Chapter 1
The Hand As A Canvas Your unique and individual character is mirrored on your hands. Imagine the hands as a canvas, the lines and features upon them as the paint that colours all the hues and tones of your personality and predispositions. The picture, however, is likely to change in time.
You can alter the lines upon your palm. With will and effort, you can be the designer and artist creating the picture of your own destiny. Your metaphorical box of paints is likely to include some colours you never thought of using before. If we link the idea of colour to ways of thinking and being, we may realize that we have so often been using greys and flat, dull tones, whilst forgetting to dip into the brighter, positive shades of hope and love. When these colours are unused, they become dry and cracked, but remain in your paintbox. So use them to colour your life in the best way you can.
The following pages will reveal how the i shape of the hands, fingers and the contours of the palm constitute the framework of your personality.
The Language of Hands
When you are trying to discover the personality of someone you have just met or do not know, how often do you find yourself looking at his or her hands? You may not even do this consciously, but the way in which people use their hands will be telling you much about the personality of the owners.
In many ways, the hands can reveal more about someone than the face, especially when it comes to first impressions. We can change our facial expressions, 'put on a brave face', smile with just our mouth but not with our eyes, etc. Make-up can make people look very different and many people succumb to the plastic surgeon's scalpel. Hands, however, have a language of their own that is less easy to manipulate. When people are carefully controlling their facial and verbal expressions, their hands are often telling quite a different story. Gesticulations can therefore be very revealing. Think of how the hands are used to demonstrate so many feelings: drumming fingers in impatience, making fists in anger and pointing the forefinger in aggression or accusation. Biting, picking or clicking the nails, cracking the knuckles and other fidgety habits usually suggest a nervous disposition or a habit stemming from childhood that is difficult to break. Effeminate men often affect a limp wrist and women tend to have looser and more flexible wrists than men. Look at the hands of tiny babies: even at this early stage in life, individual gesticulation patterns are established.
In business, we set great store by the handshake: if it is firm, we interpret it as a good, decisive sign, while a weak handshake is taken as an indication of a vacillating, unassertive nature. Remember, however, that a finn handshake can be faked. There are far more subtle ways to find out the way another person is thinking. Supposing you are discussing a business arrangement with someone and notice that the thumbs are held inwards, towards the palm. This suggests that the other person is not revealing feelings of annoyance and may also be secretive. A more positive sign is rubbing the fingertips together, especially those of the thumb and the little finger, which occurs when trying to generate the flow of ideas. Ring-twisting shows convoluted thinking. Placing the ring finger under the middle one can mean that financial issues are not being openly revealed.
Hand gestures are also used to insult others. In some countries it is rude to point the index and middle fingers up at someone, forming the 'V' sign. The origins of this insult are interesting. When the longbow was used in battles, these two fingers drew the bow, and soldiers had them cut off when they were taken prisoner. For this reason, the fingers were often pointed at the enemy in a victorious, jeering gesture.
The fingers rings are worn upon can also be revealing. In old paintings of important people, rings tend to be worn on the index finger, the finger of power and ambition. Gay people often adorn their little fingers with a ring. A ring chosen to fit the middle finger can link with a slight psychological quirk or problem. Making a fist is obviously aggressive and reveals tension. Rubbing hands together usually signals pleasant anticipation. As you can see, there are many ways in which our hands express what we think or feel.
Open and Closed Hands
When you look at hands placed upon a flat surface, it is interesting to note how the owner holds them. Some people naturally allow their fingers to splay open; this literally shows that the overall personality is also likely to be open and that the person is receptive to having his or her hands examined. If the fingers are naturally held close together, the opposite applies and the owner may not be as keen to be scrutinized. Open hands often have spaces between the fingers at their roots where they join onto the palm. You can see the spaces more easily if the fingers are held together and the hand is held up to the light. This means that the person not only has an open nature, but is also generous and friendly, often gregarious, sometimes a little vulnerable and will usually be open to new ideas and experiences. If the fingers bend back easily away from the palm under slight pressure, then the above attributes will be marked and there will also be adaptability.
If there are no spaces between the fingers, the owner may be rather good at holding on to what he or she has, in all senses. On the closed hand if the fingers do not yield to slight pressure when bent away from the palm, but naturally turn inwards towards the palm, it reveals a personality that is far less spontaneous, gregarious and willing to reach out for new experiences than the openhanded type. Inflexible fingers reveal a tendency to resist change: the owner will wish to hang on to things and people that are familiar, adhering to crystallized patterns of existence. Such a person will always need a certain amount of time to adjust to any new phase in life.
Hand Size
The size of the hands can also be extremely revealing. It does not necessarily follow that a large person will have big hands, or that a small person will have little ones. To judge whether hands are big or small, they must be considered in relation to overall body size. Big hands generally belong to people who are good at handling detailed and even intricate activities. A brain surgeon would be likely to have such hands. Small-handed people do not generally take to things that require detailed thought or intricate actions as they tend to apply themselves to matters in hand in a quick and sometimes more intuitive way. The natural impatience of people with small hands is exacerbated if the fingers are short. If the nails are naturally short as well, then the lack of patience could be a real problem.
Small hands often belong to people who are good at organizing and handling things on a large scale. Very dynamic, high achievers with the ability to direct others will usually have hands that are small in relation to their overall body size. Small hands tend to be warm to the touch, whilst long, big, bony hands are often cool. In some ways, this can be seen as a reflection of the two temperaments. Small, neat hands found on a person with a large, tall body can denote great dexterity in handling many activities and can create good co-ordination.
As a rule, owners of broad hands need a feeling of physical freedom and space (see The Outdoor Type, pages 62-63). Those with narrow palms, however, are usually happy with much more indoor, static lifestyles, and can be good at jobs that require a lot of desk work.
The Right and Left hands
Are you right-handed or left-handed? This is the first thing you need to ask when you examine someone's hands. The two hands have a different significance. Physically, they usually vary too, in the shape of the fingers and especially in the lines, although some people's right and left hands are virtually the same.
Always begin a reading by asking the person whose hands you are looking at whether he or she is right-handed or left-handed. Some people are ambidextrous in many ways, in which case it will be the hand used for writing that shall be regarded as the 'right 'hand. The 'left' hand shows the basic personality and predispositions as well as past and current events. The 'right' hand shows how the basic personality has changed or is likely to develop and indicates future events. When you are reading the hands of a left-handed person, you will regard the right hand as the basic one, reflecting the present and past events, and the left as the hand linked with the future.
The two hands illustrated (above) have very different fingers. The index finger is much shorter on the left hand than on the right. As this finger tells us a lot about a person's feelings of confidence and adequacy, this person would have suffered from a lack of confidence, especially early in life, but will grow into far more self-certainty. Note also that the left hand shows a small and weak-looking ring finger, whilst the right hand shows the finger as stronger, no longer rather dwarfed by the middle finger. The owner of such hands would have problems with being positive and discovering creative energies; but as time goes by these qualities will develop.
There are no hard-and-fast rules about how long our fingers should be as our hands are all unique. Usually, however, the index and ring fingers are about the same length, their tips ending halfway up the top section or phalange of the middle finger; the little finger should end at the crease of the ring finger's top phalange. As you read on, you will learn about the lines of the palm and their meanings and see just how different lines can be on each hand. Whenever there is a marked difference, you will know that the owner of the hands has changed, or will adapt, a great deal in the course of his or her lifetime.
Significance of Shape
There are six basic hand shapes and each reveals a great deal about t...
