Index

The index is the finger of Jupiter, and it takes that name from below rather than from itself. The Mount of Jupiter is the pad at its base, the planetary vocabulary was fixed on the mounts first, and the finger inherits what the mount was already called. Johannes ab Indagine printed the scheme in 1522 and it was old then, the Latin chiromantia of the twelfth century having carried it west; the French writers of the 1840s and 1850s kept it whole, and Cheiro gave it its popular English form.

What the tradition claims for the finger is what astrology claims for the planet. Jupiter signifies expansion, authority, confidence, appetite for office and the wish to lead, and those are read off a long, straight, well-set index: pride and a healthy self-regard in the favourable case, arrogance and a taste for command in the unfavourable one, a short or crooked index for the absence of both. The transfer is complete and it runs one way only. Nothing about the finger suggested Jupiter to anybody. The planet's meanings were assigned to a region of the hand and then read back out of it, which is the pattern of the whole system and the reason its parts agree with one another so neatly.

The Latin name is more honest about what the digit does. Index means the pointer, and pointing, whether to accuse, to instruct or merely to indicate, is the use every gesture tradition makes of it. That is a fact about the hand. The Jupiterian character is a fact about astrology.

Sources Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chyromantiam, physiognomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarumJohannes ab Indagine (Johannes Rosenbach) with Palmistry for AllCheiro (William John Warner), The Earliest Chiromancy in the WestCharles S. F. Burnett

The two great elemental schemes of the hand agree about the index finger and about nothing else. In the esoteric Buddhism recorded in Japanese sculpture the digits are the five elements counted inward from the little finger: earth, water, fire, then wind, fu, at the index, then space at the thumb. In the yogic hasta mudras the assignment differs at four digits out of five, with fire at the thumb, ether at the middle finger, earth at the ring and water at the little, but the index is air, vayu, which is the same element under another name. Two systems built on different cosmologies in different centuries put moving air on the same finger.

It is also the finger the commonest hand seal uses. Touching the tip of the index to the tip of the thumb, with the other three extended, makes the gesture of knowledge, and it is so widely reproduced that it is the picture most people have of a mudra at all. Read through the elemental scheme it joins air to fire, or wind to space, depending which list is in use. Read through the anatomy it is simply the easiest contact the hand can make, because the thumb opposes and the index is the digit it opposes most directly.

The pointing use is older than either scheme and belongs to no tradition in particular. What the schemes add is a claim about what the finger is made of, and there the agreement between them is worth noticing precisely because it is the exception.

Sources Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist SculptureE. Dale Saunders with Asana Pranayama Mudra BandhaSwami Satyananda Saraswati