The Disenchantment of Chiromancy: Reading Modern Hands from Palmistry to Genetics

Abstract

We might expect chiromancy in the modern period to be analysed best within the well-known late nineteenth-century occult revival. The specific practice of palmistry, as it happens, is minimally examined in that historiographical context. Yet the purpose here is not to reinstate palmistry into our already extensive understanding of an Anglo-American modern occult, but to show how other readers of hands, including those trained in biomedical sciences, exceeded occultism altogether, and often enough repudiated it. This article considers modern palmistry in the first instance through an intellectual and social historiography of mind–body knowledges and practices. It shows not only how various ‘psychic’ practices turned into ‘psy’ practices, but also how reading signs of the hand morphed into clinical diagnostics, into primatology, comparative anatomy and eventually into early medical genetics, especially through the so-called ‘simian line’ correlated with Down syndrome. Through analysis of a suite of London-based hand experts, this twentieth-century history of palm-reading argues for a plain ‘disenchantment’ of chiromancy, qualifying historians’ common commitment to theses of re-enchantment. One strand of palm-reading’s recent past turns out to be part of the history of scientific naturalism, not super-naturalism at all.