The mounts are the raised pads of the palm, and the tradition of chiromancy assigns each to a planet, reading its prominence, firmness and markings as indications of the corresponding qualities. The Mount of Jupiter lies at the base of the index finger, and the tradition claims for it ambition, leadership, religious feeling and self-confidence, holding that a well-developed mount indicates these and a flat or absent one their lack. The planetary assignment is not native to palmistry: it is borrowed wholesale from astrological correspondence, the same set of planetary significations that the atlas records under Planets, applied to a different surface. This is worth stating at the outset, since it is often presented the other way round, as though the hand independently confirmed the planetary meanings.
The mount-and-planet scheme used throughout this atlas's palmistry pages descends from a body of Western chiromancy systematised in nineteenth-century France, chiefly by Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, whose La Chirognomonie appeared in 1839, and Adrien Adolphe Desbarrolles, whose Les Mystères de la Main followed in 1859, and later popularised in English by Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, whose Cheiro's Language of the Hand (1897) shaped much of the terminology still in use today. The mounts themselves, and their planetary names, draw on the older astrological convention of assigning each finger and region of the hand to one of the seven classical planets, a scheme with roots in medieval and Renaissance chiromancy manuscripts predating the nineteenth-century systematisers who gave it its modern, organised form. No controlled study has found the mounts' prominence to correlate with the traits the tradition assigns them.
Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles, La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la mainCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner)