The hand as
a little cosmos.

A body made to correspond

The hand appears in Book II, chapter 27, “Of the proportion, measure, and Harmony of mans body.” Agrippa begins with the human being as a microcosm: a little world whose parts correspond to the larger world. He brings numbers, shapes, heavenly bodies, and human proportions into the same argument.

Read the seven signs as a map of those correspondences. Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and Mercury occupy the finger-bases; Venus, Mars, and the Moon occupy regions of the palm. In Agrippa’s system, the Sun and Moon count among the seven planets. The engraving makes his larger claim visible on something as familiar as a hand.

“there is no member in man which hath not correspondence with some sign, Star, intelligence, divine name”1651 edition, p. 263

The hand is also a measure

The surrounding pages compare the parts of the body. Agrippa gives four finger-breadths to a hand-breadth, six hand-breadths to a cubit, and twenty-four hand-breadths to the height of the body. A cubit runs from the elbow to the end of the longest finger.

His purpose is to describe a body ordered by harmonious ratios. Treat these as an ideal scheme in the text, rather than a standard that every person’s body must meet. The interesting move is from a small unit—the finger—to the hand, the arm, and the whole.

Read the measurements on p. 270

Numbers you can speak in silence

Earlier, in Book II, chapter 16, Agrippa describes hand gestures that stand for numbers. He says that gestures he had dismissed became intelligible when he recognised their numerical logic. Citing Bede, he explains a system in which different bends of the fingers carry different values.

Start with the first three examples. Select a number and follow the movement with your own left hand if it is comfortable. You are examining a counting convention.

The same shape can change value when it moves to the other hand: Agrippa says that the sign for ten on the left becomes one hundred on the right. This is why simply seeing a gesture is not enough. You also need the system that gives it meaning.

A sign and a cause are different things

Agrippa discusses chiromancy, or divination from the hand, in Book I, chapter 52. His explanation is that a bodily sign and a future event may share a celestial cause. In that account, a mark on the hand indicates something; the mark itself does not cause the event.

This helps explain the kind of world the engraving assumes. It does not turn chapter 27 into a step-by-step guide to predicting a life from palm lines. Keep three activities distinct: mapping correspondences, comparing proportions, and making a divinatory judgement.

Read Agrippa’s discussion of gesture and chiromancy