Spread out your fingers. Check out your palm. Those weird lines on your palm. Do they suggest anything? Well, there are people in this world who can interpret those lines and foretell your future. Any doubts?Then thrust your palm to a palmist and he will; by the size of your palm, the length of your finger, the intersections of hand-lines and the texture of skin, examine your character and predict your future. But is there any truth to it? True or false, palm reading is popular in our society and many treat it as a science and many universities even teach it.
BUT WHY HAND LINES? There are other parts in our body we could be judged by, say, our face. Our hand posses some peculiar features which we often fail to observe. Patterns on our finger have uniqueness about it, i.e. nobody else has the same pattern as you have. Not even twin brothers have it the same. And hence it is globally used as a means of identification. Lines on our palm also have something curious about it. It changes all through a person’s life. And interestingly enough about a quarter of the part of human brain which controls all movement in the body (motor cortex)is devoted to the muscles of the hands. Ancient people might have noticed this and a science, short of empirical support, born out of their curious study of palms.
People always like to plan ahead. It is apparently this nature of human beings that urges them to go after fortune tellers and in Europe gypsies made a fortune out of it. But we cannot rule out palmistry as just another fortune telling. It tells possibilities and potentials one has in life. It’s more like a guide in the complex course of human life.
Palmistry is an ancient art as well as one of the oldest practices in the world.Though its roots could be traced back to ancient Vedic period of India, Palmistry or Palm reading is one of the many traditional practices common to almost all cultures of the world. In spite of its being treated as a pseudo science by many a scholars, and a pagan superstition by Christian church, it has a magnificent history than any other existing science discipline or religion.In fact, the great Indian sage Valmiki and western philosophical champion Aristotle believed to have written works on the same and Alexander the Great, who found it an intriguing practice, used it to analyze the character of his officers. But somewhere in the course of its history incompetent and fraudulent palm readers came into the business and tarnished its name; and it is frowned upon by many ever since.
Great men believed it doesn’t give a practice any authority, but if examined the history of palm reading one can see that it stood the test of time and emerged unscathed. During the middle ages it has to suffer the puritan nature of Catholic Church and in the renaissance period it was treated as necromancy, the practice of which would make one share the fate of Joan of Arc. But the “forbidden art” has something in it that lent it a perennial quality. Perhaps it is this quality that supplies the practice with an authority. And now it enjoys a wide popularity all over the world, along with astrology.