A short history of palmistry

Where did palmistry originate?

No one knows where palmistry began. No text records its start, and the oldest writings we have already treat palm reading as something people knew.

Palmistry books of the 1800s told a confident story. Cheiro’s Language of the Hand says it began in India, in “the remotest period” of an ancient civilisation, and was later practised in China, Tibet, Persia and Egypt. He gives no dated text for it; he only describes an old book he says he was shown in India.

Historians are more careful. Charles Burnett, a historian at the Warburg Institute, notes that palm reading texts exist in Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. But he found no link between them and the Western tradition (Hogan, 2018).

So palm reading may have several starts, not one.

Palm reading grew in more than one place. No text records the day it began, and no historian we cite names an inventor.

Palmistry in ancient India

The oldest dated Indian text we could check that reads the palm is the Brihat Samhita. It was written in Sanskrit by Varahamihira in the 6th century AD. Its chapter “On the Features of Man” reads the whole body, and a few verses read the lines and shapes on the palm.

This kind of body reading is called सामुद्रिक शास्त्र (Samudrika Shastra). Palm reading in India, हस्त रेखा शास्त्र (Hast Rekha Shastra), is often described as part of it. Burnett also argues that Sanskrit palm reading grew out of such passages about the hand in body-reading texts.

The Brihat Samhita’s palm verses promise wealth, rank and long life from the lines. Those are forecasts, so we don’t repeat them. What the text does show is that palm lines were being read in India about 1,500 years ago.

Palmistry in ancient Greece

Ancient writers do mention palm reading, so some form of it existed then. But no full Greek palmistry book from that time survives. The Greek palmistry fragments we have were copied much later; Burnett dates them to the 13th to 15th centuries.

Cheiro wrote that the philosopher Anaxagoras taught and practised palmistry in 423 BC. He gave no source, and the historians we cite don’t mention it. Treat it as a claim, not a fact.

Did Aristotle write a book on palmistry?

No. Aristotle mentioned palm lines only once.

In his History of Animals, written in the 4th century BC, he remarks that the long lines across the palm differ between long-lived and short-lived people. The historian Roger Pack called this one sentence Aristotle’s “chiromantic principle”.

That sentence is a lifespan claim, and modern studies that measured life lines found no such link: see is palmistry real. It sits in a book about animal bodies, not in a book on palm reading.

The Aristotle myth: a golden book for Alexander

Palmistry books tell a better story. They say a book on palmistry, written in gold letters, was found on an altar of Hermes and sent to Alexander the Great. Cheiro (1916) says a man called Hispanus found it; Heron-Allen (1885) says Aristotle found it himself.

The two tellings don’t agree, and neither gives a source.

The facts point the other way. Medieval scribes put Aristotle’s name on many Latin palmistry texts: one survey listed 41 of them, all falsely attributed (Schmitt and Knox, 1985, as reported by Hogan). One was printed at Ulm in 1490 as Chyromantia Aristotelis cum figuris, “Aristotle’s palmistry, with pictures”.

How did palmistry reach medieval Europe?

The oldest European mention of palm reading is from the 12th century. The writer John of Salisbury criticised Thomas Becket, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for asking fortune tellers, a palm reader among them, about a coming military campaign.

The oldest surviving Western palmistry text was written into the back of a book of psalms, the Eadwine Psalter, in Canterbury in about 1160. Burnett found it there in 1987. Its rough, repeating style suggests it was written down from a spoken tradition.

Medieval palmistry texts often said they showed a person’s natural leanings, not their fate. That helped them avoid church bans on fortune telling, a form of divination.

Over time, the texts added astrology, linking parts of the hand to the planets. The mounts of the palm still carry planet names today, such as the mount of Venus: see palm mounts.

The 19th-century revival of palmistry

In the 1800s, a few writers in France, Britain and the United States set out to write palm reading down as a system.

Year	Who	What they did
1843	Casimir d’Arpentigny	La Chirognomonie (Paris): reading the shape of the hand and fingers
1859	Adolphe Desbarrolles	Chiromancie nouvelle (Paris): the lines of the hand
1885	Edward Heron-Allen	A Manual of Cheirosophy
1894	Cheiro	Cheiro’s Language of the Hand
1900	William G. Benham	The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading
1927	Leo Markun	What You Should Know About Palmistry, a doubter’s guide

D’Arpentigny’s system of hand shapes is the root of what is now called chirognomy. His translator, Heron-Allen, wrote in 1886 that it “came suddenly into existence, without any known precedent”. The reading of the lines is called chiromancy.

Who was Cheiro?

Cheiro was the pen name of William John Warner (1866–1936), an Irish palmist, astrologer and numerologist. His pen name echoes cheir, the Greek word for hand. He wrote that he was shown an old palmistry book during a stay in India, a claim we can’t check.

His books, above all Cheiro’s Language of the Hand (1894) and Palmistry for All (1916), are the ones PalmSays cites for most line meanings. They are now free to quote.

We keep his readings of character and leave out his forecasts of death, illness and disaster. You can read how we choose sources.

The doubters of the time

Not everyone was convinced, even then. Benham, a palmist himself, warned that the sun line had been badly misread. Markun (1927) mocked palmists who read years and deaths from the life line, and called old predictions of early death harmful.

Palmistry today

In the 20th century, psychologists began to test readings. In 1949, Bertram Forer showed that vague, general statements feel personal to almost anyone, which helps explain why readings can feel true. Scientists now class palmistry as a pseudoscience; the tests are on our page is palmistry real.

The four-element hand types (earth, air, fire and water) are a modern system, not found in the old books we cite; our guide to hand types in palmistry keeps them apart from Cheiro’s seven types. Today palm reading lives on in books, in India’s Hast Rekha tradition, and in apps.

PalmSays is one of those apps. Its scanner traces the heart, head, life and fate lines on your photo and measures your hand type and fingers.

The meanings come from the old books in this history, each with its source, and never as a forecast. To start on your own hand, read how to read palm lines.