What You Should Know About Palmistry

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. This witty, skeptical survey turns palmistry into both history and satire, tracing its roots from ancient cultures through Greece, India, China, and the Middle Ages to the later writers who shaped its modern form. The author explains how hand-reading promised access to character and destiny, then questions the very idea that the hand can reliably reveal either. Palmistry emerges as one more human system for craving certainty about the future, alongside religion, fortune-telling, and even science when it ventures into prediction. From there, the book catalogs the palmists' elaborate classifications: the elementary, conic, square, knotty, psychic, and mixed hands; the meanings of finger length, shape, bends, and spacing; the planetary associations of each digit; the phalanges, thumb, nails, mounts, lines, wrinkles, hardness, softness, hairiness, and skin color. Every feature is made to signify labor, artistry, intellect, ambition, caution, vanity, morality, success, cowardice, sexuality, domesticity, or even criminality. With comic precision, the text exposes how endlessly adaptable and fundamentally arbitrary these readings are, mocking a pseudo-science that can always invent an interpretation.