[massinstall]

From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.”

This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any given reasoning. I’m surprised to find this in what appears to aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory.

Any thoughts?

[runjake]

32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.

However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.

[flir]

> presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.

I wouldn't bet on it. Performative secrecy is very common in esotericism.

[fidotron]

> 32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.

Would you actually be able to say it if they were?

[temporarely]

Sorry to break the news to you Jake but there are two orders. Those of "that era" are the actual power breakers, you guys are the peculiar but innocent window dressing.

> And since, ..

No, the meaning is the secret :) Oh dear.

[kjkjadksj]

Sometimes with these sorts of organizations their deepest secrets are the meaning of their public symbology.

[coliveira]

What is secret is the meaning, not the gesture itself.

[bgoated01]

Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.

[karaterobot]

There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.

[crdrost]

I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...")

And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry."

A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.'

I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?

[panarchy]

This reads like it belongs in an episode of The Curse of Oak Island not an article.

[anigbrowl]

I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.

[marginalia_nu]

Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture.

I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.