What is palmistry?

A palm reader looks at the main lines of the palm, commonly the life, head and heart lines and often a line of fate. The fleshy raised areas are called mounts and most carry planetary names, such as the Mount of Venus at the base of the thumb. Readers also note the shape of the hand and fingers, and small marks such as crosses and triangles.

Older manuals treated the hand as part of a wider science of the body. They mixed medicine, astrology and the reading of faces, on the theory that the heavens left their signs on the hand.

The reader compares one feature with another and applies the rules of a chosen book or teacher. Those rules have never agreed. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica reports that older authors sorted hands into anywhere from 6 to 80 shapes.

Gershom Scholem, writing in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, placed the development of hand reading in the Near East, apparently in the Hellenistic period, and noted that no Greek or Latin text of that kind survives from then. It reached fuller form in medieval Arabic and Byzantine Greek writing. Early Hebrew sources show Jewish mystics using it to judge who was fit for secret teaching.

The oldest surviving Latin text on the subject sits in the Eadwine Psalter, a large book made at Christ Church, Canterbury, about 1150 and now at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS R.17.1). The notes on palmistry are at folio 282, in a hand the catalogue distinguishes from the main script. Charles Burnett published a study of this text in 1987. The art then developed from the mid-twelfth century, and Pietro d'Abano, a professor of medicine at Padua who died about 1318, wrote at least one treatise on it.

Illustrated printed manuals spread the subject widely. A block book called Die Kunst Ciromantia, with large drawings of hands, appeared probably at Augsburg about 1480 to 1490, under the name of Johannes Hartlieb, who had himself condemned hand reading in his Book of All Forbidden Arts of 1456. A 1533 Strasbourg edition of the work of Bartolommeo della Rocca, called Cocles, contains 158 small woodcuts of palm markings. French and English manuals followed, including a London title of 1558.

The art also met resistance. The Church suppressed it, and Popes Paul IV and Sixtus V issued edicts against divination that reached palmistry. Seventeenth-century writers tried to recast it as natural science. The Chiromantia medica printed at The Hague in 1655 ties the subject to medicine in its very title. The subject then declined during the Enlightenment.

French writers rebuilt palmistry as character reading. Captain Casimir d'Arpentigny published his book on the shapes of hands in 1839. Adolphe Desbarrolles followed with Les mysteres de la main around 1860.

In Britain, Edward Heron-Allen wrote a manual in the 1880s and translated d'Arpentigny in 1886, and Katharine St. Hill founded a chirological society in 1889. The best-known practitioner was the man who called himself Cheiro (1866 to 1936), whose books were reprinted in Britain and the United States. In the United States palm reading became popular alongside seances and spirit photographs. William G. Benham's Laws of Scientific Hand Reading of 1900 tried to give it a scientific footing.

Claims of great age cannot be confirmed. Books name the Brahmins of India, and a 1905 article cited by the 1911 Britannica put Chinese palmistry at 3000 BCE, but the sources read here give no dated early text for these claims. Indian and Chinese hand reading are also separate traditions with their own systems, and tracing Western palmistry back to them remains a guess.

A popular story says Aristotle found a treatise in letters of gold and gave it to Alexander the Great. It is legend, and the text is not among his works. Medieval writers attached his name to several chiromantic books, and later scholars identified at least six as false attributions. The name Cheiro hides a further puzzle, since sources give his real name as both Louis Hamon and William John Warner.

The long association with Romani fortune tellers has been used as a stereotype, as JSTOR Daily documents into the 1960s. The sources read here do not establish it as a documented line of transmission.

Critics have long been blunt. The 1911 Britannica took the folds of the palm to be mechanical, and the psychologist Ray Hyman recalled that when he read palms in his youth, deliberately reversed readings for a few clients went over just as well.