In another such book, The Golden Key of the Egyptians, an extensive table of days was included, with dates on which various dreams could be considered good, or bad, omens. Dreams you have on March the 2, 9, 12, and 14, for instance, were dreams you should never tell anybody about. Dreams you have on December 10, 20, and 29, on the other hand, would bring great joy. In general, according to this key, dreams you have on Wednesday nights would be the most informative when it came to business matters, while those you have on Fridays would be more pertinent to romantic affairs.
When trying to decide which dreams were truly oracular and which ones were simply, well, dreams, an authority on the subject who went by the name of Rankajou suggested that you should discard any dreams that occurred during the first couple of hours of sleep; they were just the results of the digestive process. You should also discard any dreams of things or people that you had just heard discussed; these were no more than echoes from the day. Also to be discounted, dreams that resulted from an illness, a fright, an uncomfortable sleeping position, or a book you were reading before falling off to sleep. The best dreams, when it came to their predictive power, were the ones you had between three and seven in the morning, when digestion was all done, the mind had been untroubled, and the body, presumably, had found itself a relaxing position of repose. How exactly you remembered these particular dreams and distinguished them from any others that had come to mind (from tainted causes like a draft or a head cold) Rankajou did not say.
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
During the reign of King Tarquin the Proud, who ruled Rome from 534 to 510 B.C., a strange visitor appeared at his palace one cold winter day. Unlike most of the dignitaries and plutocrats who asked for an audience with the king, this visitor was an old woman in a voluminous cloak. Nobody knew who she was or where she’d come from, but there was something in her demeanor that was so mysterious and compelling that she was allowed to see the king, nonetheless.
When he asked her what business she had with him, she drew from under her robe nine books (or scrolls) which she offered to sell to him. Tarquin asked her how much she wanted for them, and the old woman quoted a price so fantastic that Tarquin laughed. The old woman didn’t. With a sober, even sad, expression, she took three of the books and threw them into the fire burning in a brazier near the king’s throne. Then she asked him if he wanted to buy the six remaining books.
Again, the king asked the price, and she gave him the same price she’d originally asked. “Why should I pay you for six books as much as you were asking for nine?” Tarquin replied.
The old woman threw three more books into the fire.
Tarquin was amazed. Who was this old woman, and what was in these books?
For the third time, she asked if he would buy the books, and this time the king didn’t laugh or scoff at the offer. Fixing his gaze on the resolute old woman, he wondered what he should do. And when, without bending, she moved to throw the last remaining books on the fire, he said, “Stop!” And he paid her, in gold, the full sum she was asking.
Then the old woman turned and slowly walked out of the palace. She was never seen again.
Had Tarquin made a good buy?
When the books were opened, they were discovered to be written in Greek. After they were translated for the Roman king, he learned that they were books of magic and prophecy and that they addressed the future and the welfare of the Roman empire. Now, the king’s augurs declared, the old woman must have been the famed Sibyl of Cumae, one of the divinely inspired seers of the ancient world, the same one who had counseled Aeneas before he made his descent through the infernal regions.
The Sibylline Books, as they were then dubbed, were reverently placed in a shrine in the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol; there, they were overseen by a small group of official custodians (half patrician, half plebeian) whose duty it was to consult them, at the behest of the Senate, whenever guidance was needed. Most important, the books were used to figure out what religious rituals had to be performed in order to stave off national catastrophes, such as earthquakes, droughts, pestilence, and war. After one such consultation in 226 B.C., the guardians of the books ordered that a Greek and a Gallic couple be buried alive in the Forum, in propitiation of the gods of the underworld.
Though the fate of the original books is unclear (they were probably consumed in a fire in 83 B.C.), reconstituted versions remained among the most precious and revered possessions of the Roman empire for many centuries. When Augustus became pontifex maximus, he ordered all the books of magic and prophecy then extant to be gathered together and burned (in 12 B.C.). But the three Sibylline Books he spared. These he ordered to be taken from the Capitoline Hill and placed in a golden chest, which was then enshrined in the base of a statue of Apollo on the Palatine Hill.
They were preserved there until the reign of the emperor Honorius (from A.D. 395 to 423). At that time, the empire was in great danger, with the barbarians restive at its borders, and the Goth leader, Alaric, moving his army across the Alps. It was then that the Roman general Stilicho decided to put a stop to the pagan beliefs that half the population still stubbornly clung to. He stole the treasures stored in the temples, ripped the gold plates off the doors of the Capitol, and put the Sibylline Books to the torch. When his wife, Serena, took a precious necklace from a statue of the goddess Rhea and had the nerve to wear it herself in public, the wrath of the people became unquenchable. Stilicho, despite his private cadre of barbarian bodyguards, was hunted down, captured, and beheaded. The Senate then sentenced his wife to death by strangulation.
Terrifed by the approaching Gothic horde, the government officials turned to some persuasive Etruscan sorcerers, who claimed that they could call down lightning bolts and blast the Goths to powder. Needless to say, the Etruscans failed to deliver, and after a prolonged siege, the Romans were forced to surrender nearly everything they owned to Alaric and his army, in exchange for the privilege of keeping their lives.
