Reading the hand

The mounts of the palm, without the mysticism

The lines get the attention. Practitioners who have read a lot of hands tend to think the mounts carry more, and they are considerably easier to see in a photograph.

How to find them

Cup your hand slightly and look at it side-on in raking light. The mounts are the raised pads: four across the top beneath the fingers, the large one around the thumb, the one on the outer edge opposite it, and the flatter areas between. What matters is which are full, which are flat, and whether any is displaced towards a neighbour.

The seven

Jupiter — beneath the index finger

Ambition, self-regard, the wish to be in charge of something. Full is read as appetite for responsibility; flat as an indifference to status that is either restful or costly, depending on what the person wants.

Saturn — beneath the middle finger

Seriousness, solitude, and patience with dull necessary work. It is normally the flattest of the four upper mounts; a genuinely full Saturn is read as a strongly private and self-sufficient temperament.

Apollo — beneath the ring finger

Display, taste, and the wish to be seen doing something well. Read as the aesthetic mount, and in the tradition its fullness is about wanting an audience as much as about talent.

Mercury — beneath the little finger

Quickness, persuasion, trade, and language. The mount of people who can talk their way into and out of things, read for better and worse.

Mars — two positions

Inner Mars, between the thumb and the head line’s origin, is read as assertion and the willingness to have a row. Outer Mars, on the opposite edge below Mercury, is read as endurance — the capacity to absorb something for a long time without moving.

Venus — the large pad around the thumb

Enclosed by the life line. Appetite, warmth, physical vitality, and pleasure in things that can be touched. The largest mount and usually the easiest to assess in a photograph.

Luna — the outer edge, below Mercury towards the wrist

Imagination, restlessness, and the pull of elsewhere. Traditionally read alongside the head line’s slope: a head line dropping towards a full Luna is one of the most-discussed combinations in the literature.

Reading them as a set

Benham’s contribution, in 1900, was to argue that a hand has a dominant mount which sets the type of the whole reading, with the lines modifying it rather than the other way round. Whatever you make of the meanings, that is a genuinely more disciplined way to read a hand than treating each feature as an independent oracle, and it is how our readings are structured.