Also called palm reading, chiromancy, hasta samudrika
Reading the shape, lines and mounts of the hand as a map of character and life tendencies. It has roots in India and the ancient world and was revived as a Victorian craze.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Never tell anyone their life line predicts an early death or illness; it does not, and such readings cause real distress. Treat any reading as conversation, not diagnosis.
In India, reading the hand is one part of a larger science of reading the whole body, including the face, feet and marks on the skin. Lines and small symbols such as fish, lotus or conch shapes on the palm are read for fortune. It is still practised by many astrologers today, often alongside a birth chart.
The French officer Casimir d'Arpentigny classed hands by shape (spatulate, square, conic and others) and read temperament from them rather than lines. His system fed the hand-type groupings that modern palmists still use.
William John Warner, known as Cheiro, read the hands of celebrities including Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde and wrote popular guides such as Cheiro's Language of the Hand (1894). His blend of lines, mounts and hand shapes is close to what most Western palm readers use.
Palm reading is found from Mesopotamia and Persia to India, China and Tibet. In India it forms part of Samudrika Shastra, the lore of reading bodily marks. In medieval Europe Latin treatises on chiromancy circulated under Aristotle's name, although scholars agree he did not write them. Palmistry was counted among the forbidden arts, and in the sixteenth century Popes Paul IV and Sixtus V issued edicts against divination, including reading hands.
The art revived in the nineteenth century. Casimir d'Arpentigny's La Chirognomie appeared in 1839, Edward Heron-Allen published his manual in 1883, and Katharine St. Hill founded the Chirological Society of Great Britain in London in 1889. The Irish palmist Cheiro, born William John Warner in 1866, became its star. Scientific studies give no support to palmistry's claims, and the psychologist Ray Hyman found his readings worked just as well when he said the opposite of what the lines suggested.
An open right hand, often with an eye in the palm, hung in the home or worn to push back the evil eye and bless a household.
The itchy palm superstition says an itch in the hand predicts money. In the most common version, a right palm itch means money coming in and a left palm itch means money going out, though many regions and families reverse it.
The practice of turning birth dates and names into single numbers and reading them as clues to character and life themes. Modern Western numerology took shape in early twentieth-century America, borrowing older letter-number systems.
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