214 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 



it is not surprising that they should have interrogated their own bodies 

 with a like expectation. From the earliest times the peoples of the East 

 had believed that the broken and multiple lines which radiate from the 

 sutures of the skull are, in fact, the strokes of a mysterious handwriting 

 which contained the secret of each man's individual fate. 



The Middle Ages were therefore quite prepared to recognise a symbolical 

 writing of a similar kind in the countless lines, more or less distinct, which 

 correspond with the inflections of the skin of our hand. This speculative 

 science, called chiromancy (from the Greek words x'p> hand, and /xaiWa, 

 divination), had more adepts than all the other sciences of divination, and 

 was eventually merged in astrology, giving rise to a number of systems 

 which have been upheld by savants of unquestionable merit. 



The chiromancers cunningly founded their doctrine upon the following 

 passage in the Exodus, which is repeated almost word for word in the 

 Book of Job : " This shall be as a sign in his hand, and as an instru- 

 ment before his eyes" (xiii. 9). But the Church would not admit of 

 this futile interpretation of the holy text, and chiromancy was one of the 

 superstitions which she most uncompromisingly opposed. It was not, 

 however, until the beginning of the fifteenth century that this superstition 

 spread from the East into Europe. At this epoch, the Bohemians, who had 

 arrived from the remote regions of Asia (see the volume on " Manners and 

 Customs," chapter on Bohemians), brought with them the ancient traditions 

 of chiromancy, and propagated them rapidly in all countries which they 

 traversed. Inquiring minds set themselves to study this new science of 

 divination as soon as it made its appearance. Some of them reproduced, in 

 special treatises with designs and illustrations appended, the types of hands 

 scored with lines or signs favourable or the reverse ; others investigated the 

 direct relation between the various parts of the human hand and the celestial 

 constellations. Both had discovered and defined various types of hands : 

 Eumphilius declared there were six types, Compotus eight, and Indaginus 

 thirty- seven, while Corvseus placed the number of different types at a 

 hundred and fifty ; but Jean Belot, the cure of Milmonts, afterwards reduced 

 the total to four. There was a long discussion as to whether the right or the 

 left hand was the one from which the horoscope should be drawn. There 

 was an equal difference of opinion as to the meaning of the lines and 

 irregularities of the hand, though it had been subjected to the astrological 