THE HAND OF FATE
Of all the body parts regularly turned to for divination—and this pretty much includes everything from the head to the toes—none was ever more studied than the hand. The hands are at once one of the most expressive parts of the body and of course one of the most utilitarian. Perhaps because they are so vital in the practical sense, they have also been invested with considerable importance in other ways, too—the hands have been used both to predict the individual destiny of their owner and to diagnose his or her present health and disposition.
The science, or art, of chiromancy (from the Greek words for “hand” and “divination") goes back as far as three thousand years before the birth of Christ, when it was already being practiced in China. Even in the most ancient Greek writings, chiromancy is discussed as if it were an established and widespread belief; Homer refers to it, and later on, so do Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. (Indeed, there’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that a chiromancer studied Aristotle’s palm, then made some rather unflattering statements about the great philosopher’s character. Aristotle’s students were so shocked and dismayed that they were ready to string up the palmist by his heels, when Aristotle stopped them and said that the hand reader had done a good job; the very flaws that the reader had seen were in fact the flaws he’d been striving all his life to overcome.) In the patristic literature (the writings of the Fathers of the early Christian church) several references to chiromancy are made, and it’s clear from these that most people at that time believed there was mystical significance in any marks that could be found on this “organ of organs,” the hand.
When studying the hand for divinatory purposes, everything about it was to be taken into account. How was the hand shaped? Was it small and narrow or wide and thick? Was the skin rough or smooth? Were the fingers short and blunt, or were they long and tapered? Were there many lines, crisscrossing the palm every which way, or were there just a few, barely discernible? Were the nails hard and clear or brittle and cloudy? Was there hair on the
hand, and if so, where and how much? And what about the veins—were they blue and prominent or pink and delicate? Was the skin warm and dry or cold and damp? All of these were factors that a conscientious chiromancer could, and usually did, take into account.
And although their methods and the interpretation of their data varied over the centuries, the chiromancers (or palmists, as they were often called) did gradually build up a kind of catalog of hand shapes and traits and features which they could use for handy reference. The first question that had to be decided upon, however, was which hand to read. Many palmists insisted on using the left hand, as that was the hand (most people being right-handed) that had suffered less wear and tear; the lines and signs in it, they felt, would be more visible and undisturbed. (Of course, in a left-handed person, the right would be used, for the same reasons.) Some readers looked at both hands, and many distinguished between the two by saying that, in a right-handed person, the left hand displayed the inherited characteristics, while the right showed what had, and would be, accomplished in the person’s life. (Again, this distinction was reversed for lefties.)
As for the shape of the hand, there were several broad categories into which it could fall. First of all, there was the question of length; palmists measured the length of the hand from the top of the extended middle finger to the bulge of the wristbone (known to the medical profession as the ulnar styloid) on the outside of the forearm. If this distance seemed unusually long, the person was thought to be of a pensive and brooding nature, inclined to spend more time working toward perfection than toward getting the job over and done with. If the length was unusually short, the person was thought to be imaginative and creative but a tad impractical. If the hand and fingers were thin, it implied a nervous disposition and possibly a timid one; if they were thick, it suggested a more carnal and earthy nature.
The influential French chiromancer Henri Rem declared that hands could be divided up into four major types, with a host of emotional attributes corresponding to each one. The first type he called the pointed hand, with sharp, tapered fingers. “Pointed fingers,” he wrote, “offer a conduit free and without obstacle, and in this resemble the magnetised points of lightning conductors; they easily draw in and emit fluid, consequently absorb spontaneously surrounding ideas and emit them in the same manner. Hence the inspirations, the illuminations, the inventions which flow from pointed fingers and make dreamers, poets and inventors.” Among the notables with pointed fingers, Rem included Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, George Sand, and the painters Raphael and Correggio. He also observed that the pointed hand belonged to those with a taste for luxury and sensual pursuit. What it wasn’t well suited for was “the battle of life, for reasoning, for materiality, for effort.”
The second type of hand Rem identified was the square hand, whose fingers ended in a clear, squarely cut nail. This, Rem declared, was “the hand of reason, of duty and of command.” It belonged to those with a cool and methodical nature, who could consider a problem dispassionately and come up with a logical, precise solution to it. Square-handed people of note were Voltaire, Rodin, Holbein, and the great stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. There were, however, a couple of worrisome things to look out for: If the middle finger was too square at the end, then it implied an uncompromising, and even intolerant, disposition. Even worse, “if by an excess of malformation, the square finger attains the shape of a ball, a tendency to murder may be feared.”
The third type of hand, the conical, was “the philosophical hand, par excellence." Why? Because, with its gently rounded fingertips, it was partly square and partly pointed—an ideal mix of attributes. “It is the hand of him who can understand everything and love everything, who can acknowledge his errors, be benevolent, friendly, indulgent, the friend of peace and harmony, of order and comfort.” Rousseau had the conical hand, as did Molière, La Fontaine, and the legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse.
