Decoding fingerprints
A talk about fingerprints and making meaning from marks - given at Hastings Museum.
For as far back as we have texts, humanity has been reading the signs on our bodies, in traditions from the Indian Samudrika Shastra to ancient Egyptian practices. The hands are a powerful, meaningful map of who you are, laid down while you were gestating.
The Secret is in the Womb
Your fingerprints retain a permanent record of your first interactions with your environment in the womb. They are formed by the same embryonic set (ectoderm) that develops into your brain and nervous system. The talk breaks that down into what your print patterns mean: A powerful, concentric whorl indicates strong, even force during development, correlating with leadership and a forceful personality (something Vedic scientists knew, and modern science confirms via Myers-Briggs and other personality metrics). A simpler loop print correlates with more moderate and adaptable personalities.
Looking at specific fingers: the Index Finger (Jupiter), which governs your sense of self and status, is more likely to have a powerful whorl in non-depressed people, while a whorl on the thumb is more common in the depressed group. Why is this? A whorl on the thumb is linked to a focused will, and yes, that is going to cause bearers of one more frustration than more easy-going, happy-go-lucky loopy-thumby people. I speak from experience on this, not just my own but also the thousands of hands I have examined.
Palmists look at the size of the thumb, the degree to which it tapers, how it is held out or in, lines supporting and lines blocking, the size, tension and colour of the mound it emerges from. The flexibility of different joints of the thumb is indicative of the degree of flexibility of the will too, and I'd place a bet on that being correlated with the ratio of estrogen and cortisol loosening and tightening the ligaments. But I don't need to see the results of that experiment.
Science is a blunt, even cackhanded instrument to measure single landmarks in a complex landscape that palmists spend years studying, and yet the data is catching up. Machine learning models can now use fingerprints to differentiate personality and even predict complex conditions with high accuracy.
Find out more:
🌐 Visit me at www.dannydeepalmistry.com ✨ Follow for more talks on endocrinology, finger length and consciousness! #Palmistry #Fingerprints #Dermatoglyphics #AncientScience #VedicTradition #SelfImprovement #PersonalityTest #MyersBriggs #JupiterFinger #HandReading #DannyDeepalmistry #MindBodyConnection #Consciousness #WhorlLoopArch #ScienceMeetsSpirituality
The artist being exhibited is Stephen Emmerson, who had applied the techniques of palm-reading to the lines found on the covers of well-read paperback books, as a different way to read them. More about the exhibition here.
Transcript:
Reading the Human Story: An Introduction to Palmistry
I'm Danny, a palmist. That gives me about as much street cred as a used car, snake oil, or maybe a pickpocket salesman... Anyway, I'm here to tell you about reading hands and making meaning out of marks.
For about two hundred thousand years, the only thing on telly was the sky at night, nature, and other people's bodies. We got really good at reading all of those things—really good at astronomy, herbalism, understanding meteorology and animals, and also understanding each other's bodies.
Hands in Ancient History and Tradition
Some of the first prints we've made in our history are of hands. If you go back about forty thousand years, the first painting on a cave wall is a red dot. Thirty-nine thousand years ago, we were already making hand impressions. As soon as we learned how to blow paint down a bone, we were already taking impressions of our hands. Maybe because it's easy, but we could also have been doing it with leaves, or tusks, or all kinds of things. But we weren't. We were doing it with hands. We've been interested in hands for a very long time, yes.
The Vedic tradition goes back about three and a half thousand years to the book, the Samudrika Sasra, the teachings on signs and the interpretation of signs, making meaning out of signs. Mudra means sign, so you'll be aware of mudras, like Hindu "gang signs," basically. The signs on the body are something we've been reading for ages, particularly the Hindus. There's divination of the marks on the lines of the face. There's a divinatory system directed at the belly buttons of women to see what kind of wives they would make. You can tell all sorts.
In fact, there's palmistry in traditions all over the world. The hand is thought to be meaningful as to what's going on underneath. Mesoamerica, the Egyptians have a tradition. The Chinese have a really interesting tradition which is much more geared towards symbols on different mounds; they're quite pictographic. There's a European tradition. A lot of it is to do with the lengths of the phalanges, as your aristocrat is waving at you from their carriage. So each culture brings its own particular feeling to how we read palms.
The Significance of Fingers and Fingerprints
We're going to talk about fingerprints today. Our fingerprints are how we manipulate the world. They're also how we engage with the world, how we feel our way around the world. So they're super important in our everyday life.
These are the developments of monkeys down towards apes down towards man over here. There are a few things which you see emerging out of the primate hand into the human hand. One is the increasingly longer first finger. There are no monkeys and no apes which have a longer first finger than the third finger. But in humans, one in ten people has a longer first finger. Palmists see the first finger as to do with the self, with consciousness, with individuality—all these things that emerge as we emerge out of the collectivism of the apes.
Another thing is, obviously, the thumb comes around into full opposition to the fingers. It's also quite interesting because the thumb is about your will. Human beings are the only ape, the only animal, where your will can go completely against the rest of the organism. There aren't other creatures that go on hunger strike, for example, to make a point.
