protective · c. 100–300 CE
The Hand of Sabazios
A bronze right hand raised in blessing, crowded with small figures — a pine cone, a snake, a frog, a lizard — mounted on a pole and carried in the rites of a Thracian god at Rome.
What the sources claim for it
Divine presence and blessing in gesture form, with the god's attributes carried on the same object so that it names whose hand it is.
History
Where does the Hand of Sabazios come from?
Around a hundred survive. The hand makes the benedictio Latina gesture, first two fingers and thumb extended, and is loaded with attributes: a serpent coiling up the wrist, a pine cone at the thumb, a frog, a lizard, a scale, a caduceus, a small reclining figure on the palm. They were fixed to poles and are generally understood as cult standards for the mystery rites of Sabazios, an originally Thracian or Phrygian god assimilated at Rome to Jupiter and, in some Jewish and Christian polemic, confused with Sabaoth.
The hand belongs beside the hamsa on this site rather than in a Roman corner of it. Same shape, same gesture, same Mediterranean, same job — and no traceable line of descent between them, which is the more interesting result. Protective marks converge on the raised open hand independently, and often.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
The Sabaoth confusion is the durable part: Roman writers who heard the god's name as the Hebrew title of hosts helped produce the idea, repeated for centuries, that the Jews worshipped Sabazios.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Sabaoth, the divine title Roman writers confused with the god's name.
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Fasti
Ovid · c. 8 CE · Latin
The Roman religious calendar the imported mystery cults are fitted into.
Read Fasti in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Giovanni Battista Tiepolo · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Gorgoneion
A severed monster's face on a shield, a roof tile, an oven and a coin — the most-produced apotropaic image of the ancient Mediterranean.
The Ephesia Grammata
Six meaningless Greek words, said to have been written on the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, and spoken or worn as protection for a thousand years.
The Pentagram
A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line — an accounting mark, a Pythagorean password, a Christian emblem of the five wounds, and only recently a sign of evil.
The Swastika
An auspicious mark used continuously for four and a half thousand years across most of the world, and destroyed as a public sign in the West by twelve years of one European party's use of it.
The Nazar
Blue glass with a white and black eye at its centre, worn on the theory that a look can be sent back.
The Caduceus
Two snakes twined on a winged staff — the badge of a herald under safe conduct, and, through a filing error, the emblem of American military medicine.