Hand Shapes | Hand Lines | Palm and Mounts | Thumb & Fingers 1 -- h a n d ... t e x t u r e s & s h a p e s & t y p e s Hand Texture ---- You can easily tell shaking hands with people that some seem to have soft skin, while others have a rough, earthy hand. This is your first clue into the personality of the other, and thus provides an invaluable clue you could exploit in such situations as business meetings, etc. Generally, people with smooth hands possess a very calm and unruffled temperament. These individuals will rarely lose their temper. Skake hands with a smooth-handed person at a business meeting, and you can assume they are not going to lose their temper easily. By contrast, a rough-handed person is easy to enrage and tends to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. You have been warned! Firm hands denote a great deal of energy and drive, soft hands suggests sloth. The Meaning of Individual Hands ---- When looking for meaning, each individual hand has something different to tell you. It is widely recognized that for right-handed people, the left hand represents the past, including previous lives, while the right hand shows the direction one's present life has taken. Thus, the fact that I have Medical Stigmata on my right Mount of Mercury signifies that I have spent this lifetime trying to develop my psychic skills. At least that is the way I read it! The Psychic Hand ---- Of all hand shapes the Psychic Hand is said to be the most beautiful, and consequently the most rare. Long, narrow and fragile looking with slender, tapering fingers and long nails. Indicates a sensitive, intuitive personality. The Artistic Hand ---- The Artistic Hand is defined by smooth Fingers whose nailed Phalanges assume the form of the Cones or of elongated Thimbles. Plastic arts, painting, Sculpture, monumental architecture, poetry of the imagination and of the senses, cultivation of the beautiful in the solid and visible form, romantic charms, antipathy to rigorous deduction, desire of social independence, propensity to enthusiasm, subjection to fantasy - all these Qualities & defects are Distinctively represented by the Artistic (Conical Hand). The Square Hand ---- A sign of perseverence, practicality, punctuality and a respect for society and the law. The Square Hand is of medium size, but large rather than small, often with knotty fingers, square nailed phalanges, a large thumb, a well developed Mount of Venus, a firm medium-sized palm. The Necessary Hand ---- The Necessary Hand boasts nailed phalanges of whose fingers present the appearance of a more or less flattened out spatula. The thumbs are large, with those in which the instinct peculiar to these hands, supported by the promptings of the brain, makes itself the most clearly manifest. The possessors of such hand are almost insensible to art or to poetry, they are endowed with a very small share of the instincts which lead to moral instability. They attach themselves to a country for the material benefits which is accrue to them therefrom. Manual labor is agreeable to them, and it is the same with all kinds of active exercise. they suffer from the absence of the necessaries of life, but not from the absence of the superfluous, for they are only slightly sensual. The Philosophic Hand ---- Signifying an analytical and thoughtful nature, the Philosophic Hand is long and angular with bony fingers, developed joints and long nails.According to Astroshastra.com, hands with "spatulate Finger-tips are drawn irresistibly toward that which is materially useful; that the tendency of the Conical Fingers is toward beauty of form, i.e., art; and that the inclination of the square finger-tips tends towards social utility, average and practical ideas, and realizable combinations." The Elementary Hand ---- Denotes the lowest type of mentality, according to VedicAstro.com. "Its appearance is coarse and clumsy. It has large, thick, heavy palm, short fingers and short nails, and very few lines on the palm. Such people have very little mental capacity but they have brute force." Bearers of this kind of hand also have little or no control over their passions -- the spiritual world does not interest them. The Artistic-Elementary Hand ---- This is a slightly improved type of basic Elementary Hand. Astroshastra.com says: "This is an improvement one meets especially among those men of talent, or even genius who emerge from the very lowest ranks of society, urged on by an invincible force, which pushes them to the highest places in the social hierarchy. Many of the Great poets, famous musicians, illustrious painters, sculptors, orators etc. belong to this category." The Brutal Murders Hand ---- Indian palmists visiting that country's prisons were amazed to find that many murderers and violent criminals had a particular kind of hand. This kind of hand consists of a thick, heavy Palm, reddish in tint, and broader than the average; short awkward and stiff Fingers, generally crooked and often spatulate in shape; no knots to speak of although sometimes the second joint may be clumsy and thick; a thumb with a "clubbed" first phalanx and a second phalanx very much undersized. The Congenital Idiots Hand ---- This is further deterioration of the Elementary hand. Below Criminal, almost in a level with him, one finds the Congenital Idiot, the half-developed brain, the child for Life. This hand is so ill-shaped as often to be justly called crippled. The Palm is thick, soft longer than the Fingers and generally narrow; this narrowness is increased by the position of the Thumb, set very high and only half detached from the side of the hand; very short besides clumsy and ill-shaped. The Fingers are hardly more than one-half the normal size; the Phalanges are twisted and their Tips rounded and shapeless. The Mixed Hand ---- The mixed Hand is most difficult to describe. The mixed hand is so called because the hand cannot possibly be classed as Psychic, Artistic, Useful, Necessary, Philosophical or Elementary; the Fingers also belong to different types - often one pointed, one square, one Spatulate, one Philosophic etc. This is the hand of Ideas, of versatility, and generally of changeability of purpose. A person with such a hand is adaptable to both people and circumstances, clever, but erratic in application of his talents. The Woman's Hand ---- The tendencies of each type among women are, the same as they are among men, only, those which are peculiar to the Spatulate and Square types are much less intense among women, by the reason of the suppleness of their muscles, than they are among men. It is worth noting that some Indian palmists believe that only the left hand of the females and right hand of the males should be taken into consideration for palm reading. I will leave it up to you to decide whether you want to follow this belief in your own explorations of palm-reading. Hand Shapes | Hand Lines | Palm and Mounts | Thumb & Fingers Contact the author Rob Sullivan at bunyarra@hotmail.com. Anticopyright February 2005.