“I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly.” - Elizabeth, Friday the 13th

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

My surprisingly hot girlfriend works at an antique store where people sell their junk from rented booths.  My favorite is the one with the overpriced bookshelf that keeps filling up with discarded quasi-New Age Christian self-help manuals.  Browsing through the Wealth Through Prayer and Unlocking Your Spirit’s Potential tomes offers a pretty sad and pathetic view into the seller’s failing personal life.  And by “sad and pathetic”, I mean, of course, “hilarious”.  But there’s another booth that runs a close second.  I’ve never met the woman who owns it, and I have no idea where her merchandise comes from.  It’s full of Little Golden Books, paper doll cutouts, old baseball bats, canes with hidden swords, ninja weapons, and feather boas.  It’s like the thing is owned by a drag queen martial arts master at a first grade reading level.  Up on a shelf, this mystery person has placed a ceramic hand, its lines and curves marked and labeled in blue.  Supposedly, it’s a map of the soul.

Palm readers have been around for centuries now.  They’re mostly equated with Gypsies in popular culture, though this isn’t quite fair.  Gypsies didn’t invent palmistry just like they didn’t start using tarot cards until the 20th century.  They did, however, kidnap my seventh-born child and use his extracted teeth to cast a curse upon all my subsequent generations.  For this, I shall never forgive them.

But just because palm reading isn’t some kind of gypsy performance art, that doesn’t mean it’s not hokum.  Did you really think there was any other explanation?

II. The Findings

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at his hands.  My regular bank teller counts my money with these creased, callused meat paws that just scream, “I’m packing some sausage under these polyester pants.”  O.J. Simpson’s hands are permanently stained from the blood of his victims.  I know this guy named Edward who has scissors for hands, so you automatically know two things about him: he’s an outcast, and he’s great at crafting.  Jewel’s hands are small, she knows.  But they aren’t ours, they’re her own.  And from that, we know she’s a terrible poet.

But in addition to being able to tell whether someone works for a living or just spends all day at home masturbating, ancient people believed the lines of the hands were also a coded message about their owners’ personalities, physical conditions, and even futures.  Let’s be careful not to fall into the “ancient = wise” trap here.  As I’ve discussed before, modern people often demonstrate a weird logical fallacy by holding up any practice as worthwhile simply because it’s old.  The ancient Egyptians practiced some form of palmistry, and they were also responsible for a great civilization in many ways.  But they also thought their king was a god, and they regularly stuffed their vaginas with crocodile feces.  There’s something to be said for progress.

Palmistry is just another in a long, depressing line of variations on vitalism.  Like other vitalist belief systems such as chiropractic, reflexology, and phrenology, palmistry assumes that everything about you can be more or less distilled to and accessed from one place on your body.  Chiropractic falsely tells us your gateway is in your spine, reflexology in your feet, and phrenology on your scalp.  All of these ideas are wrong, and they were either originated in times before scientific discovery or by unscientific people who weren’t concerned with things like evidence.

The first palmistry guide was published in the 15th century, and the practice was used throughout the middle ages to track down witches and burn them but good.  You see, palmistry (also known by the far cooler word “chiromancy”) isn’t just the interpretation of lines in the skin of the palm.  It also encompasses the shape of or markings on the hand.  Witches were believed to be identifiable by particular moles or freckles Inquisitors and lay-witch burners found on their palms.  The location of these markings were well agreed upon by learned palmistry experts except for all the times they couldn’t agree on them, which was nearly all the time.  Basically, any spot on your hand could be proof that you’re a witch if your palmist had already decided you could use a nice roasting.  This, in essence, is the science of palmistry.

Of course, modern palm reading isn’t quite so dangerous.  Most fortune tellers are perfectly happy to simply separate you from some of your money instead of from your handy layers of skin.  But the basic idea of palmistry isn’t any more reliable or reality-based.  You’ve probably heard the term “life line”, which is supposedly the curved line almost everyone has around the thumb area.  It’s supposed to indicate your physical condition, longevity, and vitality.  But if you’ve never done a day of work in your life, your life line may not be as prominent as someone else’s.  That doesn’t mean your life will be shorter.  For Christ’s sake, Prince Charles is still kicking, and the only manual labor he’s ever done is picking tax money from British pockets.  (I’m assuming.)

The belief that palmistry could possibly predict a person’s future is even more ridiculous.  At least your palm is part of your physical condition, so it’s not completely moronic to think there might be an interpretable connection between the two.  How your hand creases could indicate your future romantic, financial, or otherwise personal future is anyone’s guess.  Unless, of course, you’re giving all your money to fortune tellers, in which case your financial future is all but certain.

III. The Conclusion

I know the ridiculousness of palm reading is pretty obvious to most readers, but you’d be amazed how some people buy into this crap.  If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a market for those hand-shaped neon signs with the eye in the center.  And no one would plop down the $11.53 (and eligible for free Supersaver Shipping!) for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Palmistry (redundant?).  But I quote a Mr. Edward D. Campbell from his Amazon.com review of this very useless book: “[Robin Gile's] work on the fingers is some of the best I have read and I have about 150 books on the subject.”

150 books.  On fingers.  Granted, I’m no finger expert (Just ask my junior high girlfriend!  Zing!), but I do know a little bit about thumbs.  And instead of buying all those books on palmistry, Mr. Campbell may have just as much success sticking his thumb up–  Hold on.  I was just looking at the lines around my own thumb, and according to this palmistry book, it appears I may have a very lucrative future in publishing idiot’s guides for idiots.  Better get on that.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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