A Medieval Palmistry

ERIKO AMINO

Through the ages there have been persistent attempts to pen¬
etrate the mystery of the future. These attempts have taken
any number of different forms, in particular, the study of
subjects that hold the promise of keys to prognostication. Astrol¬
ogy, perhaps the most complex of these subjects, has been pursued
and debated from antiquity to the present day, both on a highly
sophisticated level, as in the writings of Saint Augustine, Saint
Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus, and also on a much more
mundane level, as part of a popular tradition of fortune-tellers and
gypsies that continues into the present day. Physiognomy, another
of these subjects also dating back to classical authors such as
Aristotle and Pliny, is the science of learning to read the features of
the human face and understanding the implications of various traits.
The descendants of such studies are apparent in the "how to"
books and manuals that flood the popular marketplace of contem¬
porary society, for example, in interpretations of the stars and stud¬
ies of body language.

As we look at the development of the line of inquiry concerning
the art of reading the signs of man's personality or nature and how
these signs may influence his fate, we can see that palmistry or
chiromancy, the art of reading hands, falls directly within the
parameters of this search. Unlike astronomy and physiognomy,
however, palmistry, which claims to go back to antiquity, cannot be
traced directly to any substantive writings of the ancients. We find a
few brief sentences in Aristotle's Historia Animalium where he
speaks of long-lived persons having one or two lines running across
the hand and short-lived persons having two lines that do not
extend across the palm; Pliny in his Natural History also has a short
reference to broken lines in the hand indicating a short life. But
aside from these, there is little to aid us in discovering the roots of
this discipline.

How then did the expanded art of reading hands for divinatory
purposes come about.' The first actual texts we have are in Latin,