This post is part of a series of guest posts on GPS by the undergraduate and graduate students in my Science vs. Pseudoscience course. As part of their work for the course, each student had to demonstrate mastery of the skill of “Educating the Public about Pseudoscience.” To that end, each student has to prepare two 1,000ish word posts on a particular pseudoscience topic, as well as run a booth on-campus to help reach people physically about the topic.
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Palmistry: Science or Pseudoscience? by Shanshan Huang
History
Palmistry, or what is also called chiromancy, is a kind of fortune telling through reading of lines in one’s hand. Based on archaeological evidence, wall paintings, and stories of Brahmanism, palmistry was very popular all the way back in ancient India. The foundation of palmistry is ancient Indians thought that they could discover potential energy, motivation of acts, advantage, disadvantage and so on from palms of the hands and bottoms of the feet. They marked different part of the foot and hand, based on the regularity to predict the future of a person, and used the lines to tell the fortunes. Later on, this kind of way to fortune tell spread to every part of the world, like China, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and finally, it became popular in Europe.
In China, palmistry has a very long history. Around 3000 years ago, during the Zhou Dynasty, palmistry starts to be used by people; at the same time, other kinds of “philosophy” and pseudoscience are also introduced in China. These include the concept of Yin and Yang, the two opposing principles of the nature; five-phase theory which is doctrine of five elements; and the eight letter theory started forming during that time. When palmistry was developed, this kind of fortune telling mixed itself with these philosophies, making people more trustful of it’s truth. The theories of palmistry became more and more principled and expanded. “Yellow Emperor”, the first medical reference book in China has many entries on how to measuring disease by examining someone’s hands. However, the most complete palmistry monograph is from the Western Han era by XuFu. The book that he wrote on hands can be regarded as the most systematic physiognomy in all of ancient China. The experts after him in the area of physiognomy would only diagnose a person by using one portion of the hand.
During Medieval times in Europe, it is said that many priests in the Church tried to practice palmistry. They were very curious how accurate palmistry could be. During this time, the fields of palmistry, astrology, geography and chemistry were the special sciences and were guarded by the church, meaning others could not as study them as they want. So they tried to collected all kinds of books of palmistry, and tried to control the spread of it. They criticized palmistry as witchcraft and the work of devil. But the spreading of palmistry still could not stopped, lots of people are burn to death because they tried to study the mystery of the palmistry. The Roma people (oftentimes called gypsies) during that time learned how to do palmistry and used it for living. More and more people just using palmistry to defraud so that they could got money from them. Palmistry became less trusted, but did not die out completely.
Way to do Palmistry
Because the thickness of the hand and the lines will change over time, it is claimed that you can also investigate the past and predict the future fortune through hand lines. A good hand line could make us prepared in advance to receive the good fortune, but in another hand, the bad hand patterns could let us to be know and prevent for the bad things to be happened. According to Zhang JinHua, the palmistry experts of Fengshui department, the Dean of Jiangxi School in China, palmistry could tell the health and luck fortune of human based on the hand’s shape, texture and color.
Even in ancient times, people were using palmistry as a prediction method, that is, palmistry as physiognomy. Hands were considered representatives of the whole body, with the color and textures connected with the physical and also spiritual health of the human. All parts of human are linked, and as the hand is the most sensitive and skillful organ on the body, it is seen to fulfill of mystery of human body.
If you want to check your palm for a personal reading, the first step is to put palm as the center, and move through different signs (for example, the size and texture above the hands; palm branches go left, right or the different position of the braches) to analyze human talent, character, achievement, wealth ancestors, parents, spouses, children, circumstances and their trends.
The location one centimeter below the little finger can supposedly determine a person’s marital status, such as how old a person will be at his/her the first marriage or how old is when they begin cohabitation. The side of the palm tell one your spouse’s merits and how beautiful or ugly he/she is. Protruding parts of the thumb can be seen as spouse’s health condition, like a face’s shape, weight, height. The lower parts of the index finger can tell if a pregnant woman would have a boy or girl. And on and on and on it goes. But…
Palmistry is totally pseudoscience!
First, one of the thoughts underlying palmistry is that the finger print are unique for everybody, so if the finger print are different, it must mean that palms are unique. As such, these represent the different life of each human life and, if you know what you are doing, you can learn all about someone. Unfortunately, this means nothing. How could finger prints and palm lines represent one’s life? What is the mechanism behind this? What about the people who were burned and have no finger prints? What if you had a hand cut off? They would die because there is no life line present any more?
Second of all, should you read the left hand or right hand? In ancient China, people prefer to read female’s left hand and male’s right hand. But this is because China is a country that thought women are inferior than men. Males are supposed to be worth more than female, especially in ancient China. Nowadays, the palmistry as using the theory of the hand of using more/writing is the hand that represent of your life. There are people who are right handed, also have people who are left handed, but there also people who can use both left hand and right hand to write, and most of time, different hands represented totally different or even opposite life. So which one of them would be true? Or what if neither of them make sense?
In ancient China, people did not know about how we fool ourselves, how to use the scientific method to stop that, and did not know how to explain many different phenomenon, so they explain everything by the plan of the immortals. People want to control of their life, and they want to know if there is a plan or we called destiny, they want to follow the good one and change the bad one, that is how pseudoscience like palmistry became popular, by playing on all of our personal wishes.
