History

Cheiro: the Irishman who invented the modern palm reading

He was born in County Wicklow, called himself a Count, and by 1900 was the most famous hand reader alive. The system he wrote down is still the one most palmists use.

Almost every palm reading you will ever be given — the four major lines, the seven mounts, the business of one hand for what you were born with and the other for what you did with it — arrives to you through one man. He was born William John Warner in Bray, County Wicklow, in 1866. He worked as Cheiro, and at other times as Count Louis Hamon, a title with no discoverable basis whatsoever.

This is worth being clear about at the outset, because the honest history of palmistry and the flattering history of palmistry are two different documents, and we would rather sell you the first one.

The consulting room

Cheiro set up in London in the late 1880s and, within a decade, had read hands for a client list that reads like a guest book of the late Victorian world: Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Thomas Edison, Joseph Chamberlain, the Prince of Wales who became Edward VII. He kept a visitors’ book and he reproduced pages of it in his own publications, which is a detail worth holding onto.

Cheiro has exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy. I ought not to confess this accuracy, still I am moved to do so.Attributed to Mark Twain, reproduced by Cheiro from his own visitors’ book

That line has been quoted in palmistry books for more than a century. It may well be exactly what Twain wrote. It is also the case that the only person who has ever produced the page is the man it flatters, and Twain was a professional writer of amusing things in other people’s books. Both of those can be true at once.

What he actually built

Cheiro’s real achievement was not prophecy. It was editorial. Palmistry before him was a sprawl of inherited fragments — medieval chiromancy, Romani practice, seventeenth-century engravings, a great deal of local invention. What he published in Cheiro’s Language of the Hand in 1894 was a system: consistent names, consistent divisions, a fixed vocabulary, and diagrams a reader could actually work from.

• The four major lines fixed as heart, head, life and fate, in that order of reading
• The mounts named for the classical planets and given consistent meanings
• Hand shapes reduced to a small set of types rather than infinite description
• The convention that the passive hand shows inheritance and the active hand shows what has been made of it

None of that was original to him. All of it was standardised by him. If you have ever been told your head line separates from your life line and that this means something about independence, you are being read out of a book that traces back to Cheiro’s edition of the tradition.

The Kitchener story

The most repeated claim about Cheiro is that he warned Lord Kitchener he was in danger of death by water, and that Kitchener drowned in 1916 when HMS Hampshire struck a mine off Orkney. It is a superb story. It also comes to us, as far as anyone has been able to establish, through Cheiro’s own accounts, published afterwards.

Why he still matters

Cheiro died in Hollywood in 1936, having spent his last years writing horoscopes for newspapers. He left behind a practice that was better organised than he found it and a reputation built partly on work and partly on salesmanship, in a ratio nobody will ever now determine.

We read from a vocabulary he standardised, and we say so. What we do not do is repeat his other trick, which was to let the drama of the reading stand in for evidence. When we tell you where your heart line sits, that is because it is visible in your photograph. When we tell you what tradition makes of it, we say that is what tradition makes of it.