Practical Magic: A Beginner's Guide to Crystals, Horoscopes, Psychics, and Spells - Nikki Van De Car 2017

Palmistry
Casual Clairvoyance

IT IS INTERESTING THAT SO MANY PROPHESYING PRACTICES date back centuries and centuries. Is this because we felt so lost and confused then, that we more desperately needed to know the answers? Or is it because we were less skeptical and more readily sought answers because we believed they were available?

In any case, palmistry is no exception. The art of reading palms dates back to Babylonia, ancient Greece, China, and India, among other places, until it was heavily suppressed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The Church ranked it as one of the seven “forbidden arts,” putting it right up there with necromancy and fire magic. Compared to those two, simple palm-reading seems fairly harmless.

But the Church’s efforts to suppress palmistry were very successful until the mid-1800s, when people started taking the practice seriously again. It became regulated by the Chirological Society of Great Britain, so that certain lines on a palm would always be interpreted the same way, no matter who was doing the reading. But, like tarot and astrology, palmistry tells more about the personality of the bearer of the palm, and less about their future, though there is a little of that sprinkled in.

There is reason to believe that there is something behind palmistry. The practice of fingerprinting, for instance, reminds us that no two hands are exactly alike. And while the eyes may be the windows to the soul, the hands are a lot easier to read. We do everything with our hands, and they bear the evidence of that. The callus from where you hold your pen, the way you bite your nails, the swelling around a wedding ring, or the tan line from where one used to be.… the scars, the burns, everything—the evidence of our lives is in our hands. We have them to thank for our place outside of the food chain. It’s no wonder that palmistry has hung on for so long, despite the efforts to suppress it.

There are two branches of palmistry: Chiromancy, which deals with the lines on the palm, is what usually comes to mind when we think about palm-reading. But there is also chirognomy, which looks at the shape and texture of the hands, including the fingers and thumb.

Each hand will tell a reader something different. The nondominant hand represents the person’s inherited traits—what they were born with and how they came into the world. The dominant hand shows how life has changed that person. Watch for the differences between the two hands.