Finally, there was what Rem called the spatulate hand, with “spatula shaped fingers, with the nail joint almost flat (exception must be made in the case of deformation owing to the use of tools).” Spatulate fingers could be found on people who looked before leaping, who were sometimes overly confident and overbearing. Such people had an inborn aversion to bureaucrats and hated any form of confinement, whether it was as extreme as a prison or as ordinary as a workplace. “It is the hand of instinct,” Rem wrote, “of feelings but little restrained, of the material mind, of revolt (most revolutionaries have these finger signs).” Among the spatulates were Rembrandt, Rubens, and Napoleon III, the emperor of France from 1852 to 1870.
Even Rem conceded, however, that few hands were purely one type or the other; most displayed certain features of different types, and so they required a practiced eye to assess their true meaning—all, perhaps, but the “elementary hand,” which Rem said he often came across in the country. “The fingers are thick, massive, it is the hand of the peasant, instinctive, of the rudimentary being. . . . It is the helpless hand of the born slave.”
But even more telling than the size or shape of the hand were the signs to be read in its palm—the lines (or creases), the mounts (or hills), and the valleys (or plains). In nearly every form of palmistry, this information is correlated to astrological and mythological lore. To get a rough idea of where these various features lie and what they are supposed to reveal of the future, imagine a left hand, with its palm facing you. We’ll start by laying out the mounts, or fleshy elevations, of the palm. Their size, their position in respect to the adjacent mounts, the ways in which they are transected by the lines of the palm, all of these factors are thought to influence their power and significance, but overall the mounts and their respective meanings go pretty much as follows.
The first mount is the raised area of the palm that sits at the base of the thumb. This is called the Mount of Venus, after the goddess of love and beauty. It represents warmth, affection, and sexual allure. On the negative side, however, it can betoken an indiscreet and tasteless nature, given to promiscuity and irresponsible behavior.
Moving just above that, to the crux of the thumb and index finger, is the mount called Inner (or Lower) Mars, named after the god of war and power. Not surprisingly, it suggests energy and daring, adventure and bravery. But it also suggests wanton destruction and malice.
Next, at the base of the index finger, is the Mount of Jupiter, after the king of the Greek gods, and it symbolizes justice, pride, and ambition. On the downside, it can convey pomposity, arrogance, and tyranny.
At the base of the middle and longest finger is Saturn—authoritarian, rigorous, controlling, and sometimes a bit dull. But good at amassing and maintaining a fortune.
The Mount of Apollo lies below the fourth finger. Like the sun god after which it is named, it suggests creativity, beauty, and charm. But it can also signal fickleness, conceit, and an unwise proclivity to gamble.
Just below the little finger is the Mount of Mercury, standing, like the messenger of the gods, for quick-wittedness and adroit maneuvering. But at the same time, it can suggest dishonesty, greed, and compulsive chattiness.
Moving just below Mercury, and running along the outside of the hand, is the mount called Outer (or Upper) Mars, representing such laudable qualities as courage and consideration, and such negative traits as irrationality and stubbornness.
Finally, there’s the Mount of Luna, which sits at the base of the palm, on the side opposite the thumb. Luna signifies imagination and introspection, vitality, and a love of travel. Less favorably, it can suggest a selfish, secretive, and overly sensitive nature.
The central area of the palm that is bordered on all sides by one or more of the various mounts is called the Plain of Mars. If it’s full and fleshy, it indicates an energetic and hopeful spirit. If it’s visibly depressed, or hollowed out, it conveys ineffectuality and pessimism. If it falls somewhere between these two extremes, if it’s got a gentle curve to it, then that suggests a well-balanced, good-natured temperament.
> But the feature that has always drawn the most attention from palmists and their clients is the lines that furrow the palm. Are these lines deep and long or short and shallow? Are they complete, or do they instead stop and start? Are they many in number, or are they few? According to one theory, people with more sensitive and complicated souls have an abundance of lines, while those of a simpler, less intelligent nature have not nearly as many. Again, the interpretation of the lines is largely up to the individual palmist. But even so, some general observations can be made.
Five lines are considered by most palm readers to be the most significant. The first of these is the Line of Life, which runs around the base of the ball of the thumb. If this line is deep, it signifies great energy and drive; if it’s not, it suggests lassitude. If there are parallel lines running beside it, this indicates a strong need for affection and the company of other people. If it makes a wide curve toward the center of the palm, it suggests an active nature; if it curves close to the thumb, it shows an activity of the mind, instead.
The Head Line begins above the Life Line, in the Upper Mars area, then curves outward, across the Plain of Mars, and toward the opposite edge of the palm. If this line is deep, then the person’s thoughts will be equally deep; if it’s shallow, it indicates a more pragmatic than inspired nature. If it’s not there at all, there will be death by accident. If it is wavy, the person’s thoughts will go in many different directions; if it’s straight, it suggests practicality.
Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them Page 18
