The Journal
Where hand reading came from, and what it can honestly do
Fourteen pieces on the people who built this practice — Cheiro, Benham, Charlotte Wolff, Julius Spier — on the sceptic who dismantled it from the inside, and on what each of the four major lines is actually taken to mean. Written by the people who sell the readings, which is the reason we are careful.
Reading the hand
How to photograph your palm for a reading
Light from the side, not the front — and four other things that decide how much of your hand is legible. Five minutes of care, a materially better reading.
Reading the hand · 7 minThe mounts of the palm, without the mysticism
Seven fleshy pads, named for classical planets, and the framework Benham built around them. What each is traditionally read for, and how to find yours.
Reading the hand · 6 minThe fate line is the one that is not always there
Around a third of hands show no clear fate line at all. That is not a defect, and what it is traditionally taken to mean is more interesting than the alternative.
Reading the hand · 6 minThe life line does not measure your life
A short life line does not mean a short life. It never did, no reputable practitioner reads it that way, and here is what the line is actually taken to show.
Reading the hand · 7 minThe head line, read properly
The middle crease, and the one that carries the most weight in a serious reading. Length, slope, and the gap where it leaves the life line.
Reading the hand · 7 minThe heart line, read properly
Where it runs, what its curve and ending are traditionally taken to mean, and what a photograph genuinely can and cannot show about it.
Reading the hand · 6 minLeft hand or right hand: which one gets read?
The oldest question in palmistry, and most sites get it muddled. The rule is about dominance, not sex — and there is a reason a full reading uses both hands.
History
The Victorian women who organised palmistry
Katharine St. Hill founded the Chirological Society in 1889, and a generation of women turned a fairground trade into something with minutes and a membership.
History · 7 minJung wrote the foreword. The hands were Julius Spier’s.
Julius Spier studied under Carl Jung, read hands in Amsterdam under occupation, and was the subject of one of the twentieth century’s great diaries. He died in 1942.
History · 8 minWhere hand reading became science, and where it stopped
Harold Cummins coined the word dermatoglyphics and built a real science from the ridges on your palm. It is not palmistry, and the difference matters.
History · 7 minThe palm reader who talked himself out of it
Ray Hyman read palms for money and believed it. Then someone suggested he try telling clients the opposite — and they agreed just as readily.
History · 8 minCharlotte Wolff took hands into the laboratory
A Berlin physician who fled the Nazis, wrote on hands with a preface by Aldous Huxley, and tried to do what nobody in palmistry had done: measure.
History · 7 minWilliam Benham spent thirty years trying to make palmistry a science
Benham’s 1900 book put "scientific" in the title and built the mount system most readers still use. What he got right about method, and the one thing he never did.
History · 8 minCheiro: the Irishman who invented the modern palm reading
He read the hands of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, and built the template every palmist still works from. What Cheiro actually did, and what he only said he did.