The Four Foundations of Chirology
When I first studied hand reading I was instructed by my UK tutors to initially ignore the lines in the hands. I was taught instead to focus on the four areas of hand analysis that form a foundation that comes before the study of the lines. These are shapes, skins, thumbs and glyphs:
- The hand shape – shows expression. Is it an earth, water, fire or air shape?
- Skin textures – show impression. Earth, water, fire and air skin textures each tell of different environments, activities and jobs we’d be happiest in.
- Thumbs – governed by chi, the thumbs are the ever important ‘rulers of the hands’. In themselves thumbs are an area of speciality in hand reading.
- The glyphs – ascribed element and meanings for the distribution of our cosmic, karmic skin ridge patterns and glyphs on our fingers and palmar surface.
Before that, I thought the lines in our hands to be the most important ‘keys’ for interpreting hands. I’d poured for hours over the traditional meanings for life, head, heart, Mars, fate, health and sun lines, but learning the lines was really difficult. While I slowly began to ‘get’ the meanings of travel, worry and allergy lines along with the obsessive via lascivia (translates to ‘line of lust’ and the idealistic girdle of Venus, the hundreds of diverse meanings for the confusing variations in the lines were truly hard to remember. Then about six months into my passionately ‘palmistic’, pre-chirology period, I came upon the five element system of chirology.
The ‘language of the elements’ brought me ‘home’. In the craft of chirology, we first set an infra-structure with these four foundations. In fact you can offer an insightful reading based ‘only’ on the hands’ shape, skin texture, thumbs and glyphs.
Many beginner hand analysts lose faith because they find it too difficult to make sense of the lines. But once we grasp the five element system of interpretation and the four foundations, the lines, each of which are also governed by an element, become far easier to understand.