History

Jung wrote the foreword. The hands were Julius Spier’s.

The closest palmistry has come to establishment respectability arrived through a man most people have never heard of, in the worst circumstances imaginable.

Julius Spier was born in Frankfurt in 1887 and spent his early career in business. In his forties he went to Zurich and studied under Carl Jung, who encouraged him to develop the thing he had been doing privately for years: reading hands, and treating what he found as psychological material rather than fortune-telling. Spier called it psycho-chirology.

The foreword

Spier’s book The Hands of Children was published in English in 1944, after his death, with an introduction by Jung. That introduction is the single most-cited piece of respectability in the whole of modern palmistry, and it is worth reading what it actually says rather than what it is usually taken to say.

Jung was interested in the hand as an expressive whole — as one more channel, alongside dreams and drawings and gesture, through which something about a person becomes visible. He was cautious. He was not endorsing prediction, and he was not claiming the lines encode a future. He was saying that a trained observer looking carefully at hands might see something, in the way a trained observer looking carefully at anything might.

Amsterdam

Spier left Germany in 1939 and settled in Amsterdam. He was still practising when the occupation came. One of the people who came to him — first as a patient, then as his secretary, then as something more complicated than either — was Etty Hillesum, whose diaries were published decades later as An Interrupted Life and are now regarded as one of the essential documents of the period.

Hillesum’s account of Spier is the most detailed record we have of what it was actually like to be read by him, and it is unsparing. He emerges as magnetic, self-dramatising, genuinely perceptive and thoroughly human. She was transformed by him and saw through him, often on the same page.

Spier died in Amsterdam in September 1942, of natural causes, the day before he was due to report for deportation. Hillesum was killed at Auschwitz the following year.

What is left

Spier’s technical system has not survived; almost nobody reads hands his way now. What survives is the reframing — the idea that a hand reading is a piece of self-description rather than a forecast, and that its value, if it has any, is in what the person does with it afterwards.

That is the frame this site works in. We are not telling you what will happen. We are telling you, carefully and specifically, what is on your hand and what a long tradition makes of it, and leaving the use of that entirely to you.