Palmistry or palm reading is an art or science of reading a person’s behaviour, fate, character, career and his life path from the lines and lineaments on his hands.
The Hand is the terminal part of the human arm containing the Palm and Fingers from below the wrist. The Hand contains 27 bones.
The Hand is composed of three parts, the Hand proper and the Fingers, including nails. The Thumb is the third important part of the Hand.
Palmistry has two divisions: (i) the shape of the hand; and (ii) lines on the palm.
The shape of the hand is an indication of the instincts of the person concerned. Basic human instincts are: hunger, thirst, the sex drive, anger, fear etc.

Instincts are basic toa man’s nature and he is born with them: No process of learning is involved in them. Chirognomy is the name of the science which helps one to find the instincts of the owner of a hand.

[GARD align=”left”]

The lines on the palm indicate the past, the present and the future of the man. The science which deals with them is known as Chiromancy.  The collective name for these two disciplines is Chiromancy. It is also called palmistry.

We will first take up chirognomy and come to the lines of the palm later, because one must understand chirognomy before one can follow the significance of the lines of the hand.
The science of palmistry was a well-developed science in ancient India. It was a part of the science known as Samudrika Shastra. The practitioners of this science studied the shape of the various organs of the body and indicated the tendencies of that person as well as forecast his future.  A small part of Samudrika Shastra was Hasta Samudrika.

Many of the treatises on Samudrika Shastra are now extinct, but references to it are found in the scriptures which show how developed this science was in ancient India.

Many scholars have authored treatises on Hindu Palmistry based on the ancient Indian texts. Some of them are: Raman Kristo Chatterji, Gopesh Kumar Ojha, Narayan Dutta Shrimali, K.C. Sen, S.K. Das, V.K. Aiyyar and others.
From India this science travelled to China, Tibet, Rome, Greece, Egypt, Iran and other countries. The famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle was an erudite scholar of both the branches of palmistry. Historians place his birth around 384 B.C.
In modern times this science has developed in Europe, the U.S.A. and other western countries.

[GARD align=”left”]

It was the Gypsies who spread the knowledge of this science in ancient times. Gypsies are supposed to have travelled originally from India. Some western scholars took the Gypsy lore of palmistry seriously and between the 15th and the 18th century many of the European palmists wrote a number of books on the subject. Some of them are Bulwar, Carden, Cocles, but most of the people considered palmistry as black magic.

Most of the scientific investigations on palmistry were done in the nineteenth and the twentieth century’s. Some of those who are credited with taking the science to the drawing rooms of the patrician families are D’ Arpentigny, a contemporary of Napoleon, Desbarrolles, Craig, Carlcrus, Hartlieb and St. Germain.

Those who did commendable work on the science in the 20th century in Europe and the U.S.A. include Benham, Cheiro, Fred Hutchinson, Neol Jaquine etc.
Cheiro belonged to Ireland. Count Luis Harmon, to’ give Cheer his full name, Iived in England and made many forecasts. Almost all of them came out to be true which added luster to his name.

The popularity of palmistry in Europe and the West in the 20th century brought the realization to many scholars that it could not be dismissed as hocus pocus or black magic. They included Freud’s rebel disciple, Carl Gustav Jung, who along with his own disciples considered it nearer to psychology than anything else.
Palmistry may have developed in India but most of the research on it has taken place in the West. That is why we will base our observations on palmistry as it is practiced in the West. We would also refer to Samudrika Shastra as the context demands. In the end the conclusions would be based on our experience and study of the subject.

Let us now come to the shape of the hand and the lines on the palm and also how they come to be formed.

Handlines and the Mind 

The palm is a mirror of our brain and mind.
There are raised mounds of flesh on the palm which is known as “mounts” in palmistry. They indicate the activity of the various centres of our brain.
The lines on the palm are the waves which indicate what goes on in our unconscious mind which has been compared to an iceberg. An iceberg as you know is 9/10 submerged in water and only the top 1/10 of it is visible.
The American, Dr. Eugene Scheimann has referred to many experiments of his times to say that the three main lines and the pattern on the skin of the palm are formed during the third and the fourth months of pregnancy. (For three main lines, see Fig. 1.1)

You might ask the mind starts functioning only when one is born. How do, then, these lines form during the time one is in one’s mother’s womb?
There are two answers to this question.

The Indian sages of yore answer it to say that one takes birth according to his/her desires. When one’s mind is free from desires of any kind, one attains Moksha (or emancipation from the cycle of births and deaths)
From this one can infer that there is a time when the soul is in suspension, as it were. This is the period before one starts developing as a fetus in his mother’s womb. It is the time when the bodiless soul is accompanied by the, mind. This is known, in common parlance, as preta vastha.

