One of the most difficult lineal features of the hands that I have come across is where there is a doubled formation of the Major Water line in the hand.  The Major Water line is the uppermost of the three main lines that runs across the hand under the fingers, starting under the little finger and ending at or towards the index finger. A commonly seen Major Water line might look something like this:

Here you can see that the Major Water line arcs in a gentle curve and has a little overlap towards the index finger, with one branch ending into the base of the index finger and the other going up between the fingers.

Around 44% of people have this sort of ending to the Major Water line, so it’s actually fairly common. The most important thing to notice for the purposes of what we are considering now is that the line has integrity, it essentially is just one line.  And this is how it should be!

The Major Water line is a lineal indicator of how we relate to other people and how we make connections with other people.  Water is the element of feelings, emotions, sentiment, intimacy, a sense of connection, a sense of belonging and the condition of this line reveals a great deal about how that person experiences themselves emotionally and how they connect to other people.  It shows a great deal about the relationships they form with other people and how they go about forming those relationships.

When the line curves towards the space between the index and middle fingers, it shows there is an ease of connection with others.  People whose line ends cleanly between those two fingers are open and honest, are emotionally transparent and easy to get to know. When there is a little overlap at the end of the line, as in this case, it can show a slight emotional caution, someone who takes their time to get to know someone before opening up. The bigger the gap between the lines in such a reduplication, the more emotionally cautious or hidden the person is, such as in this example of a married man who had a long-term affair that he kept secret from his wife for many years:

This is the right hand of Michael Aspel, a minor British television personality (c1965-2005) and BBC newsreader who had been married three times – but during his third marriage started a relationship with a fourth woman. This dishonesty was uncovered by the press and this ‘scandalous hypocrisy’ exposed.  Curiously, he is still with this fourth partner and is still married to his third wife !

So we can see that a doubling of the Major Water line can give rise to this kind of dual emotional life. Psychologically, the pattern shows someone who is working on two emotional levels simultaneously.  At the very least, this reveals a lack of emotional integration and a high likelihood of duplicitous behaviour.

This higher version of the Water line, running as it does above the Water line, is often an indicator if imaginative and creative thinking and can often be seen in the hands of actors and musicians – indeed Michael Aspel was an actor before becoming involved in television.  These people are idealistic and often wish life to be other than they find it – so they are dreamers, idealists, visionaries people for whom the grass is always greener elsewhere. However, this line formation can also be found strongly present in the hands of schizophrenics and those with other forms of delusional mental illness. 

The doubling of the Water line can easily be seen here in the right hand of Jimmy Savile.  Savile was a disk-jockey on BBC Radio 1, presented the flagship ‘Top of the Pops’ BBC music program from its inception in 1964 and was also involved in other children’s television programmes during the 1970’s and 1980’s.  He had a ‘larger-than-life’ personality, was very exuberant and often wore garish clothes, gold medallions and big rings.  To anyone growing up in the UK in the forty years from the 1960’s, he was a familiar, if not altogether pleasant, sight.  His hand shows that the persona that he showed to the world was quite at odds with what he was like actually – his television popularity was enhanced by his charitable endeavours, in which he raised over forty million pounds for hospital charities which eventually won him a knighthood and an OBE.  However, when he died in 2011 it was uncovered that during all the time that he had been in the public eye, he had been sexually assaulting children and teenage girls, particularly those who had been lured onto the television programs in which he was the ‘star’.  Furthermore, his work at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Broadmoor psychiatric institution gave him the opportunity to sexually assault inmates and patients – and even some corpses.  All in all, some 450 people came forward disclosing that they had been sexually assaulted by Savile.

In all the discussion about how it was he manged to get away with such predation for so many decades whilst also being so fully in the public eye, one of the things that becomes clear from looking at his hand is that he was very, very good at hiding what was really going on.  And this is what is shown by the upper Water line.  As mentioned earlier, this line is commonly found in the hands of actors and gives them the ability to give a convincing presentation of the character they are playing.  They can really inhabit that role and ‘become’ that person.  This is what Savile did.  He created a persona and played that part so convincingly that everyone believed what he showed them.  And this is one of the reasons why it was so difficult for anyone to speak out against whilst he was alive – his public persona was SO large, SO big and SO charitable, the despicable quality of his sexual actions were unbelievable. He was a much trusted public figure by virtue of the fact that he was in everyone’s living rooms on family time TV, every week for forty years.  The shock of being sexually assaulted by Savile would have been compounded by the shattering of shock of disbelief that this person was absolutely not what he presented himself to be.

