The Fortune Teller, painted by Caravaggio at the end of the 16th century, depicts a gypsy reading the palm of a young man. This scene illustrates the ancient and enduring appeal of chiromancy, the divinatory art based on interpreting the palms. A practice spanning millennia, palm reading has never truly disappeared. History.
From Eastern origins: India and Classical Antiquity
The roots of chiromancy reach back to Eastern Antiquity. According to tradition, the art of reading hands took shape several millennia ago in the Indian subcontinent. Ancient Hindu texts link chiromancy to the Samudrika Shastra, a body of knowledge studying the marks on the human body, with the palm (hast-samudrika) playing an important role. From India, this divinatory practice spread to Central and East Asia, notably China and Tibet, before reaching the Mediterranean world.
Authors of Classical Antiquity also mention palm reading. The word chiromancy comes from the Greek kheir (hand) and manteia (divination), indicating a possible Hellenic familiarity with this art. Tradition holds that Anaxagoras (5th century BC) was interested in it. A famous legend also tells that the philosopher Aristotle once discovered a treatise on chiromancy placed on an altar of Hermes, which he gave to Alexander the Great. The Macedonian conqueror then supposedly examined the hands of his officers to deduce their character and destiny. Although this story is apocryphal—the text in question not belonging to Aristotle’s authentic corpus—it illustrates the ancient belief that the hand could “engrave readable characters” revealing a person’s fate or nature.
Arab knowledge and medieval transmission in the West
After Antiquity, references to chiromancy fade in Western sources until the High Middle Ages. It is in the medieval Arab-Muslim world that hand-reading practices are found which would bridge to Christian Europe. Medieval Arab scholars classified chiromancy among popular occult sciences, alongside physiognomy (face analysis) and astrology. In Arabic, a distinction is made between ʿilm al-kaf (“science of the palm,” studying the hand’s shape) and ʿilm al-asārīr (strict chiromancy, interpreting the palm lines). Although the Quran and hadiths discourage divination, these techniques persisted in tolerated or underground forms depending on the era, forming part of the rich esoteric heritage of the medieval Islamic world. The knowledge thus accumulated, through translations and travels, prepared the return of chiromancy to Latin Europe.
In Europe, chiromancy reappears in texts around the 12th century. The English cleric John of Salisbury, in his Policraticus (1159), mentions it as a new art emerging in his time, evidence that the practice had just been introduced into Christendom. He gives an unambiguous definition: “Chiromancers are those who predict hidden things by inspecting the lines of the hand.” Shortly after, around 1160, a first Latin treatise on chiromancy was written in England—possibly adapted by the itinerant scholar Adelard of Bath—and copied in the Canterbury scriptorium. This manuscript, inserted at the end of the Eadwine Psalter, attests to the written recording of a tradition probably transmitted orally until then. Notably, its content seems intended for a cleric, as it explains that a certain mark shaped like a c at the bottom of a palm line foretells that a man “will become a bishop.” This early English development is accompanied by the first mention of a famous client: John of Salisbury reports that his correspondent Thomas Becket, then chancellor to King Henry II, consulted a chiromancer in 1157 before a military expedition. This anecdote shows that the art of the hand, though marginal to official knowledge, had intrigued the powerful from its arrival in Europe.
The medieval Church’s stance toward these practices was immediately critical. John of Salisbury himself, while documenting nascent chiromancy, classified it among superstitious errors lacking rational foundation. In the Policraticus, he condemns the belief that “truths are hidden in the folds of the hands,” considering it unnecessary to refute by reason since “those who boast of it do not rely on it.” Implicitly, this severity suggests that chiromancy, associated with pagan divinatory arts, contravened Christian orthodoxy. Over the 13th–14th centuries, the Church multiplied prohibitions against divinatory practices: councils and local synods condemned judicial astrology and spells, categories implicitly including chiromancy. Despite these condemnations, palm reading continued diffusely. It circulated in popular folklore but also within more learned esoteric currents—among some early 13th-century Jewish Kabbalists who developed an esoteric chiromancy linked to their mysticism of letters.
Humanist Renaissance: between occultism and scholarly knowledge
During the Renaissance, chiromancy experienced notable growth, favored by the humanist enthusiasm for ancient occult sciences. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, many works were dedicated to it in Europe, linked with astrology and physiognomy. These treatises sought to legitimize the art of the hand by integrating it into the scholarly knowledge of the time, while confronting persistent religious prohibitions.
From the early 16th century, publications laid the foundations of a “scholarly” chiromancy. In 1504 in Bologna, Bartolomeo della Rocca, known as Coclès, published a Compendium of physiognomy and chiromancy (Chiromantie ac physionomie anastasis). He combined the examination of facial features and hands to establish diagnoses on health and destiny, even directing his predictions to princes (Coclès thus dared to draw the dark chiromantic portrait of King Louis XII of France in his book). In 1522, the German scholar Johannes ab Indagine, a monk converted to humanist ideas, published in Strasbourg a landmark work: Introductiones apotelesmaticae, a treatise merging chiromancy, physiognomy, and astrology into a single system. Indagine proposed a true synthetic method: assigning each mount of the hand a ruling planet, linking palm morphology to the four temperaments of humoral medicine, and using the lines to detect both character and future tendencies of a person. The ambition was to embrace the whole person—body, temperament, astral influences—through the study of their hand. Translated into German in 1523 and French in 1556, Indagine’s book testifies to the reception of these occult knowledges in France: it was published in Lyon by the prestigious printer Jean de Tournes and prefaced by the humanist Antoine Du Moulin, proof of the interest of Lyon’s elites in these divinatory arts.
This integration of chiromancy into contemporary knowledge was accompanied by close ties to medicine and astrology, disciplines then intertwined. Renaissance authors sought to present chiromancy not as superstitious magic but as a “natural” art based on physical correspondences. Thus, Indagine’s treatise devotes long sections to “astrological and medical rules” allowing determination of an individual’s health and appropriate remedies based on signs observed in their hand. The work explains, with diagrams, how an expert chiromancer can determine a person’s complexion and “nature” from the dominant planet indicated by their palm, then advise the physician on the regimen to follow according to the current horoscope. The hand was thus seen as a microcosm of the human being—“the mother of all organs, the organ of organs,” wrote Coclès—whose careful examination complemented pulse or urine analysis in medical diagnosis. By blending chiromancy with astrological and physiological knowledge inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, humanists hoped to elevate it to the rank of an auxiliary science of medicine and emerging psychology.
Despite these legitimization attempts, chiromancy remained contested and frequently repressed during the Renaissance. From a religious viewpoint, it was still equated with occult divination prohibited by the Church. In 1560, the Council of Trent and the Catholic Inquisition reinforced censorship of the artes magicae: chiromancy was among the seven forbidden divinatory arts, alongside necromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, and other suspect mantics. Pope Paul IV listed several chiromancy books in the Index librorum prohibitorum as early as 1559, calling them “diabolical divinations” contrary to the faith. An author like Indagine, though a monk, saw his treatise placed on the Index and owes its survival to discreet copies preserved in princely libraries. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition condemned in 1583 Jean Taisnier’s Opus Mathematicum (1562), which mixed astrology, chiromancy, and sacred arithmetic, ordering its purge. The witch hunts of the time also fueled suspicion: accused women’s hands were examined for marks of the Devil, natural spots or signs interpreted by inquisitors as the seal of a satanic pact. Paradoxically, chiromancy thus served as a tool for the very persecutions condemning it.
However, far from disappearing, the art of the hand took root both in popular culture and among some literate circles until the Classical era. In France, several chiromancy works appeared in the 16th–17th centuries, showing a practice straddling scholarship and oral tradition. The Compendion de chiromancie by the monk Robert Fludd (1603) or the Instruction familière pour apprendre les sciences de chiromancie (1619) by the priest Jean Belot show that even clerics practiced this art, sometimes rationalizing it within an acceptable Christian framework. Under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the physician and philosopher Martin Cureau de La Chambre incorporated chiromancy into his physiognomy studies (L’Art de connaître les hommes, 1660), seeking to distinguish the natural reading of hands (to reveal soul inclinations) from an illicit divination of the future. These “scientific” appropriations by respected authors—sometimes Academy members or royal physicians—testify to a form of intellectual tolerance: chiromancy, stripped of its overly prophetic aspects, could be reclaimed as an art of observing human temperament, close to metoposcopy (reading forehead wrinkles) or the later phrenology. Nevertheless, in the dominant Enlightenment opinion, it remained relegated to superstition. Diderot and d’Alembert, in the Encyclopédie (1751), firmly rejected judicial astrology and, by extension, all fate divinations, calling them a “ridiculous prejudice” still widespread among the ignorant. By the late 18th century, rationalism was in vogue and chiromancy survived mainly in curiosity cabinets or among fortune tellers, perpetuating a traditional know-how on the margins of enlightened science.
