Mount of Jupiter

The mounts are the raised pads of the palm, and the tradition of chiromancy assigns each to a planet, reading its prominence, firmness and markings as indications of the corresponding qualities. The Mount of Jupiter lies at the base of the index finger, and the tradition claims for it ambition, leadership, religious feeling and self-confidence, holding that a well-developed mount indicates these and a flat or absent one their lack. The planetary assignment is not native to palmistry: it is borrowed wholesale from astrological correspondence, the same set of planetary significations that the atlas records under Planets, applied to a different surface. This is worth stating at the outset, since it is often presented the other way round, as though the hand independently confirmed the planetary meanings.

The mount-and-planet scheme used throughout this atlas's palmistry pages descends from a body of Western chiromancy systematised in nineteenth-century France, chiefly by Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, whose La Chirognomonie appeared in 1839, and Adrien Adolphe Desbarrolles, whose Les Mystères de la Main followed in 1859, and later popularised in English by Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, whose Cheiro's Language of the Hand (1897) shaped much of the terminology still in use today. The mounts themselves, and their planetary names, draw on the older astrological convention of assigning each finger and region of the hand to one of the seven classical planets, a scheme with roots in medieval and Renaissance chiromancy manuscripts predating the nineteenth-century systematisers who gave it its modern, organised form. No controlled study has found the mounts' prominence to correlate with the traits the tradition assigns them.

Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles, La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la mainCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner)

Hand-reading of some kind is attested in several traditions: Samudrika Shastra in India includes the reading of the hand within a wider science of bodily marks, Chinese physiognomy includes hand-reading, and scattered Greek and medieval Latin texts on chiromantia survive from the twelfth century onward. But the system used today, with its named mounts and lines and its detailed interpretive vocabulary, is modern and French.

Captain Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny published La Chirognomonie in 1843, classifying hands by shape; Adolphe Desbarrolles published Les Mysteres de la Main in 1859, systematising the lines; and the Irish palmist William John Warner, known as Cheiro, popularised the result in London from the 1890s. As to evidence: there is none. Controlled studies of palmistry have not found the claimed associations, and the accuracy readers report is well explained by cold reading and by the Barnum effect, the tendency to accept vague personality statements as specifically true.

Sources La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la mainCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny with Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles, Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner)