Talk:Chiromancy

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Well I'm doing a seminar for school and would really like to know more about chiromacy. please post something on this because I'm sort of stuck.

Thanks

[edit] Right Hand

If we're to read the dominant hand and most of us are righties, why is the diagram of a left hand?

[edit] NPOV tag

I added the NPOV tag because this article is a disgrace. Anyone coming to read this would think that it's 100% completely real and legit and scientific even. It needs massive improvement. DreamGuy 15:48, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV?

"Anyone coming to read this would think that it's 100% completely real and legit and scientific even." -DreamGuy

"There has been little widely accepted research verifying palmistry's accuracy as a system of analysis." -The Article

I think that one line from the article negates your entire arguement. (unsigned, but by User:Boringraindrop)

You can't take one weak sounding sentence out of an entire super long article treating it as real and try to claim that this little itty bitty mention -- especially when it's contradicted by other statements claiming scientific basis -- somehow all by itself undoes the incredibly biased rest of the article. DreamGuy 22:56, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

I contributed a large portion of the information in this article, and I appreciate the feedback that the scientific/skeptic side of the equation was not adequately represented. I have tried to go back and alter the tone of the article to reflect the fact that the information contained in the article represents the opinions of practitioners and has not been scientifically examined with any corroborative result. I added some links to sites with opposing perspectives, as well.

I do hope that this brings more neutrality to the article. I would appreciate hearing from DreamGuy about whether or not these edits are an improvement.

TariRocks 18:27, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

• DreamGuy is right... this is far to swung in the direction of this actually being true...

RuSTy1989 22:49, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures

Please could somebody who knows about these things put a picture on this page to illustrate the lines? Otherwise from the text descriptions you're just left guessing. 193.129.65.37 06:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I'll second that motion, and with the additional request that the names of the lines be given. Quick glances at source material shows a wide variety of names for different lines, even within the Renaissance. Linea vitalis seems to be the Life line, which seems to correspond to modern medicine's nomenclature. The mounds seem to be montes (singular: mons), but they especially differ in specific name according to the author consulted. One man's Mons Veneris may be another's Mons Solis. Still, some general consensus should have been achieved after hundreds of years, and a general guide with the caveat of variance by specific author might be given with a general reference. Perhaps someone skilled in anatomy and physiology might be able to contribute to the article?

I think a lot of the variations referenced above are dictated by the language of the source text. The examples listed are Latin and French translations of the English names listed in the article. Tari 20:27, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The psychology "research" cited

The research cited looks dubious. If it's not from a peer-reviewed journal, then nobody is checking up on it, and the author can say whatever he feels like. It really should not be counted as credible scientific research.

Unfortunately, peer reviewed journal are (very nearly) never available to the public for free. Either you can go to the library of a university and, from their computers, access the articles via the university's paid account; Or you can try www.scholar.google.com. On Google Scholar, often the abstract will give you the basic results of the experiment, and sometimes you'll even get lucky and find the full text for free.

The reason I looked at the research to begin with was that the following sentence worried me: "Although some interesting correlations have been found, these were usually not considered very significant." Psychologists use the word "significant" in the statistical sense - they say that findings are significant when there is <.05 probability that they are due to chance, given the sample size. The phrase "very significant" uses the word "significant" in the everyday sense, since it does not make sense to say "very" when you are talking about statistical significance. So I'm left wondering -- were the results statistically significant or weren't they?

The 2nd of the 3 paragraphs under the heading "Science and Skeptics" should be taken out until we can get some real, peer-reviewed research on the topic. I don't want to snip it based solely on my opinion, but if someone else agrees, then maybe they should go ahead and take it out.

[edit] Bible Misquote

Should we bring to life the bible misquotation of Job 37:7 or Proverbs 3:16?

http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/palm.htm

The quotes are clearly taken out of context. Job 37:7 ("sealeth up the hand of every man: that all men may know his work") refers to the lord binding the hands of the people, i.e. stop them from working in the winter to witness the lord's work, while Proverbs 3:16 ("length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour") was a simple colloqialism.

[edit] Palm reading

Palm reading is bullcrap. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.218.17.142 (talk • contribs) 16:38, 3 December 2006 (UTC).

Do you have a citation for that? Tari 01:16, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] like wow this article is a doozy!

Talk about a lack of cites and POV. This reads like much of it was written by palm readers and fortune tellers. "A science in its infancy"? Holy cow! Mr Christopher 20:11, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for this feedback. I've made it a project to add more sources and cites. Tari 01:12, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request re-write of Hand Shape And Character

Could we get a re-write on at least the start of the Hand Shape And Character. It doesn't seem to match the tone of the rest of the article.

(Oh and I added a wikilink to phrenology since it's also a discipline relating to reading character traits from physiological elements)

Elaverick 16:25, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I re-wrote this section, trying to reduce bias, maintain consistent tone, and make the information more clear. I scrapped most of the original contribution because it seemed easier to start from scratch than to edit; I meant no disrespect by that, and have preserved the original below if people feel there is useful information that could be worked back in - or if the original seems more informative than the rewrite. Tari 01:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

The one who hears of chirology or palmistry mostly thinks of lines. Therefore it may be very surprising, that it all begins by analysing the shape of the hand. It tells about the constitution and the temperament. Sometimes it is more difficult to interpret it than to read the lines. It requires a lot of experience and hand analysts often tried to find an appropriate system of classification. The breadth and the length of the hand gives us a first and important indication.

The breadth shows us the abundance of the substance. It is a symbol of the concrete, material being on earth and it often has to do with meetings. A broad hand supports our force of creation.
The length connects the bottom with the top, the heaviness with the lightness. It is a symbol of the polarity between matter and spirit, as well as for the development of the consciousness.

If you complement this observation with the astrological elements, you’ll get four categories of hands:

The full, broad and heavy hand stands for the influences of earth and water.
The slender, lightweight hand stands for the air. The similar, less matter pointed fire, expresses himself mainly by a strong thumb, striking contours and sharp lines.

The royal-Saxon doctor Carl Gustav Carus’s well known system of the 19th century is also based on these four elements. As a humanist he was very familiar with the Greek doctrine of temperament. He designed a model of four hand shapes which has been developed further on by the German astropalmist Manfred Magg (Hand And Horoscope). Dr. Carus arranged the variety in the following basic shapes:

• The elementary earth hand awakens the impression of heaviness. This depends above all on the big, thick and hard palm. The fingers are short and strong, the thumb is bulky. The palm shows few clear lines. The life and heart lines are red and strong and the head line is short and straight. The fate line mostly rises up to the middle finger as a deep furrow. That suggests a realistic and material orientated, earthly nature.

• The strong fire hand has striking edges. It makes a muscular tensed impression. The thumb is big and its mount full developed. The strong fingers mostly spread themselves to the top, like spatulas or frog fingers. The picture of the lines are similar to earth hand. Sometimes several deep sharpened lines rise up from the root of the hand to the fingers. This all speaks for a strong will power, that likes movement. The person prefers working independently, because he likes to fix his own tempo.

• The sensitive water hand is to be found mainly with women. Sometimes it is smaller, narrower and more finely built than the prior hands. Its delicate and soft skin reveals much more permeability against the impressions of the surrounding. It reacts very sensitively to this. The main features of the shape are the rounded courses of the lines, specially the head line, that bends down to the mount of Moon.

• The psychic or mental air hand isn’t very broad and big. Beside the slender palm, the fine, long and thin fingers stand out. The knuckles hardly stand out. The fine and numerous lines show a differentiated picture. They mark a life with a lot of events and experiences. This kind of hand points to a refined, nervous organisation and to an aesthetic or spiritual mentality.

On base of this patterns it is easy to determine the dominant element and temperament in your hand (Dominant Planets In Hand And Horoscope).

((preserving the original))Tari 01:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

It's kind of silly to explain palms like this in a single page because of the different schools. I have a business reading palms and I use a very different Indian method because my dad is from Bangalore. In our school of palmistry the head and heart lines are switched. You might want to make it clearer that this isn't the only way to do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.172.186.128 (talk) 15:38, 11 March 2008 (UTC)