Ring

The ring finger is the finger of Apollo, and equally the finger of the Sun, the two names used interchangeably exactly as they are for the mount at its base. That doubling is itself a piece of evidence. A god-name and a planet-name standing for one thing, either being usable, is how astrological vocabulary behaves, and it shows the chiromantic scheme taking the term ready-made rather than coining it for the hand.

What is read from the finger is what the same system reads from the Sun: art, display, brightness, the wish to be seen and the luck of being noticed. A long, straight, well-formed ring finger is taken for talent and for recognition of it; an over-long one for showiness, or in some manuals for a taste for gambling; a poor one for a life passed without applause. The Sun line, also called the Apollo line, runs up the palm toward it and is read for the same qualities, so the finger, the mount and the line together form a single Apollonian district of the hand.

The wedding ring is worn here across much of the world, and that custom is far older than the modern palmistic system, so the two should not be run together. The reason usually given for it, that a vessel runs from this finger straight to the heart, is true of no human hand. The custom is real and its explanation is folklore, which is exactly the distinction the chiromantic literature is unwilling to draw about its own material.

The elemental schemes reverse each other here. In the Japanese esoteric reckoning the ring finger is water, sui, the second element counted inward from the little finger. In the yogic hasta mudras it is earth, prithvi, and the little finger beside it takes the water instead. Two lists, the same five elements, and this digit and its neighbour swapped between them: the pattern suggests two independent traditions that both wanted the elements ordered along the hand and chose opposite ends to begin from.

Anatomy makes this the least independent digit. Bands of tissue called the juncturae tendinum link the extensor tendons across the back of the hand, and the ring finger is tied by them to its neighbours on both sides, which is why it cannot be raised far while the middle and little fingers are held down. A gesture that isolates the ring finger is therefore hard to make and rare in the repertoires, while gestures that fold it down with the little finger, or extend the two together, are common.

That has consequences for how the finger is used ritually. It appears in the hand seals as part of a pair far more often than alone, and where a tradition wants a single digit to carry a meaning by itself it usually reaches for the index or the little finger. The symbolism assigned to the finger is a choice. The constraint on which gestures are available to be assigned is not.

Sources Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist SculptureE. Dale Saunders with Asana Pranayama Mudra BandhaSwami Satyananda Saraswati