Palmistry: a history of hand reading from Aristotle to Cocles
Palmistry through history: Aristotle's remarks, medieval treatises, Hartlieb, Cocles and Indagine, down to the nineteenth-century chirognomy of the salons.
The word chiromancy joins the Greek cheir, «hand», and manteia, «divination». It refers to the art of drawing omens about a person's character and fate from the lines, creases and raised areas of the palm. It is one of Europe's longest-lived divinatory practices, and its history runs through ancient natural philosophy, medieval manuscripts, Renaissance printing and popular fairs, all the way to the elegant drawing rooms of the nineteenth century.
Ancient traces
A structured practice of hand reading in Greek antiquity is not well documented, and many attributions to ancient philosophers are later legends. One certain fact is that Aristotle, in the Historia animalium, noted that the lines of the palm vary from person to person and hinted at a connection between certain lines and length of life. It was an observation of natural philosophy, not a divinatory system, but later palmists often cited it to lend authority to their art.
Traditions of hand reading also existed in India and China, with their own developments. Direct links between these traditions and the European one, however, are uncertain. The idea, widespread in the nineteenth century, that palmistry was brought to Europe by Romani groups coming from India is also a simplification: the Latin treatises predate their documented arrival in the West.
The Middle Ages and the first treatises
In Europe, Latin texts on palmistry appear in the twelfth century and multiply over the next two centuries, often brief and accompanied by drawings of hands with annotated lines. A vocabulary destined to last took shape at that time: the line of life, the line of the heart, the line of the head, also called the mensal line, and the «mounts» at the base of the fingers, named after the planets, such as the mount of Venus under the thumb and that of Jupiter under the index finger.
In 1456 the Bavarian physician Johannes Hartlieb placed palmistry among the seven forbidden arts in his Buch aller verbotenen Kunst. Hartlieb himself, shortly before, had written a treatise on palmistry, a sign of how ambivalent attitudes towards these arts could be. Moral condemnation and learned curiosity often lived side by side in the same person.
Printing and the Renaissance
Printing gave palmistry a new reach. In Bologna, in 1504, Bartolomeo della Rocca, known as Cocles, published the Chyromantie ac physionomie anastasis, which combined hand reading with physiognomy. In 1522 Johannes ab Indagine issued the Introductiones apotelesmaticae, soon translated into several languages. In these books woodcuts of hands became a characteristic feature.
The Church viewed palmistry with suspicion whenever it claimed to predict the future, since this seemed to contradict free will. Partly for this reason, many authors presented it as a natural science of bodily signs, close to medicine and physiognomy. The Council of Trent and the Index of Forbidden Books struck at the divinatory arts in general, but palmistry continued to circulate in editions and compendia.
From the nineteenth century to popular culture
In the nineteenth century the French captain Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny published La chirognomonie (1839), devoted to the shape of the hand rather than its lines, and Adolphe Desbarrolles popularised palmistry in the Parisian salons. In England, by contrast, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 punished anyone who claimed to tell fortunes «by palmistry or otherwise».
The long story of palmistry reveals an ancient wish to see in the body a legible script. Between learned treatises and fairground booths, the hand remained for centuries a small book that each age read with its own tools and its own fears, from the medieval physician to the curious Victorian.