Mount of Apollo

The Mount of Apollo, also called the mount of the Sun, lies at the base of the ring finger, and the tradition claims for it artistry, taste, brilliance, success and the capacity to please; the ring finger itself is called the Apollo or Sun finger in this system. The reading follows the solar significations of the astrological tradition, splendour, art and public regard. It is worth noticing how the scheme is generated: four fingers, four planetary mounts beneath them, the thumb's ball as Venus, the outer edge as Luna, and Mars divided between the two remaining spaces, so that the seven classical bodies are distributed across the available surface. The completeness of the fit is a property of the design rather than a discovery.

Traditional chiromancy reads a well-developed Mount of Apollo, at the base of the ring finger, as indicating artistic sensibility, a love of beauty, and a capacity for brilliance or public recognition, associations drawn from Apollo's own role in classical mythology as god of music, poetry and the sun; the mount is accordingly sometimes called the Mount of the Sun rather than of Apollo specifically, reflecting the same solar association. An excessively developed Apollo mount is read in the tradition as vanity or a craving for attention without substance, while a flat one suggests indifference to art and to public life. The reading rests on the same borrowed planetary-character logic as the other mounts and has no independent evidential support.

Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Les Mysteres de la MainAdolphe Desbarrolles

The mounts are named for the seven classical planets, and that naming is the clearest fingerprint of where the modern system comes from. Reading the hand and reading the sky were fused in the chiromancy of the later medieval and early modern period, and the planetary vocabulary entered from astrology rather than from any independent tradition of hand reading. Where a system's parts are borrowed, the borrowing is usually visible in what it calls them.

The Mount of Apollo is anatomically the pad at the base of the ring finger. It is named for the Sun under the god's name rather than the planet's, which is a small piece of evidence for the astrological borrowing, since the Sun is one of the seven classical planets.

Two things follow. Mount prominence is strongly affected by build, by handedness and by manual labour, none of which the chiromantic reading isolates, so a reader judging a mount is judging a physique as much as anything else. And the planetary names carry astrological meanings in with them: what a mount is said to signify tends to be what its planet signifies, which means the mount system inherits its content rather than deriving it. The atlas sets out the tradition's own reading elsewhere on this page. Here it records what the structure actually is and where the name came from.

Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Kaplan's Functional and Surgical Anatomy of the HandEmanuel B. Kaplan, 3rd edition revised by Morton Spinner