Ask an Amateur Scientist: Palm Reading
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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I remember reading an essay by Robert Heinlein once who talked about how in his childhood, things like Palmistry and Horoscopes and that kind of thing were completely dead industries and virtually unknown (in 1920 he said only 3 newspapers in the entire country ran horoscopes), and were the kinds of things that were openly laughed at by polite people. It was considered “Disgusting old world stuff” that should be tolerated-but-derided. He then went on to express shock and revulsion at how this crap made a comeback after WWII, and became all-but-ubiquitous.
Heinlein assumes it was our educational system that held this crap in check, and it’s decline caused it’s resurgence, but the truth is: We’re Americans. We’ve never been all that well educated.
I wonder if, perhaps, it was our rampant puritanism that held it down? (Because, again, though we’ve never held much for book learnin’ as a people, we definitely were into puritanism for a long time) Once puritanism broke down, that perhaps backed up the old spiritual drain and let this stuff flood the bathrooms of our souls?
@hoobajoobah (what a great name!). I think palmistry and horoscopes started coming back into vogue in the 1920s and 30s about the same time that saw the upswelling of interest in Edgar Cayce’s predictions and the “unseen” world. There was a resurgence of interest in Egyptian tombs, mummies, and Egyptian religion in particular. The way was probably prepared by the previous decades’ fascination with hygiene, health foods, and medical bunkum.
From what I can tell, it was mostly a kind of “seems like fun – bring out the ouija board – wouldn’t it be a kick if something actually happened?” kind of playing by people who didn’t have television and wanted some sort of “new” diversion. There was a rising middle class with more leisure time than before. They were curious and bored probably.
Unfortunately, the poor people who have been victimized by fortune tellers and “mediums” will always be with us because they WANT to believe. In fashion or out, there will always be a market for hooey.
This was a funny article, by the way. I very much enjoyed the description of the booth as seeming as though it was owned by a drag queen martial arts master with a first grade reading level (what a picture!). I’ve been interested in Egyptology since I was a small child, and I’d never heard about that use of crocodile feces – so thanks for that (I think).
Robyn – thanks!
All true, I think you’re right. I was just wondering what role a relaxing of traditional religious values may have played in that transition. I mean, go back to any point in the 19th century, and most people would have treated the idea of Ouija Boards and Palm Reading as satanism, and not to be entertained. Then you get to the mid-20th century when only satanism is regarded as satanism. And now you you get to us, where satanism is regarded as a quaint marketing tool for washed up musicians.
So the question is: is the decline in one in some way tied to the decline of the other, or are they paralell but unrelated trends? Did Nurse Romances go out of fashion because they were stilted and boring and no longer accurately reflect the lifestyles of most women, or did they go out of fashion because it suddenly became easier to get porn? That kind of thing.
I honestly don’t know. I’m just asking.
Nice article. By all means, refrain from dumping your cash into the hands of unscrupulous palm readers. There is certainly no shortage of charlatans, cold readers and kooky people eager to make some extra dollars out there.
However, there are also some of us who are interested in the "hard" science that explains observable correlations between the construction and movement of the human hand and human behavior. For many of us, it absolutely goes beyond superstition and vitalism. It's not so much about observing what we can't explain and then just making stuff up, but about trying to explain what we observe by seeking observable patterns. As scientists (amateur or otherwise), some of us do this – yes, even in the study of (gasp!) palmistry – by running carefully controlled experiments and recording further observations. Remember that more of the cerebral cortex goes to sensory and motor functions in the hand than to any other part of the body. Those are a lot of brain-hand connections.
Most palm readers and "fortune tellers" out there don't know much more about what they're doing than what they've read in the Idiot's Guide, and it would be idiotic to give your money to such a person who claims to be an expert, just as it would to give money to a physician who learned to diagnose illnesses from reading Men's Health. There are a number of serious palmists who will tell you that there is no "fortune telling" involved in palmistry at all. For example, the "life line," also known technically as the "radial longitudinal crease," is indeed an indicator of physical health, but it cannot and should never be used to predict the duration of someone's life. To do so would not only be ridiculous, but unethical. It, and other characteristics of the hand, do correlate to certain predispositions, however, relating to both physical health and behavior. Because of this, a serious palmist can consider a subject's future just as a geneticist, psychologist, or anthropologist can, but can't predict when (or even if) that person is going to win the lottery or divorce his wife.
Try looking through a palmistry book and replacing all the silly sounding terms ("Jupiter finger, Mount of Luna, Line of Apollo") with more sophisticated sounding, less hokey terminology. Then try reading some of the hard to find works on dermatoglyphics, palmar creases and genetics, and body language. We no longer live in the middle ages, and while some people may still cling to the mystique of times long gone, those of us who wish to move science forward don't have to be hindered by the stigma that they perpetuate.
For your information, the allotted time for presentation of the material in my paper on palmistry, dermatoglyphics, criminal forensic sciences and hand analysis during the Dermatoglyphics Section of the 16th World Conference of the International Union of Anthropologists and Ethnologists at the end of July at Yunan University in Kunming, China, has been extended from fifteen minutes to fifty minutes by the chairperson of that section because he considers my paper very important. That equals the times allotted for two and a half presentations. You will probably see this change reflected on the conference program before the conference in the last week in July, 2009. This conference, originally scheduled for 2008, was moved probably because of the earthquake that year as well as the Olympics, and more can be found at https://www.icaes2008.org/defaultDo.jsp. Academics from many of the leading Universities in the world are expected to attend this week long event. I have to split this comment here.
Here is the rest of my comment: The scientific study of hand analysis has arrived. The person who wrote this trash obviously does not know what he is talking about. Robin Gile’s book is very good, though I disputed a couple of points with him. He is an excellent palmist. By the way, I was invited to make this presentation by the chairman of this section after he had heard a presentation I made on the subject of fingerprint behavioral correspondences to behavior at a scholar’s conference sponsored by the Mind Measurement Education Association in Taipei, Taiwan. Come to our conference in Las Vegas in October and learn something about the subject http://www.ibmbs.com/.
One last comment: Until one has used the teachings of palmistry found in many books, such as Robin Gile's of palmistry in the examination of at least one thousand pairs of hands, I do not believe they are qualified to judge. Nor would I allow a surgeon to operate on me without finishing medical school and doing his internship. It is a highly technical subject that requires a great amount of study as well as practical experience. I have now well over two hundred volumes on the subject and have probably examined ten thousand pairs of hands in my twenty five years of experience. Could have examined more but have also been a full time lawyer. There may be some bad people calling themselves palm readers, but that does not mean the profession or the subject is bad as a whole.