Palmistry is the practice of reading a person's character, and in some schools their future, from the shape and markings of the hand. It is also called chiromancy, palm reading or hand reading.
It is a tradition, not a science. Palmistry is widely viewed as a pseudoscience, and no good evidence shows it predicts anything. People keep returning to it anyway, because a hand is a personal thing to look at, and an old vocabulary hands you words for what you find there. (Poker players say "hand reading" too. They mean something else.)
Chirognomy
Reads character from the build of the hand: the palm against the fingers, the fingers against each other.
Shape
Chiromancy
Reads the markings on the palm. In the old books this was the branch that claimed to foretell, which is what its name means.
Lines
The creases, their length and direction.
Mounts
The pads, named for planets.
Marks
Crosses, rings and other small signs.
Palmistry, chiromancy, chirognomy: four names and two arguments
The words overlap, and the people who used them didn't agree on where one stops. This is what each one means in the books we read.
| Word | Where it comes from | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Palmistry | Markun: probably Middle English and Old French paume and maistrie, so skill with the palm. | The whole practice, in everyday English. |
| Chiromancy, or cheiromancy | Dale: Greek for the palm, plus manteia, to foretell. | Foretelling fortunes from the hand, in Markun. The study of the lines, in Cheiro. |
| Chirognomy, or cheirognomy | From the same Greek word for hand. | Character from the hand, in Markun. Hand shape, in Cheiro. |
| Palm reading, hand reading | Plain English. | The same practice. Wikipedia also lists chirology. |
The last column holds the first argument. Leo Markun, a skeptic surveying these books in 1927, split palmistry by purpose: chirognomy reads character, chiromancy foretells. Cheiro, the most famous palmist of the period, split it by subject: lines on one side, the shape of the hand on the other, and he told students they could take up either. Neither is wrong. They are different ways of cutting the same cake, which is worth knowing when two guides seem to use one word for two things.
The second argument is in the first column. Dale calls "palmistry" the vulgar name for a learned art, writing that it "has been vulgarly called Palmistry." The vulgar name won.
How palmistry works, and what a palm reader looks at
- aPalm's proportions
- bHead line
- cHeart line
- dMount of Venus
- eMystic cross
It works by convention. Each part of the hand has been assigned a domain of life, and a reader interprets what they find on that part according to the books they learned from. Nobody has shown a mechanism that connects the two, and the old writers mostly argued by analogy: Cheiro compares a line to a needle in a compass.
A reader normally starts wide. Shape comes first, sorted into types, which you can test on yourself with the hand type test. Then the lines, which are the part most people picture: the heart, head and life lines, and on many hands a fate line. All of them have shapes with their own readings, listed one by one on the palm reading lines page. Then the mounts, the padded areas named after planets. Marks come last, because they are small and easy to imagine. Our palm reading guide walks through that order on one example hand.
Most of the skill is in combining. A strong head line changes how a reader takes a large mount of Jupiter in Cheiro's account, and that is why a list of meanings doesn't teach much on its own.
Western, Indian and Chinese palmistry
People talk about schools as if each had a settled rulebook and a known age. What we could actually open is thinner and more interesting than that. The cleanest way to see the difference is a question every reader must answer first: which hand?
- WesternCheiro, Markun
Mostly a modern arrangement. Markun credits the layout of the books he knew to "two men, Hartlieb in the fifteenth century and d'Arpentigny in the middle of the nineteenth." Mounts carry planet names, and hand shape became its own study.
Which hand: Both, compared. Cheiro: "Both the hands should be examined together", the left for "natural tendencies", the right for the "developed or active brain." No rule by gender.
- IndianWikipedia on Samudrika Shastra, Dale
Hand reading, or Hasta-samudrika, sits inside a wider Sanskrit literature on marks of the body. Wikipedia, citing Zysk, counts around 600 manuscripts, many undated, and dates the Samudrika-tilaka to the 12th century CE.
Which hand: Dale in 1895: "The general rule in the East is that the right palm of the male and the left palm of the female ought to be examined."
- ChineseChina Educational Tours
The thinnest in what we could open. Our one source is a commercial travel site with no citations, so we give its hand rule and leave its dates out.
Which hand: The reverse of Dale. The site says "for males the left hand is considered as the most important" and "for females the right hand."
So the honest answer to "which hand do you use?" is that the traditions contradict each other, and one 1895 compiler and one travel website don't settle it. Most modern advice says to look at both, which costs nothing.
