Cheiro's Language of the Hand

Before Cheiro explains a single line, he spends twenty-odd pages on a defence. In 1894 palmistry was a fairground trick, and he knew most readers would open his book already smiling.

So he starts by saying what the study is for. The hand, he writes, is "the key to that cabinet of character", and through it one can see not only a person's faults but how those faults might be redeemed. His motto is the old Greek one: know thyself.

That changes what a reading is. It is not a party trick about tall strangers and sea voyages. It is a way of finding out what you are made of, including the talents you have been too busy to notice.

Cheiro's history runs like this. The study began in ancient India, travelled to China, Persia and Egypt, and took its clear shape in Greece. He counts Anaxagoras, Aristotle and Pliny among its students, and repeats the story of a book on the hand sent to Alexander the Great as "a study worthy the attention of an elevated and inquiring mind."

Then the church branded it sorcery. Respectable people stopped admitting to it, and the art slid down to wandering fortune-tellers, which is where Victorian London found it.

His point is not really about dates. It is that palmistry was slandered, not disproved, and he asks for one thing in return: curiosity, "tempered by common sense and patience."

Here is the argument everything else rests on. Cheiro gathers the anatomists of his day to show that the hand holds more nerves than any other part of the body, and the palm more than the rest of the hand.

Every nerve, he notes, carries traffic both ways: orders from the brain to the hand, and impressions from the hand back to the brain. That makes the hand, in his phrase, the immediate servant of the brain. Aristotle called it "the organ of organs."

Follow that through and palmistry stops sounding like magic. If the brain shapes a character, and the hand is wired more closely to the brain than any other limb, then the hand should carry the record. Cheiro is not asking you to believe in signs from the sky. He is asking you to look at the body's most talkative part.

According to Cheiro's defence, why should a hand reveal character at all?

• The planets press their influence into the mounts at the moment of birth
• Years of daily work slowly carve a person's habits into the palm
• It is the brain's closest servant, richer in nerves than any other part✓Correct answer
• People unconsciously grow into the meanings the ancients gave the lines

Cheiro's case is anatomical: the hand is wired to the brain more closely than any other limb, so it records what the brain is. He denies that work makes the lines, and he says he uses planetary names only as shorthand, not as astrology.

The first objection everyone raises is that lines are just creases from work and folding. Cheiro calls this "a very popular fallacy", and he answers it with a newborn.

A baby's hand, he points out, is already deeply marked, long before it has worked at anything. Labour does the opposite of carving lines: it lays a coarse layer of skin over them. Soften a workman's palm and the whole network shows again, "from the cradle to the grave."

Folding fares no better. Lines appear where the hand never folds, and in some diseases, paralysis among them, the lines fade away while the hand goes on folding exactly as before. So the lines are not made by work, and whatever writes them is working from the inside.

Cheiro's second piece of evidence is variety. The markings of no two hands have ever been found alike, and he says this shows most clearly in twins.

Where twins differ in nature, their lines differ widely. Where they are alike, some important difference still appears, matching the difference in temperament. A face can fool you into thinking two people are one; a pair of palms will not.

Families show the reverse pattern. A peculiarity in the lines can run for generations, carried alongside the family trait it stands for. And when one child takes after the father and another after the mother, he claims the markings follow the parent the child resembles. For Cheiro that settles it: the lines track the person, not the job and not the accident of a crease.