Anti-Semitic Conspiracies and the "Mary Magdalene" Hand Gesture

As you know, there is a cottage industry of people who think that a hand gesture featuring the middle and ring fingers pressed together between outspread index and pinky fingers is a secret symbol. Before Scott Wolter made it into a symbol of Mary Magdalene, it had previously been claimed as a secret symbol of Freemasonry (M for Mason), Satanism (multiple V’s and I’s for 666), and the Marranos, or crypto-Jews of Spain (M for Marrano). The supposed symbol is popular with anti-Semitic extremists who see it as a sign of “Judaizing” within Christianity. You can find references to it on New World Order conspiracy sites and anti-Semitic webpages.

Of course the symbol found an audience among the anti-Semitic; just look at the list of supposed perpetrators of the gesture: Masons, Satanists, and Jews, the same groups widely demonized in anti-Semitic literature and held to be in league with one another to control the world.

Consider this piece, written before the premiere of America Unearthed, by a conspiracy theorist who sees the symbol as an occult recognition of the Jews’ role in bringing about the New World Order:

[Televangelist Paula White] has force-aligned her 3rd & 4th fingers on BOTH hands to STAY parallel to each other. This forms the “M” sign & is not easy to do. You have to consciously force your fingers to do it, & then to have your brain telling your fingers on BOTH hands to do it at the SAME time & then to KEEP them that way for any length of time is even harder. Maybe that’s why she appears to be straining & grunting! […] One thing’s for certain, Paula White is a Judaizer Supreme, heavily promotes the anti-Pauline-Epistles “Judaized-version” of Christianity. As the apostle Paul said, ANY OTHER GOSPEL, let those who preach it be accursed! (Galatians 1:8-9). [emphasis in original]

As I pointed out back in 2013, not only is this a natural hand gesture among people (like me) of certain European heritage (I can’t hold my hand any other way without effort), but it has also appeared in images of unsavory characters, including Adolf Hitler, who had himself painted with just such a posture in his 1937 official portrait. Last night Scott Wolter finally discovered that, oops, he’s accidentally caught up with the Nazis again, and he has come up with another layer of conspiracy to get himself out of his latest brush with Nazism and anti-Semitism.

“Hitler would use anything and everything at his disposal if he thought he (sic) it would benefit him,” Wolter wrote. “I’m sure he became aware of the symbol and tried to use it to his advantage somehow.”

Somehow. Wolter happily excludes Hitler from his Holy Bloodline family, asserting (without evidence) that Hitler had simply perverted the truth. Now how does that supposed knowledge of the Holy Bloodline square with the documented fact that the Nazis, under Himmler, secretly sought the Holy Grail—in the form of a pagan object, not a Holy Bloodline—and that Hitler himself had the alleged Holy Lance used to pierce Jesus’ side taken from Vienna for his use? This doesn’t jive with the idea that Hitler was aware of the Holy Bloodline conspiracy in 1937—the same year Otto Rahn wrote his Nazi-funded book on the Grail and a year before the seizure of the lance.

Wolter concluded his comments by calling the pseudoreality.org website “great one for looking at examples of historical figures being portrayed using the symbol” even though it’s an anti-government conspiracy website that claims white Germanic Europeans are the “true” Jews.