Word: palmists
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Prescient Palmist. Of the stories, Enoch Soames is the better one. Soames (Richard Kiley) is a minor minor poet pickled in absinthe who harbors a paranoiac conviction: people who ignore his slim volumes, The Ultimate Nil and Fungoids, are turning their backs on a late 19th century Milton. He desperately yearns to know posterity's judgment and makes a pact with the devil to spend a few hours 100 years hence in the library of the British Museum. There he finds that the brief and only mention of the name Enoch Soames is in a short story...
Kiley is marvelously intuitive in the role, capturing both the smug vanity and simultaneous vulnerability of literature's seedy hangers-on. In A.V. Laider, Kiley is a prescient palmist who foretells the death of four people riding in a railway coach. Or does he? Beerbohm is having a little fun with the old writer's problem of illusion and reality. Neither story is much more than an attenuated anecdote told over brandy and cigars...
Lutin was right. I didn't see any clergymen, but all sorts of other specimens did appear. They were attracted to this clever conglomerate of circuits and bolts. fascinated by its mystical aura and scientific precision. Damaska had said he considers palmists to be his "spiritual cousins," but these people, would never go to a palmist. Or to a private astrologer, for that matter. The first is too unconvincing, the second too expensive and exotic. For a people living in the Moon Age, the cybernetic version of the astrological moon can be just as believable as the sandy satellite visited...
Formed in the Womb. The patterns of fingerprints and the fine lines on the palm are established by the fourth month of life in the womb. The more conspicuous "flexion creases" (the palmist's "heart, head and life lines") are formed a month or two earlier. In normal palms, the heart and head lines are separate and distinct, and neither extends clear across the palm. In many victims of mongolism and of prenatal rubella, however, they are replaced by a single "simian crease," like that on a monkey's palm. At the Children's Medical Research Foundation...
...Cover: Oil painting by Birney Lettick. The constellation shining in the night sky is Aquarius. Drawn in the sand is the I Ching symbol for "Inner Truth." The crystal ball is a standard prop for clairvoyants; the Tarot cards are those for the devil and the sun. The palmist's hand shows the zodiacal signs...