Lower Mount of Mars

The Lower Mount of Mars, also called Mars positive or Mars active, lies on the thumb side of the palm between the Mount of Jupiter and the Mount of Venus, inside the origin of the life line. The tradition claims for it aggression, physical courage, initiative and a readiness for conflict, the active counterpart of the upper mount's endurance.

As with every element of the scheme, the claim is the tradition's and there is no evidence for it. It is worth adding that palm creases do have a genuine medical significance in one narrow respect: certain patterns, notably the single transverse palmar crease, occur with raised frequency in some chromosomal conditions including Down syndrome, and dermatoglyphics is a real if limited field. That fact is sometimes cited as though it supported palmistry generally. It does not; it concerns crease formation in embryonic development and says nothing about character or future events.

The mounts are named for the seven classical planets, and that naming is the clearest fingerprint of where the modern system comes from. Reading the hand and reading the sky were fused in the chiromancy of the later medieval and early modern period, and the planetary vocabulary entered from astrology rather than from any independent tradition of hand reading. Where a system's parts are borrowed, the borrowing is usually visible in what it calls them.

The Lower Mount of Mars is anatomically the area inside the life line above the thumb, at the edge of the thenar muscle. It shades into the Mount of Venus without a boundary that anatomy would recognise, and different chiromantic authorities divide the region differently.

Two things follow. Mount prominence is strongly affected by build, by handedness and by manual labour, none of which the chiromantic reading isolates, so a reader judging a mount is judging a physique as much as anything else. And the planetary names carry astrological meanings in with them: what a mount is said to signify tends to be what its planet signifies, which means the mount system inherits its content rather than deriving it. The atlas sets out the tradition's own reading elsewhere on this page. Here it records what the structure actually is and where the name came from.

Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Kaplan's Functional and Surgical Anatomy of the HandEmanuel B. Kaplan, 3rd edition revised by Morton Spinner