Cult Leader

In this hand we can see a doubled Water line where the upper line extends even further than in the previous examples.  Here we have someone whose imagination has so run away with him that he is living in a complete fantasy world.  Terry Dukes was a fraudulent martial artist and con man who fabricated an entire Buddhist cult based around his made-up martial arts practice and pronounced himself a ‘re-incarnated warrior-monk’, giving himself all sorts of fancy names and titles (‘Flowing star of the Holy Light’) and creating a fake temple where he lured young women to become ‘dakini’ to provide him sexual services for the purposes of their enlightenment.  He was an extremely good liar, a mythomaniac in fact, a legend in his own lunchtime. He managed to dupe all sorts of highly intelligent people to get them to run his organisations for him, and even managed to get the BBC to make a documentary about his life.  He claimed he had a Doctorate in Divinity and a PhD from Peking University. But, actually, he was a working class lad from South London who left school at 16 and whose only actual qualification was a certificate in bricklaying.

Once again, we see someone who is pretending to be one thing – in this case a benign Buddhist teacher – but who is, like Savile, actually a liar, a thief and a sexual predator.

In both of these cases, we have someone who is psychologically divided, psychically split.  They have created an idealised version of themselves and a role which they wish to play which is differentiated from what is going on with them internally.  It’s like they are living emotionally at two different levels.  The more strongly they create their adopted persona – something which is strengthened and reinforced by people’s participation in believing in, the more entrenched they become in that persona.  The mask that they have developed to protect them from a sense of emotional vulnerability becomes a protective armour that encases them.  They fear intimacy, they fear being known – and as the lies get greater and greater, they fear being found out. 

Paradoxically, it is the fact that their role-playing is so successful that makes them have increasing levels of disdain and disregard for other people.  They know that they are putting on a front – and they become aware that people can’t see through it.  And in so far as people can’t see through their charade, this allows them to get away with even more.  Their offending becomes yet more brazen because they feel that they cannot be caught or found out, they feel like they are above the law.

These are the fantasies of narcissism.

Narcissism, Sexual Predation and Mental Illness

When you see such a line in someone’s hands, it’s like you are encountering two people.  These are the people who can flip from being loving and adoring in one moment to becoming enraged and physically violent the next.  Like a manifest expression of manic-depression or bi-polar disorder, there are literally two factions in their being, a veritable Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  What I have observed in such cases is that there is a deep-seated psychological wounding, a deeply held lack of self-worth or self-disgust, a lack of love and one must suppose that these derives from some deep-seated trauma from childhood.  There is a yearning for emotional connection with others and this manifests in their urgent and desperate need for sexual interactions.    Their fear of intimacy actually causes such connection to be an emotional siphoning of the people with whom they have relationships with, whether those relationships are sexual or not.

As can be seen in all these cases, the main Water line itself (the lower one) is actually rather straight in its course across the hand.  A straight Water line is someone who has intense feelings and desires and someone who seeks to express such desires physically.  There is a lack of subtlety in their interactions with others and they just grab at what they want, taking what they want without any negotiated consent from the women to whom they are sexually attracted.  It’s the lack of consent and the evident entitlement that is behind that which is what makes their behaviour predatory.

Spiritual Delusion

Perhaps the most problematic effect of this divided self is it creates a schizoid mental condition which puts considerable emphasis on ‘improvement’ and ‘transcending’.  These are people who frame spiritual progress as something marked by ‘going beyond’ or ‘rising above’ what they were before.  The sense of ‘bettering oneself’ whether spiritually or materially (or both) is itself a transcendentalistic escapism.  These people are trying to get away from themselves and/or their origins as a form of intention to avoid acceptance of who and what they are.  Whilst they may talk about being heart-centred, the secondary Water line shows that actually they are manifesting a form of psychological dissociation.

When you see such a line formation be warned that what you see is not what you get.  These are people whose actions do not match up with their words, their behaviour is not consistent, their word is not true.  These are not people who value truth and integrity for they prize the preservation of an image, they are concerned with how things look, they are concerned with appearances and they will do or say anything to promote their self-story and avoid being exposed for the liars and dissemblers that they  are.

For, most of all, they are concerned only with themselves.