Sun Line

The sun line, also called the line of Apollo, runs vertically toward the ring finger, and the tradition reads it for reputation, artistic capacity, public recognition and good fortune; like the fate line it is absent in many hands, and its presence is read favourably. The naming again borrows the astrological significations of the Sun. Palmistry belongs to a family of divinatory arts that read the body, alongside physiognomy, phrenology and metoposcopy, the reading of the lines of the forehead, and of these it is the only one still widely practised. Phrenology, its nineteenth-century sibling, is now the standard textbook example of a discredited science, and the comparison is instructive: both were systematic, both attracted serious adherents, and both failed for the same reason, that their claimed correspondences did not hold when tested.

India's samudrika shastra gives the line its own name, surya rekha, and some texts also call it yasha rekha, the line of fame, an association with recognition that matches the Western reading. Cheiro himself used Line of Apollo and Line of Brilliancy as alternative names for what other writers of his period simply called the Sun line, following the Greek attribution of the mount beneath the ring finger to Apollo rather than to the Sun itself. Multiple lines running parallel are read by some schools as an indication of several talents or interests rather than as intensifying a single one, one more instance of the ambiguity that runs through the whole art.

Sources Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles with Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner)

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 Sun Line is a secondary crease, not one of the three primaries. It is among the more frequently absent lines, and a reading system that assigns meaning to its absence is assigning meaning to a normal variant that a large share of hands simply do not have.

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.