Palmistry, also called chiromancy, is the practice of interpreting the lines, mounts, shapes, and other features of the hand to reveal a person's character and to foretell the course of their life. The reader studies the major lines of the palm, conventionally the heart line, the head line, and the life line, together with lesser lines such as the "fate line", along with the fleshy "mounts" beneath the fingers (each traditionally associated with a planet, in the manner of astrology), the overall shape of the hand and fingers, and their flexibility and markings.
The tradition has deep roots in India, and versions appear across the classical and medieval worlds, often intertwined with astrology, so that the mounts and lines were correlated with the planets and their supposed influences. Palmistry flourished in the European Renaissance alongside the other divinatory arts, was condemned at various times by church authorities, and enjoyed a great popular revival in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through figures such as "Cheiro." Presented fairly, palmistry is a traditional divinatory and character-reading art with a long and genuine cultural history; from a scientific standpoint there is no established basis for the claim that palm features predict life events, and it is best understood, like astrology, as a symbolic and interpretive system rather than a predictive science. Its enduring appeal lies in the ancient intuition that the hand, so central to human action, might carry the imprint of the whole person and their destiny.