Can Palmistry Predict Cheating?

The Mount of Venus — the padded area at the base of the thumb — was, according to numerous older palmistry texts, a kind of passion-o-meter. A high, firm mount meant strong desires. Strong desires, apparently, meant trouble. The logic would not survive a first-year philosophy seminar, but it persisted for centuries.

The heart line attracted similar scrutiny. A deeply forked end was said to indicate someone who "loves two people at once." A chained heart line was described as the mark of a flirt. An island partway along was a "secret relationship." Reading these old books, you start to wonder if any heart line was considered safe. Nearly every variation seems to have been assigned some flavour of romantic disaster.

What's happening here, of course, is that palmists were doing what humans do brilliantly and badly in equal measure: finding patterns. Someone cheated on their spouse; a palmist looked at their hand; they found a mark; they wrote it down. They did not look at the hands of the faithfully married and check whether the same marks appeared there. That is not how evidence works, but it is very much how palmistry worked.