Palm Reading

The History Of Palm Reading Begins With Man’s Desire To Know The End. The occult has long been a fascination for man. The first beliefs about being able to predict the future emerged over 5000 years ago. The practice of fortune telling has taken many forms over the centuries one of the most popular and enduring of which is the reading of the palms and their lines.
Palmistry, can find its origins in history as far back as ancient Greece. It was Aristotle that first penned an account of the reading of a person’s life lines in an attempt to trace their past and future. He felt strongly that there was a connection between the soul of a person and the physical characteristics that they had. Aristotle presented his theories of palmistry to Alexander the Great who became quite keen on learning all he could of the practice. He was enthralled with the idea of learning about his military officers and governmental leaders through the study of their palm lines. Due, mainly to the advance of the Alexandrian Empire, palmistry quickly moved to other countries such as India, Tibet, China, Persia, Egypt. The practice was especially potent in these lands with Persia developing it to almost a cult religion during their middle empire periods. As the Romans absorbed the practice into their own empire after conquering the lands the Greeks had once controlled, they advanced took palmistry into any of the European lands that they conquered. These lands included territories that would eventually become the nations of Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bavaria, Bohemia, Transylvania, and others. It was this time that the Roma, or Gypsy culture, began to openly practice palmistry, along with crystal gazing. It is their contribution to the art that is most widely recognized among the general population today. There are schools of thought that state that palmistry developed first in India, and possibly concurrently in China. They state that the practice as it was known by the Greek Anaxagoras, the man exposed Aristotle and subsequently Hippocrates to palmistry, must have been a cultural development which existed in one of the lands he had contact with during his travels around the known world at the time. The history of palm reading is one that is long, vibrant, interesting and often misunderstood. This is one of the oldest fortune telling practices known to man and without a doubt one which will continue to be used for a long time to come.