Guided Pathway

Apropos the hand represented in the seventh of Agrippa’s diagrams for this chapter and reproduced as #9.2 in the panel captioned as “division of the hand according to the planets,” the philosopher writes: “And from thence where the hand is joyned to the arm on the outside, and in the inside from the top of the naile of the middle finger unto the lowermost joynt, and from thence to the shutting of the hand.” Agrippa goes on to describe correspondences in terms of size between the forefinger and the forehead or even one of the digits of the middle finger with the nose or of another finger with the chin, and so forth. The entire hand is analogized with several parts of the face and Agrippa discovers similar correspondences between a great number of other body parts so that the body itself ultimately turns into a universe of analogical resemblances. In particular, the similarities between hand and face bring to mind the expressive similarities between the epistemes of physiognomy and ch[e]iromancy including studies of gesture, both of which were central to Warburg’s research. While the human palm in #9.2 includes a representation of the same cosmological symbols appearing in #9.1 (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars, Sun, and moon now corresponding to the five fingers of the hand and parts of the palm), Agrippa does not comment on them in this chapter. Yet in chapter of Book I of his Occult Philosophy, after referring to signs related to the “arts of divination” including physiognomy and “metoposcopy” (the study of the human forehead), Agrippa writes about the art of palmistry: “Also Chyromancy, foretelling future events, not as causes, but as signes through like effects, caused by the same cause. And although these divers kinds of divinations may seem to be done by inferiour, and weak signes, yet the judgements of them are not to be slighted, or condemned, when prognostication is made by them, not out of superstition, but by reason of the harmoniacall correspondency of all the parts of the body” (Book I, ch. 52). Notice that the practice of chiromancy was banned by the Catholic Church since 1475 yet was still practiced in this era; such disputation might explain the author’s bold defense and vindication of chiromancy’s validity.