The second reply to the above question is provided by modern science. It does not believe in re-birth, but states that the genes of one’s parents are responsible for his physical and mental make -up.

The qualities of one’s forbears which lie dormant in the shape of genes are called instincts in psychology.

“We may believe in the theory of transmigration of souls, or genes or instincts, for that matter or do not believe in anyone of them the fact remains that a child brings some qualities with him at birth. We have called the companion of the soul as the mind; psychology calls it the unconscious.

The desires which lie dormant in our unconscious are the building blocks of the future. Those desires show themselves at the lines on our palms. While we “read” the lines of the palm, we are, in fact, trying to read the unconscious, because only a reading of the unconscious leads one to read the future.
The lines on the palms are graphs of the mind, just like the ECG which represents graphically the movements of the heart. Just as you have to be’ a cardiologist to interpret the wavy lines of the ECG, you have to know the science of palmistry to interpret the significance of the lines of the hand.
When a person who is ignorant of the science of palmistry finds a palmist telling him about his past, his present and also his future, he might get the impression that a miracle is unfolding be¬fore his eyes, but what the palmist is doing in fact is only reading the unconscious mind of his client.

Palmistry is a science. Just as new experiments are being conducted every day in the various sciences, old laws are discarded as new ones are discovered, palmistry is also undergoing the same process.  Modern palmistry interprets the lines in a totally new way; the old interpretations have been discarded. We shall give the old as well as the new interpretations of the lines of the hand in this work. And then we will come to what we have learned from our experience and study of the subject.

Nature of Palmistry as a Science  

We have just now called palmistry a science.  But it is not a definitive science like chemistry, because it concerns the human mind.  Man is not only an amalgam of bones and muscle. He also has a soul and a mind which has developed the most as compared to other animals which inhabit the earth.  A cat will turn to a saucer full of milk; a dog would rush towards a bone and an ant towards a grain of sugar. They will not bother about a TV set, furniture or expensive jewellery because these things do not attract them. But, in so far as man is concerned, you can never be sure as to what he would rush towards and what he would ignore with (disdain.
Palmistry is a science which concerns such a complex being. It is nearer psychology than the experimental sciences.

Unfortunately, palmistry has not got the recognition which psychology has. There is no university which teaches palmistry. The result is that people try to read the future of others without a regular course of study; sometimes they say things which are so frightening that the listener tends to consider himself dead before he actually is.

A Palmist must Act with Responsibility  

A palmist is like a psychiatrist, but his responsibility towards his clients is more than of a doctor towards his patient. If a doctor administers a wrong medicine, he may harm the physical body of the patient. But the harm a man suffers when he hears that something inauspicious is in the offing for him, is much greater, because the effect of a forecast of some impending disaster travels from the mind to the body of the listener. That is why you must venture into the business of forecasting only after you have thoroughly studied the chapters in this book. There are no shortcuts and do not look for any.  Look at your hand as you study the text. After reading the information provided in this website, having imbibed its lessons, begin with the hands of the members of your family. That will help you gain better knowledge of palmistry.

The Scope of Palmistry  

We must discuss the scope of palmistry to the study of which we are devoting our time.  Just thing when does a man go to a palmist? Only when he cannot see his future coarse of action clearly. A client might want to know about the job he should take up, the coarse of study he should choose or the profession he should elect to follow. He is like a sick man going to consult a doctor.

Hand Prints of the same Individual 1.2  

A good palmist is duty bound to understand the problem of his client and to advise him like a professional psychiatrist.
A bitter truth of life is that not everybody is fortunate enough to get everything that he wants.

If one’s spouse is not to one’s liking, or an employment which does not suit one’s tastes, it leads to frustration. One’s mental powers are used up in thinking about one’s deprivations. If the unfortunate one consults a palmist he might suggest something which might give a ray of hope to the sufferer.

Hand Prints of the same Individual 1.3  

The palmist must tell this cardinal truth to his clients that the lines of the palm go on changing. The speed with which they change is, however, so slow as to make the change unnoticeable. If the imprint of the hand taken a long time ago is compared with the one taken recently you would notice the changes some lines may have vanished and others taken their place. Figures on 1.2 and 1.3 are hand prints of the same individual. The one at 1.2 is a de¬cade old. The changes that have taken place in the palm can be seen in 1.3.
Another cardinal fact must not be lost sight of is that the finger prints do not change throughout life.

The fact of unchangeability of the finger prints indicates that to some extent we are slaves of our destiny, but the changeability of the I1nes of the palm is an indication of the fact that we are, to some extent, masters of our destiny.
The palmist should motivate his client to change his hand lines so that the inauspicious can be changed into auspicious.