How it works

The first layer is what a named book says. A sentence that begins with Cheiro reads this as, or Benham treats this as, reports that book and nothing else.

The second layer is where the books disagree. When two authors give different rules for the same feature, the page sets both out and does not pick a winner.

The third layer is modern practice, and it is labeled as modern wherever it appears. The earth, air, fire and water hand types are a good example. They are popular today, and none of the books used here gives them.

These books may be quoted: Cheiro's The Language of the Hand (1897 edition) and Palmistry for All (1916), Edward Heron-Allen's A Manual of Cheirosophy (1885), Casimir d'Arpentigny's The Science of the Hand in Heron-Allen's 1886 translation, Adolphe Desbarrolles's Les mysteres de la main (1862 edition), and the hand sections of the Chinese imperial encyclopedia of 1726. Quotations keep the spelling of the scanned text.

These books are only paraphrased: William G. Benham's The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading (1900), Katharine St. Hill's The Grammar of Palmistry (1893) and Rosa Baughan's chapters in The Influence of the Stars (1891). We could not establish when these authors died, so their books are described in our own words and quoted nowhere. Richard Saunders's Palmistry, the Secrets Thereof Disclosed (1663) is also paraphrased, because the scanned text is too unreliable to quote.

D'Arpentigny and Cheiro each sort hands into seven types, and their two lists differ. Desbarrolles declined to follow that classification, and Benham set whole-hand types aside for fingertip shapes and seven types based on the mounts. Heron-Allen and Cheiro say the planet names on the mounts carry no astrological meaning, while Baughan argues the reverse.

So an attribution is the most important part of any reading here. A name beside a reading tells you who claimed it and in which book. It tells you nothing about whether the claim is true, and another book may say the opposite.

The map shows a drawing, the same for everyone. Compare your palm is a set of choices that you make by looking at your own hand. The page does no calculation and gives no score. It has no camera and no upload, so no photo of a hand is ever read. Your choices stay in your browser and are gone when you leave the page.

The books do not agree on which hand to read, and no two of them give the same rule. A common modern saying has the dominant hand showing the present and the other showing the past. None of the books used here says that.

Read what each book says about which hand