Fortunes and misfortunes of chiromancy in France
Despite its scientific discredit, chiromancy experienced a surprising revival in the 19th century, especially in France and England. Interest in occultism, very strong under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, was accompanied by an attempt to scientifically study palm reading. In 1839, a retired French captain, Casimir d’Arpentigny, published La Chirognomonie, a foundational work laying the groundwork for modern “chirology.” D’Arpentigny developed a systematic classification of hand types (square, conical, spatulate, etc.) and deduced correspondences with individuals’ aptitudes and character. His approach, non-predictive, aimed to give chiromancy the appearance of an empirical discipline studying the correlation between hand morphology and personality—free from accusations of magic. Following him, Adolphe Desbarolles, mentor of Madame de Thèbes, a French artist and esotericist, published Les mystères de la main (1869), synthesizing ancient art and contemporary observations. Desbarolles popularized reading major lines (life, head, heart, Saturn, etc.) and minor ones, mixing anecdotes about the hands of famous figures of his time. Thanks to these authors, chiromancy—renamed chirology—entered the 19th-century social salons. It fascinated part of the cultured bourgeoisie, seeking mystery and self-knowledge in a century enamored with spiritualism. In England, the Irishman William John Warner, known as Cheiro, became the chiromancer to London’s elite around 1900, adding to the European vogue.
In France, chiromancy also remained well established in popular culture. Itinerant gypsies (Roma), nicknamed fortune tellers, perpetuated the practice at fairs and markets since the modern era, contributing to its folklore. From Victor Hugo’s gypsy reading Esmeralda’s hand to fortune-teller ads in 19th-century newspapers, palm reading stood alongside cartomancy among divinatory arts accessible to the general public. Authorities continued to watch it with suspicion: in 1835, a French law on vagrancy and fraud allowed prosecution of unregistered card readers and palm readers, considered charlatans. Nevertheless, these popular divinatory practices thrived even in the most remote countryside, where good fortune was among the secret advice sought for matters of love or luck.
With the 20th century and the triumph of positivist science, chiromancy declined as a scholarly knowledge but continued to exert a persistent appeal. Psychiatrists and psychologists occasionally showed interest in it from a character perspective: Carl Jung, for example, saw it as a rich reservoir of archetypal symbols, without validating its predictive claims. Overall, the scientific community now classifies chiromancy among pseudosciences, noting that no rigorous study has confirmed its principles. Nonetheless, the human hand, as an object of study, does reveal certain objective realities—signs of age, profession, or health (calluses, tremors, coloration)—without needing to see in it a magic of fate. Perhaps it is this element of real observation, mixed with the suggestiveness of interpretation, that explains chiromancy’s longevity. Between seriousness and playfulness, the “science of the hand” has reinvented itself in every era to adapt to mentalities. In this sense, the ancient palm divination remains a fascinating cultural history subject: that of a universal human practice attempting to unravel the mystery of our destiny inscribed... in the palm of the hand.
Bonjour,
Merci pour votre gentil commentaire !
Alors, les textes qui documentent les pratiques magiques et divinatoires du Nord de l’Europe (Eddas, sagas islandaises, récits de Tacite) mentionnent en effet les runes, le seiðr, le galdr et des formes de tirages au sort, mais jamais l’observation des lignes de la main.
Pourquoi ça ? La chiromancie vient d’Inde, passe par le monde grec, puis par les traductions arabes et entre en Europe latine médiévale. Le monde scandinave, avant la christianisation, restait “en marge” de ces réseaux intellectuels. Ceci peut donc expliquer cela.
J’espère avoir répondu à vos interrogations !
Olivier – Aeternum
Merci pour cet article passionnant! J’ai trouvé très intéressant le rappel des racines indiennes, grecques et de la transmission arabo-médiévale.
À priori, la chiromancie n’a pas fait partie des pratiques du Nord de l’Europe, où l’on retrouvait plutôt runes, seiðr ou galdr comme supports divinatoires et pratiques magiques. Mais par curiosité: lors de vos recherches, êtes-vous tombé sur des mentions, même anecdotiques, d’un usage de la chiromancie en contexte nordique ?
Merci encore pour ce bel éclairage et au plaisir de vous lire !