Why Palmistry?

A Defence

This short article is to clarify some of the common doubts and myths of palmistry. This article is not trying to propagate any myths or believes, but more to tell the opinion of a person who has practised palmistry for more than twelve years.

In endeavouring to trace the origin of palmistry, we are carried back to the time of the prehistoric age. History tells us that in the remotest period of the Aryan civilisation it had even a literature of its own. As regards to the people who first understood and practised this study of the palm, we find undisputed proof of their learning and knowledge. Long before Rome, Greece or Israel were even heard of, the monuments in India point back to an age beyond and still beyond. From the astronomical calculations that the figures in their temples represent, it has been estimated that the Hindus understood the precession of the equinoxes centuries before the Christian era.

In the nineteenth century, Sir Charles Bell, who was considered one of the greatest authorities of his age on the nerve connection between the brain and the hand, demonstrated in his works that as there are more nerves from the brain to the hand than to any other portion of the system, that as the action of the mind affects the entire body, it therefore follows that every thought of the brain must more immediately affect the hand.

Some people might argue that the crisp and fine lines on the palm is formed due to the everyday use or folding the hand. If the lines were made by use, a woman working with her hands, say a seamstress, for example, and constantly folding her hands in her effort for her livelihood, would, according to all laws of logic, have some thousands of lines and cross lines in her hands by the time she reached forty. On the other hand, a woman of luxury and comfort would have scarcely any lines; but the direct opposite is the case, as can be proved by the most casual observation.

It has been proven that the lines in the hand have, like the nose or the eyes on the face, a normal or natural position. The slightest deviation from the normal denotes abnormal qualities or tendencies, as, for example, the Line of Head falling to the wrist in the hand of a suicide, and rising and controlling the Heart Line( the better nature), as in the hand of a murderer. Thus palmistry is a "science of prediction" and not superstition. What it deals with is the usage of the abovementioned methods to judge basic human qualities and personalities, and it is these qualities and personalities that the palmist use to gauge tendencies and therefore, in layman terms, "predict the future".