, Moses’ sister, which is a protective hand called Hamsa. No doubt such a hand and its implications are imbedded in our collective subconsciousness. To stick to this observation would be, however, to ignore Islam, one of the key symbols of protection, which is also Hamsa or Kamsa, and is also a deployed hand. In this instance, it is not that of the sister of Moses, but of Fatima, one daughter of the Prophet Mahomet; a hand which sometimes had an eye in the palm…the Eye of the Divine…the one who probes the hearts.

The hand expresses the number 5, a sacred number since it reveals the Quintessence of being, the one that humans must bring to light by the intelligence of their heart.

The Five number is significant for the Christians as well, since the Quintessence of Being is an individual state of realization expressed by the Cross, the central point of which represents the Christ Principle in a full offering of Himself.

It is important to expand our thoughts about the Hamsa hand by remembering how much honor it evoked among the ancient Phoenicians who, by wearing it or by drawing it, asked for protection from the goddess Tanit; another name for Ishtar. Ishtar is the planet Venus, the same one that the Essenians called "Moon-Sun."

We must now travel to the far East where the Hindu and Buddhist Traditions give hands a place of primary importance? The sacred art of these two sister cultures shows how much the mudras of the hands occupy a major place.

Mudras, it is important to remember, are hand gestures that cause energy shifts and translate or amplify what we can call spiritual attitudes. While the head and the entire body can accomplish a lot, those accomplished with the hand, however, are more precise and powerful in their meanings because they are witnesses to a deep knowledge of the energy-subtle anatomy of the human body and of the relationship it has with the cosmos as a manifestation of the Divine Presence.

In this context the thumb expresses the Unknowable, or Braham; the index finger is the energy of Jupiter—the principle of justice; the middle finger that of Saturn—master of Time; the ring finger that of the Sun—the force of Vishnu, principle of the Universal Christ Son; and finally the little finger is the power of Mercury—carrier of information from the Divine…and that which we must know how to hear.

So, when in an amused way we say that we are going to ask our little finger for something, it may not be that trivial!

The practice of mudras makes it possible to experience the fact that, in their positions and their connections, the fingers of the hand and the position of the hand itself stimulate and bring into contact this or that aspect of consciousness with the different spheres of the divine Reality. So, there are mudras of wisdom, enlightenment, humility, mastery of the egotistical personality, and so on….

With all the precise gestures that the hand can thus accomplish, how could they possibly only represent an arbitrary set of codes and symbols that translate nothing other than internal intentions or expectations? The evidence of specific details implies a much deeper and significant meaning.

Indeed, the fingers of the hand, and the hand itself contain a whole network of "micro-nadis" which merge into a precise chakra at the level of the wrist—recalled by the nail of the Crucifixion—to a major nadis going up the arm to the shoulder and finally down to the heart, like a transverse strap.

Using this knowledge, the Essenians greeted each other by placing their right hand on their heart. By performing this gesture several times a day, they were not only making the most beautiful circles; they were performing a mudra of strength and truth. They celebrated the Divine Radiance from Its cosmic expression to Its continuity through their present incarnation. The most experienced of them, like those of all the great Traditions, understood that the Universe extends into the human who can project himself/herself by this way of being and of creating.

From this intimate relationship, uniting the "cosmic hand" of the human being to the spheres of the Spirit, was born one of the least understood aspects of a secret Enlightenment discipline—the one of Kashmiri Tantrism. This teaching comprises a set of practices, to which Master Jesus started, and which He communicated to a few rare disciples for the supreme reconciliation between the dense and the subtle.

One particularity of this method of Awakening is the knowledge of a close relationship existing between each of the fingers of the hand and five of the main chakras of the human body, themselves in direct relation with our five senses.According to this teaching, it links the thumb to the sense of touch, the index finger to sight, the middle finger to smell, the ring finger to taste, and the little finger to hearing.

This initiatory tradition considers that the senses are not the enemies of opening the consciousness, but that, well understood and well mastered, they become the exact extensions of our soul and our spirit. Speaking of both Matter and Light, we then utilize the senses to introduce us to the Divine behind all dualities.

Imagining the Christ teaching such knowledge to a few very rare close disciples, draws up another portrait of Him much more open than the one that the Church has frozen through the alleged and desperate conflict between Matter and Spirit. Considered with this look, more than ever the hand becomes a go-between, an extraordinary instrument of Reconciliation.

During this time the Greeks, in their own quest for Wisdom, evoked the existence of a nadi, starting from the heart of each of us and extending to the left ring finger. They called it, translated into Latin, the "vena amoris"—the vein of love—a knowledge based on the widespread custom in the West of wearing the wedding ring on this left ring finger. Some of our Traditions have obvious codes and send us back to an approach about ourselves that we often are far from suspecting.