The mounts of the palm are the fleshy pads at the base of the fingers and around the hand, each named for a planet: Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Luna. Their relative prominence is read in chiromancy as an indication of temperament. The planetary naming is inherited from the medieval and Renaissance palmistry literature, which read the hand through the same astrological framework as the period's medicine.
Facts
Overview
- Entries in the Atlas
- 9
- What Defines This Grouping
- The fleshy pads of the palm, each named for a planet, whose relative prominence chiromancy reads as temperament: the hand interpreted through the same planetary correspondences as medical astrology. 1
Origins
- Origin Period
- The modern European system took shape in mid-nineteenth-century France. 2
- Whose Classification This Is
- The modern reading of the mounts is the nineteenth-century French chiromantic literature's, above all Desbarrolles's Les Mysteres de la Main of 1859, building on d'Arpentigny's chirognomy of 1843. 1
Sources
- Les Mysteres de la Main Adolphe Desbarrolles, 1859
- La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la main Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, 1843
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The mounts of the palm
The mounts of the palm are the fleshy pads at the base of the fingers and around the hand, each named for a planet: the mount of Jupiter beneath the index finger, Saturn beneath the middle, Apollo (the Sun) beneath the ring finger, Mercury beneath the little finger, and the mounts of Venus, Mars and Luna about the hand. Their relative prominence is read in chiromancy as an indication of the temperament and the strength of the corresponding planetary quality.
A full mount of Jupiter, for instance, is read as ambition and leadership, a full mount of Venus as warmth and vitality, tying the reading of the hand to the planetary correspondences of astrology.
Hand and planet
The naming of the mounts for the planets makes palmistry a branch of the wider astrological correspondence tradition: the hand is read as a map of the planetary influences in the person, and the mounts are weighed alongside the lines. The atlas presents this as a divinatory tradition, describing the mounts and their meanings without endorsing the claims.
The atlas gives each mount its planet, its position, and the qualities read from it. The lines of the palm, read with the mounts, and the planets the mounts are named for, are treated in their own categories.
Enter a year to compare these entries as the atlas records them at that moment. Leave it empty for the present. A year before the common era is entered with a minus sign, so 44 BCE is minus 44.