Can Palmistry Predict Fame?

The sun line has one of the more glamorous histories in palmistry. Count Louis Hamon, better known as Cheiro, who read palms for Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and King Edward VII in the late 19th century, placed enormous weight on the Apollo line. He described it as the line of brilliance, claiming that its presence guaranteed "success, often of a spectacular kind." He was, by all accounts, a magnetic and entertaining man. His sun line predictions were correspondingly theatrical.

What Cheiro was actually doing — and he was very good at it — was reading the person in front of him: their manner, dress, speech, and confidence. The palm line was his stage prop. His actual skill was acute social observation. This is not nothing. But it is not prediction.

The problem with fame predictions is that they tend to be remembered when they come true — by confirmation bias — and forgotten when they don't. The thousands of people told they have "the marks of success" who then live quietly and happily without fame do not generally write memoirs about how their palmist was wrong. The occasional famous person who once had their palm read and was told great things definitely does. And so the legend of the sun line persists.