But one of the other things is the whorl emerges. We're going to talk about how that's formed in a while, but just for now, the prints in the monkeys are loops (see how it looks like a wave there on the left). Nearly all monkeys have those. You get to gibbons, and you've got a few whorls—a few of these round ones. Orangutans have some. Gorillas have some. When you get to chimps, it's 20 to 30 percent. In humans, it's 30 to 35 percent. So one in three of the prints is a whorl, which is quite interesting. From a palmist's perspective, obviously, that means something, but even the scientists are catching up with this now.
Scientific Findings and Dermatoglyphics
We're going to have a brief look at some of the scientific findings. Today's session is about finding meaning in marks, finding significance. And scientific significance is quite different to other forms of significance. We talk about the historical significance of palmistry. Then it's something, and we talk about how a palmist reads meaning. But scientifically, significance means if you run this experiment a whole bunch of times, how likely is it that it happens again. This is a very, very blunt way to study anything, actually. But even with the clumsy tool of science, the scientists are still beginning to catch up with what the Vedic scientists knew a long time ago.
For example, there are correlations between loops and whorls and the Myers-Briggs personality types. Namely, the more loops you have, the more moderate your personality is. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Myers-Briggs, so I'm going to say a bunch of letters now: the INFJ, the ENFJ, the ENFP, the E... I feel like a madman; I don't know what these things mean. But they are correlated to different personality types. The more loops you've got, the more moderate you are in your personality. And the more whorls you have, the more leadership you'll have in your personality, particularly these traits: a strong sense of responsibility, enthusiastic attitude, and concern for others' well-being. Now this is a fairly blunt instrument. All you're doing is counting the loops and the whorls.
The Formation of Fingerprints
How do those things form? When a bunch of cells that's going to be a baby finds its way into the wall of the uterus, it splits up over the first 3 weeks until you get to this point where you have three different parts, or three different sets of cells: the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm. Each one of these is going to develop into different parts of the embryo and different parts of the baby. The ectoderm is what develops into both the nervous system and the skin. So the folds on your fingers, they're called papillary ridges, and the folds in your brain come from the same embryonic set. And they start to develop around the same time.
Between ten and twelve weeks, you start to produce these things called volar pads. They're on the end of your fingers—all of them—and sometimes you get them in other places as well, on the hand and on the toes. They grow out like this, and then the amnion pushes in like this. Just like when a balloon shrinks, it leaves wrinkles in its skin. As the volar pad shrinks, it also leaves wrinkles, and those wrinkles become your fingerprints. So the fingerprints become a record of the human being's first interactions with its environment, which is the amniotic fluid.
The whorls we've been talking about, and some of you have seen the whorls in your own fingers: if the volar pad, and the strength of let's say life force and growth, is pushing out evenly in all directions against the amnion (the amniotic fluid is pushing back evenly), you're going to end up with concentric circles because of the way it is pushed out. That tells us something about how much force is in that particular finger.
Whereas, if the volar pad grows out and then the amnion kind of pushes it to one way or the other, you're going to end up with this loop print. Remember back in the last slide, we were talking about how the more moderate personalities have these loop prints, and the more forceful personalities are more likely to have these whorl prints. So you're already seeing this in a particular finger if someone's got more or less force in it.
You've also got other types of fingerprints. We're going to talk briefly about the arch. The arch produces a flatter pad, which doesn't go out so far. So it kind of raises and then it goes down again as well. This is all completed by the 24th week.
Fingers, Depression, and Personality
This is a slightly more sophisticated test. It was on depression. What happens here is looking at the right thumb, comparing a group of depressed people with a group of non-depressed people: the depressed group is more likely to have whorls in the thumb. Does that make sense? The control group is more likely to have loops in the thumb. That's statistically significant. It's also meaningful in other ways, but we'll get to that in a bit.
If you look at the right index finger, however (not the thumb, but the index finger), it's the other way around. The control group is more likely to have whorls than the depressed group. You see, it's the other way around, right? Isn't that curious? Next slide, please.
Arches is the other way around, right? The depressed group is much more likely to have arches in the first finger. The arch print is—I don't want to say it's a weaker print, because the arches also have their own qualities—but it doesn't push out with a great deal of strength. People with arches, particularly in their first finger, because the first finger is about the personality and the self (it's Jupiter in palmistry), are much more likely to be more supportive and more helpful, but they're more likely to get stepped on. If it's in your left finger, then in your relationships you might well get stepped on.
From a palmist's perspective, the Jupiter finger is to do with the self. That's a teacher wagging a finger. That's a student going, "I know," which is the finger we raise when we are talking about what we know. This is the one which grows as the humans emerge out of the apes, and it's to do with your self-worth and your status. Going back to that slide there, the non-depressed group is likely to have a whorl in that finger. Doesn't that make sense? If you've got more power in the status-giving finger, the expansive finger of Jupiter (Jupiter's the king of the gods), then you're more likely not to be depressed.
