Upper Mount of Mars

The Upper Mount of Mars, also called Mars negative or Mars passive, lies on the outer edge of the palm below the Mount of Mercury and above the Mount of Luna. The tradition claims for it endurance, resistance, self-control and the courage that consists in bearing rather than in attacking, as against the active courage assigned to the lower mount. The division of Mars into two mounts with a plain between them is a feature of the French school and is one of the places where different palmistry traditions diverge most visibly; Indian hasta samudrika and Chinese hand-reading use quite different divisions of the palm and different sets of correspondences, and the popular assumption that palmistry is one worldwide art with local dialects does not survive comparison of the actual systems.

The Upper Mount of Mars, distinct from the Lower Mount of Mars near the thumb, lies on the percussion, or outer, edge of the palm below the Mount of Mercury and above the Mount of Luna, roughly beneath where the heart line ends. Where the lower mount is traditionally read as active, aggressive courage, readiness for a fight, the upper mount is read as its passive counterpart: moral courage, resistance, the capacity to endure hardship, resist provocation and hold a position under pressure rather than to initiate conflict. Together the two Mars mounts are sometimes described as bracketing the whole of the palm's central Plain of Mars between them, active courage on one side and endurance on the other, a symmetry the nineteenth-century systematisers of this scheme built deliberately into its design.

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 Upper Mount of Mars is anatomically a region of the outer palm with no distinct muscle mass beneath it. Unlike the thumb and outer-edge eminences it is not a named anatomical structure, so its boundaries are a convention of the reading system rather than a feature of the hand.

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