La Chirognomonie is Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny's 1843 treatise classifying the hand's outward shape, rather than the lines of the palm, into types he correlated with character and intelligence. It launched the modern revival of Western palmistry and introduced the classification of hand shapes still used by palm readers today, distinct from the older tradition of chiromancy, which read the lines rather than the shape.
Facts
Origins
Era of CompositionSourced to the subject's own account LanguageSourced to the subject's own account Attributed Author / CompilerCasimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, retired French cavalry captain, published 1843. 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountEarlier atlas text and some secondary popular accounts gave 1839 as the publication year. Library holdings, a digitized copy of the first edition and a 2021 academic journal article on the history of chirognomy all agree the book was first published at Paris by the bookseller Charles Le Clere in 1843; the atlas now follows that convergent evidence. Composition NoteSourced to the subject's own accountD'Arpentigny developed his system of classifying hands into types, elementary, spatulate, conic, and square among them, over years of private observation before setting the method down in this published work. 1 Scholarship
First PublishedSourced to the subject's own accountPublished at Paris by the bookseller Charles Le Clere in 1843. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteSourced to the subject's own accountHistorians of palmistry credit the work with establishing hand shape, rather than the lines alone, as a primary category of interpretation, a classification later popularized in English by William G. Benham and still used by practitioners today. 1 Text
Literary FormSourced to the subject's own account Transmission
Manuscript TraditionSourced to the subject's own accountD'Arpentigny expanded and retitled the original 1843 work as La Science de la Main for its third edition, published in 1865. 1 Sources
Textual NoteSourced to the subject's own accountD'Arpentigny expanded and retitled the work as La Science de la Main for its third edition, published in 1865. 1 Learn More
Shape Over Lines
Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, a French cavalry officer who retired from active service in 1844, spent his later years pursuing a private study of the hand and published his findings in 1839 as La Chirognomonie, a title he coined by combining the Greek words for hand and for law or judgment. His method broke deliberately from the older European tradition of chiromancy, which read fortune and character from the lines crossing the palm, and instead studied the hand's overall external shape, the length and thickness of the fingers, the proportion of palm to fingers, the presence or absence of visible knots at the finger joints, treating these gross physical features as more reliable indicators of a person's underlying temperament and intelligence than the fine, changeable lines chiromancy relied on.
From this method he derived a typology still used by palmists today, sorting hands into categories such as the elementary hand, associated with simple or brutish natures, the philosophic hand, marked by knotted joints and long fingers and associated with analytical, questioning minds, and the artistic or psychic hand, associated with intuition and aesthetic sensitivity, among several others. D'Arpentigny presented his system as a serious empirical classification akin to contemporary physiognomy and phrenology, both then treated as respectable if contested sciences, rather than as fortune telling, a framing that shaped how palmistry would present itself to a skeptical nineteenth century public for the rest of the century.
The Revival of Modern Palmistry
Chiromancy, the older line-reading tradition, had circulated in Europe since at least the late medieval period and had fallen into considerable disrepute by d'Arpentigny's time, tarred by association with itinerant fortune tellers and largely abandoned by anyone claiming scholarly seriousness. La Chirognomonie is usually credited with reversing that decline and launching palmistry's nineteenth century revival, precisely because d'Arpentigny presented shape-reading in the vocabulary of contemporary natural science rather than of divination, giving educated readers a framework they could take up without embarrassment. His most significant disciple, Adolphe Desbarrolles, extended and popularized the system in the following decades, merging d'Arpentigny's hand-shape typology with a reworked and more systematic treatment of the palm's lines, and it is this combined Desbarrolles-d'Arpentigny synthesis, rather than either man's work alone, that underlies most Western palmistry as it is practiced today, including the terminology, the mount of Venus, the line of the heart, the line of the head, still used by contemporary palm readers.
D'Arpentigny's original shape typology remains a distinct diagnostic layer within that later synthesis, still taught as chirognomy proper, meaning the study of the hand's shape, as distinct from chiromancy, the study of its lines, a distinction that survives in palmistry manuals today as a direct legacy of his 1839 treatise.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Launched the modern revival of Western palmistry, classifying hand shapes still used by palm readers today.
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La Chirognomonie launched the modern revival of Western palmistry and introduced the classification of hand shapes still used today.
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