Mount of Luna

The Mount of Luna, also called the mount of the Moon, lies on the outer edge of the palm below the Upper Mount of Mars, opposite the Mount of Venus, and the tradition claims for it imagination, intuition, restlessness, a love of travel and, in the darker readings, a tendency to fantasy and instability. The hypothenar eminence is the anatomical structure. The pairing of Luna against Venus across the palm, imagination against appetite, is a piece of the scheme's internal symmetry and is characteristic of how such systems are built: the opposition is generated by the layout rather than observed. Palmistry is recorded in this atlas as a tradition with a real history and a large literature. The claims described here are the claims its practitioners make, and readers should understand them as such.

Traditional chiromancy reads a well-developed Mount of Luna, on the outer edge of the palm's base opposite Venus, as indicating imagination, intuition, sensitivity to the unconscious, and a restless love of travel or change, drawn from the moon's own classical association with the imaginative and the mutable rather than the fixed. An excessively developed mount is read as a tendency toward fantasy, moodiness or escapism, while a flat one suggests a purely practical, unimaginative temperament. Because Luna sits opposite Venus across the base of the palm, the two mounts are sometimes read together as a pair, the imaginative, changeable moon balanced against the warm, embodied constancy of Venus, within the tradition's own internally consistent but evidentially unsupported symbolic logic.

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

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 Luna is anatomically the hypothenar eminence, the muscle mass along the outer edge of the palm. Like the thenar it is a genuine muscular structure whose bulk varies with build and with manual work, so its prominence carries information about a life, but not the kind the reading claims.

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