This article is part of the Divination Hub . “Have also a ring of silver on the middle finger of the left hand, wherein is engraved the character of the spirit…” ---Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), Lemegeton , 2001   “Thou shalt have a ring of silver, and on the same finger, which is the least finger of thy left hand, thou shalt wear the same ring when thou workest by the crystal.” --- Drawing Spirits into Crystals  attributed to Johannes Trithemius, Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), Esoter

This article is part of the Divination Hub . Introduction Modern representations of palmistry are largely shaped by the nineteenth-century French tradition and its later Victorian and American adaptations, which emphasized character analysis and so-called “scientific” methods of interpretation. These modern systems have come to dominate popular understandings of palmistry and have obscured its historical origins and intellectual complexity. They project contemporary assumptio

This article is part of the Divination Hub . The American scholar Hardin Craig (1875 – 1968), editor of The Works of John Metham (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1916), provides a good first assessment of the literature on Western palmistry. His first impressions are mostly accurate, such as noting how many chiromancers list many ancient and modern authorities on the subjects of chiromancy and physiognomy, many of whom either did not write about them at all, wr