If you want to really get to know someone, all you have to do is look at their hands - or so palmists believe. Get the right handprints and you can read the palmistry of the rich and famous, on the powerful and noteworthy, or on someone you just don't quite understand. Just think of how much you can learn about what people are thinking or what they might do in the future.
One palmist, Josef Ranald, read the palms of world leaders during the mid-20th century, including Adolf Hitler. Exactly how he got the print is unclear (Renald's book simply states it is from Hotel Kaiserhof, Berlin), but Ranald - the man who read Hitler's palm - was frighteningly accurate with some of what he saw. He claimed Hitler was suicidal, after all. He also read Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's palms, both of which had some accurate insights. His insights may make you take another look at the validity of palmistry.
Josef Ranald collected and studied 10,000 handprints, convinced they revealed a man's true character. He got one of Adolf Hitler's prints from the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin and noticed two mounts under Hitler's fingers. According to Ranald, one of these indicated a man subject to "moodiness, wide swings from one emotional extreme to another, suicidal morbidity at one moment, then fanatic self-adulation, meglomania."
The mounts were under the Jupiter and Saturn fingers (the pointer and middle finger), which a palmist in 2010 identified with a sense of inferiority and a "brutish disposition." Granted, the 2010 palmist had the gift of extreme hindsight; Ranald's book was published in 1938, prior to some of Hitler's most heinous acts.
Hitler Was Artistic And Passionate, But With A Catch
Hitler's thick fingers and fleshy hands showed Ranald that Hitler was an "artistic type" and full of "passion." He was also selfish, however.
Another one of Hitler's mounts also indicated he had "boundless ambition." Hitler could have used this ambition in conjunction with his artistic nature but, as mounts go, he chose to apply them to his "domineering, bullying disposition" by "demanding blind submission from everyone."
Hitler's Fate Was "Out Of His Hands," According To His Line Of Destiny
When Ranald looked at Hitler's line of destiny, which started with a cross, he saw it terminated with "a star under the middle finger." This meant his fate was out of his hands, so to speak, and he was "marked out for an awful, tragic role. The destiny line, you will note, stretches unbroken and bare from its tragic beginning to its violent end."
Ranald cautioned the individual parts of the hand doesn't give the whole picture of what a man is capable of, and the hand as a whole needed to be taken into consideration. Ranald didn't want people who had one or two characteristics similar to Hitler assigning "themselves the qualities which make Hitler what he is."
According To Ranald, Hitler Was Destined To Meet A Violent End
Ranald noticed Hitler's life line ended in a cross which may have been "the sign of a violent end." This can also suggest innumerable worries or anxieties, of which Hitler had plenty. In palmistry, any sort of cross suggests health or mental defects.
The Lines On Hitler's Hands Showed His Heart And Brain Were Weak And Broken
When assessing Hitler's heart and head lines, Ranald saw weakness and isolation. According to Ranald, "The line of head terminates in an island which indicates some kind of weakness functional or organic of the brain. The line of heart, which is short, islanded and broken, shows frustration, bitterness, and cruelty. The broken, distorted girdle of Venus above the line of heart accentuates the destructiveness and unnaturalness of this hand."
Hitler was certainly prone to being reclusive and isolated. In 1943, Joseph Goebbels would even say as much as he saw his "tragic" leader retreat from the forefront of the Third Reich.
Benito Mussolini's Hands Said He Was Relentless And Imposing
Benito Mussolini, the dictator of fascist Italy from 1922-1943, had hands which spoke "of action, movement, boundless energy and restlessness. But even more than that, they tell of determination at the cost of humanity, of strength which is brutality."
Mussolini's brutality could be seen in his treatment of dissenters - whom he had his Blackshirts beat - as he rose to power during the 1920s. As he exiled and persecuted anyone who did not meet the ends of his totalitarian state, his relentlessness of strength - albeit a dictatorial, oppressive strength - did take its toll on humanity.
