Palmistry

“Monkey Business”- The Simian Line

Copyright © 2005 Sasha Fenton

In his excellent book (Conversations with Spirit), Gordon Arthur Smith tells us never to take on trust what people say, however confident, knowledgeable and self-important the person appears to be. He suggests that we should look into the things that we hear or read and then make up our own minds. Sweeping statements that have little or no basis in truth are common in the spiritual world, but rare among the more practical and provable arts, such as palmistry – yet some still exist.

The length of the Lifeline and the length of life is one such myth, as is the Mystic Cross, and I have put straight a few of these misconceptions in my book (Modern Palmistry). Another myth is that the Simian line gets its name because it is what monkeys have on their hands. Simian means monkey-like, and the line cuts right across the hand, replacing both the Heart and Head lines with one straight line. Over the years, whenever I visited a zoo I would try to catch a glimpse of the hands of monkeys and apes, but as far as I could see, all had the three major lines of Head, Heart and Life; then, one day, an opportunity came to look closely at one particular ape.

My daughter, Helen was working for an airline, so her dad and I took the opportunity to spend a long weekend in Gibraltar. We did all the tourist things, and naturally, we eventually found ourselves on the level where the Barbary Apes lived. The apes have now been moved away from the tourist trail because the chocolate and biscuits that the tourists fed them made the apes fat and unwilling to breed. At that time, the apes were still jumping around the tourists and noshing tubes of Smarties.

At the end of the track where the apes congregated, there was a small building, and, sitting on a chair outside the open door, was a Spanish-looking man in some kind of British Army uniform. He was obviously the apes’ caretaker and he was holding a very young ape in his lap. My Spanish is fine for getting around and ordering meals, but not good enough to ask if the man knew whether apes had Simian lines on their hands or not. Fortunately, Ernesto, the ape keeper, spoke good English. He turned out to be interested in what I had to say, and he showed me the young animal’s hand, telling me that she was three months’ old. Just like a human infant, Fifi didn’t enjoy having her hand unfurled and held, but she put up with it, with reasonable grace.

Sure enough, the hand showed the three main lines, the Fate line and much else that we see on a human hand. The differences were in the shape and length of the fingers and thumb, and in the whorls that the strongly marked skin ridge patterns made. There was no Simian line.

A palmist will read any hand almost on automatic pilot, so before I could stop myself, I was tracking up Fifi’s fate line and telling Ernesto what her life would be like. I said that her father was a non-entity in her life and that she had lost her mother at an early age. Ernesto had in, fact, adopted her and he hoped to reintegrate her into ape life at some later stage. I told him that this would fail and that she would die soon afterwards. I felt that the other apes would not accept her and that she would not have the skills to survive, even in the semi-zoo atmosphere of the Rock. I also mentioned that I would love to take a print of Fifi’s hand, but of course, I didn’t have my palm-printing kit with me.

Ernesto suggested that we buy an inked pad in town and come back the next day to give it a try. That is what we did, and, in my photo gallery elsewhere on this site, that is what the photos show.

A couple of years later, Helen and I again took advantage of one of her cheapy flights to Gibraltar. We went up the Rock. Ernesto was still there, as were the apes – but where was Fifi? Sadly, Ernesto showed us a beautifully kept, tiny grave, complete with inscribed headstone, saying that Fifi had died at the age of 13 months.

Despite the warmth of the sun, I felt cold all over to think that I had seen her early death. Death at any age is not something that a palmist normally looks for or talks about in front of his client. Poor Fifi. How sad it all was. Nevertheless, she is immortalised in these pictures for the world to know about, and there can’t be many Barbary apes who can say that, can there?