I guess the point I'm making here is that the language of the gods and the language of palmistry is so much more refined than this clumsy scientific language.
Endocrinology and Finger Growth
In terms of the endocrinology, it's also quite interesting. The first finger grows under the influence of estrogen in the mother's womb. I've got a whole other talk about that. Emotional awareness: the longer your first finger gets, the more likely you are to be schizophrenic as well. Whereas, the longer the third finger... we'll get to the third finger in a second. So things like consciousness, individuality, and "what's my place here" and all those things that mess with your head can drive you mad.
The thumb, however, is about the will. When we say "yes, I agree" or "no, I don't agree," if you're under somebody's thumb, you're subject to their will. Egyptian palmistry focuses mainly on this digit of the thumb; the thumb is really important. In this group, the depressed group is more likely to have the whorls in the thumb, right? If you have a strong will (i.e., if you want something a lot), then you're more likely to get depressed because it can be troublesome to want something and then be frustrated when you don't get it. Obviously, a more sophisticated reading is also going to look at the size of the thumb. If you have a long thumb and a strong thumb, you're more likely to get what you want. If you have a stiff thumb, then you're more likely to get what you want. If you have a floppy thumb, you're going to be easily led: "Oh, I was meant to be doing my taxes, but now I'm at a party." If you've got a really stiff thumb, you're going to be stubborn. All of that correlates to the levels of cortisol and estrogen that are influencing how your ligaments are tightening up and loosening.
The ring finger is connected to Apollo. We'll just go through this one really quickly. It's connected to your drive, your creativity. I saw a few whorls in the ring finger. People with whorls in the ring finger or even peacock's eyes are going to be quite creative and productive. The longer this one gets, the more likely you are to end up in prison, the more likely you are to have more children—all the things connected to high levels of testosterone, because testosterone influences the growth of that finger.
And the middle finger... well, if I say "I know" and it's just me, then I'm going to raise one finger. But if I'm a priest, I'm going to raise two, because that is me and that's also the institution of Saturn which is around me. Saturn is traditionally connected to morality, limitations. Academics tend to have long, strong, long, bony fingers. Pituitary hormones and pituitary growth factor 1 and 2 influence the growth of bones, but they also regulate estrogen and testosterone on both sides. And Saturn regulates the things on both sides. It's also about circadian rhythms and menstrual cycles. We have been showing our middle finger to people to limit them since way before Eminem; Nero made people kiss his middle finger.
The Language of Palmistry vs. Scientific Data
There are tons of these papers. I just want to draw attention to two. This one here is about correlations between IQ scores and fingerprint types. And this one is fascinating: machine learning models successfully differentiated schizophrenia fingerprints with high accuracy. That means you can put a bunch of prints into a computer, and it will be able to tell you which of these people are likely to be schizophrenic.
As I said, statistical significance and the science around it is kind of interesting, but it's not as interesting as palmistry. If you were to take a book and chop it up, and then analyze how many times it said the word "punch," and then look at the Times Literary Supplement and say what it's about, and you were to say that a book that says the word "punch" is more likely to be about boxing, you would get some statistical significance, but that doesn't provide any meaning.
This is how palmists work. I want to tell you about a couple of different conditions I've seen just to show you how we put it all together.
A Palmist's Interpretation
I went to read at "Bizarre But True," a pub, and nine people came in. The publican said, "There's a palmist today," and I said, "Yeah, and I'll tell you who's the bossiest and who's the most perverted." They were utter skeptics, but they had a few drinks and they called me over. "Okay, I'm going to be out in 2 minutes, all right?" I said, (notice how I gesticulated with my Saturn finger).
The first person I read had a very long first finger. I said, "This is the bossy one." They all laughed. We went all the way around, and I didn't tell them who the most perverted was, but they asked me. That person had in their left hand (the left is your intimate life) a peacock's eye on that finger. This is your intimate creativity. The reason you wear a wedding ring on this finger is because it's about your intimate creativity. If you've got a peacock's eye on that finger, you're probably going to have a bit of a kink going on. But in his right first finger, he had one of these: a double loop, a yin-yang. So he's trying to fit in. There's a person who's not going to reveal his quirks very much.
The one on the little finger always means they're going to have wild dreams. Let's skip over that one.
And then the last one is a peacock's eye on R4. Which one's that? Well, I'll tell you briefly about mine. I've got a whorl on my first finger, which means I'm very happy talking up here to all of you people because it's the public side. I've got an arch on my left finger, so it wouldn't be quite so tough in my own house. All right, next one please, and that's the last one.
I hope that this has been exciting for you. I hope I've redeemed palmistry a little bit. This is me. Those are the books I forgot to bring here and sell. And if you want to know about a talk about endocrine function and finger length, it's that one. This is a completely different thing, I'm also a hypnotist, and that is a free hypnotic session that takes you down into the mycelial web. If you want to have a quick look at that, I've also got my cards back on that table. Thank you very much.
