Captain Casimir Stanislas D'Arpentigny was born in 1798 and pursued a
military career for the most part of his life. He joined the French army and served under
both Napoleon I in 1814 and under King Louis XVIII until his retirement in 1844. Whilst
serving in Spain during the Peninsular Wars of 1820, he met a young gipsy girl who read
his hands. This chance encounter proved to be quite decisive, for D'Arpentigny
subsequently spent much of his time dedicating himself to the study of hands. He
researched all the old chiromantical texts of the Renaissance period that he could find
and began making preliminary observations of the hands of the people he encountered.
According to his own account, it was whilst he was attending the social gatherings of
acquaintances of his that he made his first significant chirognomical discoveries.
D'Arpentigny was a literary man as well as being a soldier and
consequently he was often invited to social gatherings from two quite different strata of
French society. At the first, there were mainly scientists, mathematicians and engineers,
whilst at the second there were mainly artists, poets and musicians. He noticed that there
were considerable differences in the types of fingers to be found on the hands of the
guests at each of these soirees. At the former, the fingers tended to be rather knotty
across the joints whereas at the latter, the finger joints were nearly always smooth. He
concluded that the different quality of finger joints corresponded with the differences to
be found in their owners' mentality, an assertion which still stands good today.
This primary differentiation was to become the cornerstone of the whole system of
handreading that he later developed.
D'Arpentigny was the first person to formulate of a system of handshape
classification. Despite the fact that hands clearly come in different shapes and sizes,
no-one had previously determined to consider this obvious and distinctive fact. The
chiromancer's preserve had been with the lines of the palm, not with the form of the hand
in which those lines were to be found. From his own observations, D'Arpentigny
delineated six basic types of hands, the spatulate, the conic and the square, based
primarily on the fingertip shapes, the knotty and the psychic, based primarily on the
quality of the fingers, and the elementary, based on the overall crudity and width of both
the palm and the lines. This handshape typology has been widely adopted and is still used
by many palmists today. Unfortunately, what most modern palmists do not realise is that
D'Arpentigny's handshape classification was not devised as a means of classifying all
hands. Bewarned all those palmists who have been using this system in the analysis
of the hands of women! Women's hands are quite different, he says, and this system is not
to be used for assessing their hands. D'Arpentigny has a separate section on the
handshapes of women and quite explicitly states that the six main types he has described
was for the classification of the hands of men only.
His observations and researches formed the basis of his only written
work, 'La Chirognomie' of 1839. He defends his approach to the study of the hand
with a section on the physiology of the hand and refers to the recently published work of
Sir Charles Bell and points out the significances of his neurological discoveries for the
study of chirology. He gives a detailed description of each of the six main handshape
types, but also spends considerable time delineating the variations to be found in the
Spatulate hand which, evidently, was the most common type of handshape to be found.
D'Arpentigny also considers the morphognomy of the thumb and of the
fingers in the way that we have seen. He was perhaps the first author to record the
significance of the length or shortness of the fingers and the shape and significance of
the fingertips, as well as being the first to observe the intellectual significance of the
finger joints. What is especially remarkable about D'Arpentigny's work is that he has
absolutely nothing to say about the lines of the hands whatsoever. This may have
been because of a desire to keep a distance from the possible misrepresentation of his
work as mere gipsy chiromancy when his intention was to present more a systematic and
reasoned treatise on the physiognomy of the hand. Whatever reasons he may have had,
this does not detract from the point that D'Arpentigny remains the first person to write a
treatise on the chirognomy of the hand.
After D'Arpentigny, the study of the hand could never be the same
again.
Back to Top
