Palmistry is the divination of the hands, or an ability to read the fate of the human hand.
Chiromancy studies both external hand shapes (width, length), cohesiveness of the palms, fingers, shape and the interior of the hand: lines, mounts and characters.
An interest in palmistry began about 5000 years ago, and as the cradle of this art are considered the countries of: India, China, Syria and Egypt.While observing the position of the stars in the sky it was noticed that there are similar lines on the palms. All knowledge of chiromancy had been passed on orally from generation to generation.
The first mention of palmistry in Europe appeared in the 1448th, but over the next years chiromancy lost it's popularity and regained it after 1700. In later years, astrologists took care of research on palmistry and noticed that apart from lines and characters there are also mounts on the palm, which resemble a map. They assigned assigning an astrological name to each mount and finger (such as Mount of Mercury, Venus, Saturn etc.).
