"God has placed signs in the hands of all men, that every man may know his work."—Job xxxvii. 7 (St. Hierom's Translation).
CHAPTER XV.
CHIROMANCY AND ITS ORIGIN
Chiromancy is a science which teaches us to read not only the character but the whole destiny—for good or evil, the length of life and often the manner of death of a man by the lines and marks to be seen in his hand. This study is sometimes called Palmistry, in which case, however, it properly refers only to a judgment formed from what appears in the palm of the hand, whilst Chiromancy (taken from the word Cheir, a hand, and Manteia, divination) signifies the revelations made by the hand, taken as a whole. Chiromancy is nearly as ancient as astrology, with which it is indissolubly connected, for the hand represents, as has been before said, a natural horoscope, which is placed upon it at the time both of the conception and the birth by the influence of the stars. The seven planets are all represented in the hand and also the twelve signs of the zodiac, so that the casting of a nativity is needless, as by simply examining a hand by the light of Chiromancy we can indicate what planets have been powerful at the time of birth, and what, therefore, will be their effect for good or evil over the existence; and we can also find the dates of the principal events of the life. We find many allusions to this subject in the Bible, and still more in the ancient Kabbala.
The Holy Kabbala, as it was called by the Magi, must not be confounded with what is called "The Black Art"; it is, on the contrary, the quintessence of reason and morality as they were understood by the ancients and contains that traditional science of the secrets of nature which, from age to age, is borne towards us as the wave is carried by the tide to the shore; but it has been transmitted obscurely, because the doctrines of the Kabbala were known only, in those early ages, to the adept and the initiation, later on, of neophytes was only yielded after a series of severe and terrible ordeals, whilst the revelation of its mysteries to the uninitiated was punished by death.
The necessity of silence was, in fact, one of the principal tenets of the Kabbala and is represented, in the figure of Adda-Nari,[16] by the position of the fingers of the hand holding the flowering branch of Abundance; the thumb and the first two fingers, which in Chiromancy represent will, power and fatality, are held open; whilst the third and fourth fingers, representing light and science, are closed. This was meant to indicate to the good—the initiated—that they would have, when united, strength and will to direct Fate; but that they must keep hidden from the wicked and ignorant both light and science. It must, however, in justice to the ancient Kabbalists, be suggested that their inculcation of silence probably arose, not so much from a desire of domination, but rather from the fact that, feeling themselves superior in knowledge, they thought they were obeying a divine law in refusing to the wicked those lights which, when possessed by them, led, as perhaps they had sometimes found, to error. We, seeing things in a wider light, give, or try to give, equal knowledge to all, without submitting the ignorant to the ordeal of initiation to prove their worthiness as recipients; but, after all, it amounts to much the same thing—give to all men truth and light in abundance, but all will not profit by it. We see this every day in our college system; the lesson is the same for all, but it is only the few who profit by it; and although we appear to be obeying a divine law in opening the way of light and life—the life of knowledge—to all, as God makes His sun to shine on good and bad equally, still we can, in some sort, understand the feeling of the ancient Magi, whose motto was: "Know, Dare, Will, but keep Silence."
To face Chapter XVI.