Mount of Venus

The Mount of Venus is the large pad at the base of the thumb, bounded by the life line, and it is the most prominent feature of the palm; the tradition claims for it vitality, warmth, affection, sensuality and the capacity for pleasure, reading a full and firm mount for a generous nature and a flat one for coldness. Anatomically it is the thenar eminence, the muscle group that moves the thumb, and its bulk is chiefly a function of hand use and musculature, which is a straightforward and testable explanation for variation that the tradition does not consider. This is a general problem with the scheme: several of the features it reads as character have obvious physical causes, occupational, genetic or age-related, and the interpretive tradition was constructed without reference to them.

Traditional chiromancy reads a well-developed Mount of Venus, at the base of the thumb and encircled by the life line, as indicating vitality, warmth, sensuality, love of family and physical energy generally, drawn directly from Venus's own classical association with love and desire; it is typically read as the single most consistently significant mount in the whole scheme, given how much of the palm's base it occupies. An excessively developed mount is read as self-indulgence or an excess of physical appetite, while a flat, underdeveloped mount suggests coldness or low vitality. Because Venus mount also sits directly beneath the thumb, some manuals additionally read its texture and colour, rather than only its size, as bearing on a person's constitutional health within the tradition's own framework.

Sources Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles with Kaplan's Functional and Surgical Anatomy of the HandEmanuel B. Kaplan, 3rd edition revised by Morton Spinner

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 Mount of Venus is anatomically the thenar eminence, the muscle mass at the base of the thumb. This is a real and substantial anatomical structure, and its size responds to use: a hand that grips for a living develops it. That is a confound the tradition does not control for, since the same development would be read as a temperament.

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