Where palmistry came from, in four lines
- Aristotle remarks in a zoology book that the palm has lines, "in the case of long-lived people" extending right across. The treatise he supposedly found on an altar is a legend.
- Sanskrit texts on body marks are dated from the 12th century CE. Claims of thousands of years have no source we could check.
- In the Latin West, chiromancy texts appear from about the 12th century. Hartlieb's Chiromantia followed in 1448.
- D'Arpentigny revived it in 1839, and Cheiro, born William John Warner in 1866, made it famous.
The history of palmistry page goes through each claim and marks it verified, attributed or unverified. If a site gives you a confident number of years, ask it for the source.
Is palmistry real or a pseudoscience?
The lines are real. They are flexion creases that form before birth and let the hand fold. The claims about what they mean have very little behind them. Only one has been tested in any serious way, the idea that the life line tracks lifespan. Three studies have looked: one from 1990 reported a link, and two, from 1974 and 2019, found none. The three studies and why readings still feel accurate are set out in Is palm reading real?
Skepticism isn't new either. Markun wrote in 1927, in a book about palmistry: "We have no good reason to suppose that the formation of the hand or of any other part of the human body can tell us anything about character."
Is palmistry against religion?
"He sealeth up the hand of every man; that all men may know his work."
Both sides have used religion. Palmists quoted that verse as support: Dale says it "alone proves that Job believed in this science", and Markun lists it among the texts "supposed to justify chiromancy." The verse doesn't mention reading lines. Meanwhile, in the 16th century the Catholic Church actively suppressed the practice, according to Wikipedia, with edicts from Popes Paul IV and Sixtus V against forms of divination including palmistry. Whether a palm reading sits comfortably with your own faith is a question for you and the people you trust in it.
How people use palmistry now
Mostly for fun, and sometimes for something a bit more useful. A reading gives you an unusual prompt: someone tells you that your hand suggests you weigh things up before you feel them, and you find yourself deciding whether that is true. The value is in that second step, and it works whether or not the lines have anything to do with it.
That is how this site treats it. The scan on our home page measures your actual creases, then tells you what the old books said about lines like them, so you can always see which part is measurement and which part is tradition.
Sources
- Palmistry
- What You Should Know About Palmistry
- Palmistry for All
- Indian Palmistry
- Samudrika Shastra (cites Zysk 2016, The Indian System of Human Marks)
- Palmistry: An Essential Guide
- History of Animals, Book I Part 15, translated by D'Arcy Thompson
- Predicting longevity from the line of life: is it accurate?
- Why do we have lines on the palms of our hands?
- King James Version: Job 37:7, Proverbs 3:16, Isaiah 49:16
What the tradition would make of your hand
The Complete Palm Reading takes your photo and your measured lines through love, money, work and choices, in the tradition's own terms. It reads every line and mount, compares both hands, and saves it under a link.
Complete Palm Reading$9.99One payment. No subscription.
Questions people ask
- What is palmistry in simple words?
- Palmistry is the tradition of reading a person's character, and sometimes their future, from the shape of their hand and the lines and pads on their palm. It is also called palm reading, chiromancy or hand reading.
- What is the difference between palmistry and chiromancy?
- In everyday use they mean the same thing. In older books, chiromancy is the narrower word: Leo Markun used it for foretelling fortunes from the hand, and Cheiro used it for the study of the lines. Chirognomy is the partner word, for character or hand shape.
- How does palmistry work?
- By convention. Parts of the hand are assigned to areas of life, and a reader interprets what they see there using a tradition's rules. No one has shown a mechanism linking the hand to character or events, and no good evidence shows that readings predict anything.
- Is palmistry a pseudoscience?
- It is widely viewed as one, because different interpretations contradict each other and its predictions lack evidence. The palm lines themselves are real flexion creases. It's the meanings that have no support.
- Which hand is used in palmistry?
- It depends on the source. Cheiro compared both hands. Dale, writing about the East in 1895, read the right hand for men and the left for women. One modern site says Chinese palmistry reverses that. Looking at both is the simple way through.
- Is palmistry against the Bible?
- The Bible doesn't describe palm reading. Palmists have quoted Job 37:7 in support, and in the 16th century popes issued edicts against forms of divination including palmistry. Churches and believers differ, so it comes down to your own tradition.
An old vocabulary, a hand you already have
See what the tradition would call the lines on your palm.