Life Line

The life line curves around the base of the thumb, enclosing the Mount of Venus, and it is the line about which the tradition's claims are most widely known and most widely misunderstood. Popular belief holds that its length predicts length of life. The tradition's own more careful practitioners have generally denied this, reading it instead for vitality, constitution and the general course of the life; and the claim has in any case been tested. A study of sixty cadavers at the University of Adelaide, by Teghan Lucas, Amrita Dhugga and Maciej Henneberg, examined the palmar creases against age at death and found no significant correlation between the length of the life line and lifespan, resolving a disagreement in the earlier clinical literature between a 1974 study that found no association and a 1990 study that found one. That is about as direct a test as the claim admits of, and it failed. The line remains of interest as a feature of the hand and as a subject in the history of divination.

Western chiromancy was first systematised as a formal practice by figures such as the seventeenth-century French writer Jean Belot and, more decisively, the nineteenth-century French cavalry officer Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, whose La Chirognomonie (1839) is generally credited with founding the study of hand shape as distinct from line reading. India's own tradition, samudrika shastra, developed independently of this Western line and treats the life line, jeevan rekha, somewhat differently: rather than reading it chiefly for length and lifespan, as the popular Western belief does, it is generally read for the quality and vigour of the life rather than its duration, a framing that sits closer to the more careful Western practitioners' own view than to the popular belief the study above was designed to test.

Sources La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la mainCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny with Predicting longevity from the line of life: is it accurate?Teghan Lucas, Amrita Dhugga and Maciej Henneberg

The lines a chiromant reads are flexion creases, and they have an anatomy of their own that is independent of anything read from them. The primary creases form in the womb, around the twelfth and thirteenth weeks, as the hand begins to fold; they mark where the skin is tethered to the fascia beneath so that it hinges cleanly instead of bunching. They are set before birth and change very little afterward, which is the first thing a reader should know about them.

What the tradition calls the Life Line is the thenar crease, curving around the base of the thumb, the third primary. It follows the edge of the thumb muscle and its shape is largely a consequence of how that muscle sits, which is worth weighing against any reading of its length as a span of years.

It is worth separating chiromancy from dermatoglyphics, which is often confused with it and is a different subject. Dermatoglyphics studies the ridge patterns of the skin, the loops and whorls used in fingerprinting, and it has a genuine research literature including work on developmental correlates. Palmistry reads the flexion creases, which are a different structure entirely, and there is no body of evidence connecting crease form to character, career or lifespan. The atlas records what the chiromantic tradition says about this line because that tradition is a real object of study. It does not endorse the reading.