The first thing anyone asks when they decide to have their palm read is which hand to hold out. The old rule, "left for women, right for men", was never more than a convenience, and it has been dropped. The modern rule is simpler and makes more sense: read both hands, and pay most attention to the one you use.
The active hand
Your dominant hand, the one you write and eat with, is the active hand. It shows the life you have actually lived: the habits you have formed, the work you have done, the choices you have made and the people you have loved. Its lines change over years, faintly but measurably, as you change. A palmist reading your active hand is reading your present.
The passive hand
The other hand is the passive hand. It shows what you started with: inherited temperament, natural talents, the potential you were born carrying. Its lines change far less. A palmist reading your passive hand is reading your foundations, and, in the traditional view, the direction your life would have taken if you had simply followed your nature.
Reading the two together
This is where the craft is. Where the two hands match, a quality is deep and settled; the person is being who they were born to be. Where they differ, life has intervened, and the difference tells you how.
- A heart line that is deeper and clearer in the active hand than the passive one means the person has grown into their feelings through experience. The reverse means life has taught them to hold back.
- A head line that slopes in the passive hand but runs straight in the active one is a born dreamer who has become practical, usually through work. The reverse is a practical person who has found their imagination late.
- A life line with a break in the active hand but not the passive one marks a change of direction the person chose or was pushed into; one in both hands marks something the person carried from the start.
- A fate line present in the active hand but absent in the passive is a career the person built rather than inherited, and it is one of the most encouraging things a reader can find.
Which hand to photograph
If you are sending a palm for an online reading, photograph the active hand first, flat, palm up, in daylight, with the fingers slightly spread and no flash. If you can, send the passive hand too, taken the same way. A reader with both can do the comparison above; a reader with one can only describe the present.
Left-handed people
For a left-handed person the left hand is the active hand and the right is the passive, and everything above simply reverses. People who write with one hand and do everything else with the other, or who were made to switch as children, often show hands that are unusually alike, because both have been used to shape the life.
How the signs show in the two hands
A reader who knows the person's sun sign will often find it more clearly in the passive hand, because the passive hand shows temperament, which is what the sun sign describes. The active hand shows what the person has done with that temperament, which is the story the reading is really about. A Capricorn whose passive hand shows a strong mount of Saturn and whose active hand shows a deep fate line has used their nature well; a Capricorn whose active hand shows a flat mount and a broken line has been working against it. That second person is the one who most needs a reading, and the one for whom the traditional remedies, Saturn's stones and Saturn's discipline, are prescribed.