Palmistry

Palmistry, also called chiromancy, is the practice of interpreting the lines, mounts, shapes, and other features of the hand to reveal a person's character and to foretell the course of their life. The reader studies the major lines of the palm, conventionally the heart line, the head line, and the life line, together with lesser lines such as the "fate line", along with the fleshy "mounts" beneath the fingers (each traditionally associated with a planet, in the manner of astrology), the overall shape of the hand and fingers, and their flexibility and markings.

The tradition has deep roots in India, and versions appear across the classical and medieval worlds, often intertwined with astrology, so that the mounts and lines were correlated with the planets and their supposed influences. Palmistry flourished in the European Renaissance alongside the other divinatory arts, was condemned at various times by church authorities, and enjoyed a great popular revival in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through figures such as "Cheiro." Presented fairly, palmistry is a traditional divinatory and character-reading art with a long and genuine cultural history; from a scientific standpoint there is no established basis for the claim that palm features predict life events, and it is best understood, like astrology, as a symbolic and interpretive system rather than a predictive science. Its enduring appeal lies in the ancient intuition that the hand, so central to human action, might carry the imprint of the whole person and their destiny.

Reading the hand has independent traditions in India, in China and around the Mediterranean, and the European form absorbed material from all of them. Its modern shape owes most to a revival in the nineteenth century, and above all to the practitioner who worked as Cheiro, who systematised the mounts and lines for a large popular readership and also supplied one of the rival letter tables used in numerology.

There is a real science in the neighbourhood and confusing it with palmistry is the standard error. Dermatoglyphics studies the ridge patterns of the fingers and palms, which form in the womb and are fixed for life. Because they develop at a particular stage of gestation, disturbances at that stage leave traces, and certain patterns are genuinely associated with particular chromosomal and developmental conditions. That is a narrow, well-evidenced medical observation.

It is not what palmistry claims. The flexion creases usually read as the life, head and heart lines are folds produced by the hand closing, their length is a matter of anatomy, and no association between them and lifespan, intellect or affection has survived testing. The best documented mechanism for a successful reading is the reading itself: a practitioner holding a client's hand, in conversation, has an unusually rich stream of feedback to work from.

The atlas records the tradition, its long history and its wide distribution, and records that the specific correspondences have not been shown to hold.