How Old Is Palmistry, and What Is the Evidence

Hand-reading of some kind is attested in several traditions: Samudrika Shastra in India includes the reading of the hand within a wider science of bodily marks, Chinese physiognomy includes hand-reading, and scattered Greek and medieval Latin texts on chiromantia survive from the twelfth century onward. But the system used today, with its named mounts and lines and its detailed interpretive vocabulary, is modern and French.

Captain Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny published La Chirognomonie in 1843, classifying hands by shape; Adolphe Desbarrolles published Les Mysteres de la Main in 1859, systematising the lines; and the Irish palmist William John Warner, known as Cheiro, popularised the result in London from the 1890s. As to evidence: there is none. Controlled studies of palmistry have not found the claimed associations, and the accuracy readers report is well explained by cold reading and by the Barnum effect, the tendency to accept vague personality statements as specifically true.

Sources La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la mainCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny with Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles, Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner)