Palmistry: An Ancient Wisdom

Palmistry as most people understand it is the art of future telling. Without saying yes or no to this, I want to say that it has a lot more to offer than just fortune telling. But hearing future predictions is of course so attractive that this great science has become synonymous to future telling. Other less organized and less logical arts such as Tarot cards, coffee readings, intuitive readings, chakra readings are also compared with this greatly precise and organized art. Here many palmists also want to show some mysticism around their personality and don’t want to let people believe that this art can be learnt with a logical and reasonable mind. I read a book in which the author introduces palmistry by saying, ‘the mystery of palm that when solved can reveal all the secrets of life’. I’ll not make such big statements, it’s out of my reach but I can assure the readers that if they learn palmistry with a logical and reasonable mind, they can learn it with ease and will find it accurate and without any need of intuition, for this is a very logical and systematic art.

This art was born in India and initially it was only a small branch of quite a big subject named ‘Samudrik Shastra’. Here the word Samudra means body and Shastra means classic, so together it means a classic about body signs. This subject included the study of the whole body, its shape, various signs, moles, scars. This included the face reading, lines in the forehead, lines in feet and the palms and also body language. Here, hand reading was only a small part of this ancient system. Later it became difficult for a person to learn everything and people started to make progress in small branches of Samudrik Shastra. Some became good in hand reading, others in feet reading, few in face reading and yet fewer others in reading the lines of the forehead. Even today, we can find quite a few people good in other branches of Samudrik Shastra.

These arts were commonly known as various systems for telling the future. This is the way these arts were advertised by most of their practitioners, and the common man looks at them with a mix of doubt and belief as they give an oil paper view to their past and future events. Among these systems hand reading being the most convenient, developed most. That’s why we see that palmistry is practiced extensively in all parts of the world. Interestingly, all of these branches of the ancient system of Samudrik Shastra point to the same thing about a person. So a person who goes to a hand reader, or to a forehead reader or to a face reader will get a similar interpretation.