"You're under arrest.”
That's a phrase you'd expect to hear sitting in front of a document inked with your fingerprints, while under observation by a stranger. But this week, faced with this scenario, I heard something different: "The double loop on your thumbs indicates that you're at the helm of your own destiny..."
Jennifer Hirsch is a palm reader based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who gave me a reading via Skype this past Tuesday. With a chirping voice, long blonde hair, and habit of signing e-mails to potential clients with "Love, Jen," she couldn't be less like a TV detective—but much like that character, she spends her day analyzing the ridges, patterns, and shapes of digits and palms. Fingerprint analysis is an up-and-coming field within palmistry, and is said by its practitioners to divine things like personality traits, career prospects, and medical risks.
Fingerprints are on the up-and-up in less mystic realms, too. There's the new iPhone touch ID, which also functions with "prints" of toes, paws, and nipples, if correctly set. In the art world, conservators use fingerprints to authenticate works. This fall, OC’s collection featured whorls, arches, loops, and other varieties of fingerprint or "glyph" blown up on garments.
Oddly, fingerprints are in many ways newer than palmistry. Palm reading, a staple of ancient religions, has been around for thousands of years; it was banned as witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, though fingerprints have always existed on our bodies (and those of chimps, apes, and koalas), mankind's usage of them is relatively new. In ancient Babylon, fingerprints were used to sign documents. But, in the West, it wasn't until the nineteenth-century that anyone recognized the power of fingerprints to identify their owners. A British servicemen picked up the technique in India, tipped off Scotland Yard, and trips to the police station have never been the same since.
A few decades later, palmistrists (palm-ist-rists) caught up. "It's like the myth of Magellan's ships," Jen told me the first time we spoke, after I stumbled on her welcoming, not-overly-professional website (I didn’t want to go with something glossy and corporate or a '90s GeoCities relic—Jen was the perfect medium). "Wherever Magellan sailed, the islanders wouldn't see the ships because they had no paradigm of them being in existence. Old hand readers were the same: they were looking at hands, but fingerprints didn’t seem to enter their consciousness until roughly 1940."
I'd never had my palm read. But something about Jen's posi-vibes, stories about Portuguese explorers, and promises of merging Eastern and Western techniques piqued my interest. And, there was her prediction. During our initial informational interview, Jen’s guessed that I would have at least one whorl, a circular marking resembling a tire, on my hand. “It’s a sign of a researcher."
In fact, I had not one, but two whorls, on my left middle and index fingers. Jen also sensed that I’d attracted a similarly whorl-dly partner; someone who shared my stamina, individualistic streak, and—she suspected—now, bed. Right again. However, she misread a cut on right palm as a beauty mark s
That's a phrase you'd expect to hear sitting in front of a document inked with your fingerprints, while under observation by a stranger. But this week, faced with this scenario, I heard something different: "The double loop on your thumbs indicates that you're at the helm of your own destiny..."
Jennifer Hirsch is a palm reader based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who gave me a reading via Skype this past Tuesday. With a chirping voice, long blonde hair, and habit of signing e-mails to potential clients with "Love, Jen," she couldn't be less like a TV detective—but much like that character, she spends her day analyzing the ridges, patterns, and shapes of digits and palms. Fingerprint analysis is an up-and-coming field within palmistry, and is said by its practitioners to divine things like personality traits, career prospects, and medical risks.
Fingerprints are on the up-and-up in less mystic realms, too. There's the new iPhone touch ID, which also functions with "prints" of toes, paws, and nipples, if correctly set. In the art world, conservators use fingerprints to authenticate works. This fall, OC’s collection featured whorls, arches, loops, and other varieties of fingerprint or "glyph" blown up on garments.
Oddly, fingerprints are in many ways newer than palmistry. Palm reading, a staple of ancient religions, has been around for thousands of years; it was banned as witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, though fingerprints have always existed on our bodies (and those of chimps, apes, and koalas), mankind's usage of them is relatively new. In ancient Babylon, fingerprints were used to sign documents. But, in the West, it wasn't until the nineteenth-century that anyone recognized the power of fingerprints to identify their owners. A British servicemen picked up the technique in India, tipped off Scotland Yard, and trips to the police station have never been the same since.
A few decades later, palmistrists (palm-ist-rists) caught up. "It's like the myth of Magellan's ships," Jen told me the first time we spoke, after I stumbled on her welcoming, not-overly-professional website (I didn’t want to go with something glossy and corporate or a '90s GeoCities relic—Jen was the perfect medium). "Wherever Magellan sailed, the islanders wouldn't see the ships because they had no paradigm of them being in existence. Old hand readers were the same: they were looking at hands, but fingerprints didn’t seem to enter their consciousness until roughly 1940."
I'd never had my palm read. But something about Jen's posi-vibes, stories about Portuguese explorers, and promises of merging Eastern and Western techniques piqued my interest. And, there was her prediction. During our initial informational interview, Jen’s guessed that I would have at least one whorl, a circular marking resembling a tire, on my hand. “It’s a sign of a researcher."
In fact, I had not one, but two whorls, on my left middle and index fingers. Jen also sensed that I’d attracted a similarly whorl-dly partner; someone who shared my stamina, individualistic streak, and—she suspected—now, bed. Right again. However, she misread a cut on right palm as a beauty mark s