University of Virginia Library

Popularity Wanes

check of the Virginia Code
showed she was paying as high
a license fee as a small winery.

But palm reading did not
suddenly appear on the scene
as a state licensed occupation.
idea that the hand could
reveal something about the
individual has fascinated men
for thousands of years. Just
when palmistry began is
uncertain. It was practiced long
ago in China, India, and Egypt.
It seems to have been known in
Babylonia and Chaldea as early
as 4,000 B.C. The Book of Job
has a reference to the marking
of each hand by God "so that
men may know His work."

Those who have hazarded a
guess at its origins believe it's
related to the ancient practice
of divination by the
examination of the entrails of
sacrificial animals. (Etruscan
soothsayers, called auspices,
practiced it during both the
Roman Republic and the
Empire.) After entrails, the
skin markings were examined.
Finally the process evolved
into examining the markings of
the human hand.

Aristotle was said to have
traveled to Egypt where he
became familiar with the
occult practices of the Magi.
He wrote a book on palmistry
and sent it to his pupil
Alexander the Great. Modern
scholars believe the book, if it
ever existed, to be spurious and
the story false. Juvenal, the
satirist, does mention palmistry
in passing. (As expected, the
remark is sarcastic.) There is
little other mention of palm
reading in the classical era.

The trail of substantial
evidence does not begin until
the early 13th century, when
the first surviving manuscripts
on the topic were published,
Since then the art has had a
roller coaster history of
popularity. At one time,
palmistry was taught in
universities. Bishop and Lord
alike studied it. In France,
Mile Lenormand read the
palms of the Empress
Josephine and the painter
Jacques Louis David. England
passed a severe law against it in
1824.

Its popularity waned until
the Twenties and Thirties,
when a number of books were
published on the topic.
Although there was a surge of
interest in the occult in the
Fifties and again in the late
Sixties, palmistry seems left in
the shadow of the astrology
charts in the daily paper.