Hold your dominant hand out, palm facing up, and let it rest naturally. You’ve spent time in the last module learning to read the lines — the creases that cross the surface. Now look at the palm differently. Ignore the lines for a moment and notice the terrain underneath them.
The palm is not flat. It rises and falls. There are fleshy pads at the base of each finger, a soft hill at the base of the thumb, a cushioned ridge along the outer edge. Between these rises, if you look carefully, there is a shallow central hollow.
These elevated areas are the mounts. They are the other half of the palmist’s map.
What mounts are
Mounts are the padded, raised regions of the palm formed by the underlying muscles, fat, and connective tissue. They are real anatomical structures — the large pad at the base of your thumb, for instance, is the thenar eminence; the pad on the opposite side of the palm is the hypothenar eminence. Palmistry assigned these structures names, symbolic associations, and interpretive weight centuries before anatomy had a vocabulary for them.
What makes the mounts interesting to the palmist is that they vary meaningfully between people. On some hands, the mount beneath the index finger is pronounced and firm. On others, it is barely perceptible. These differences in prominence, firmness, and position are what palmistry reads — not the presence of the mount itself, which is universal, but its character.
How to assess a mount
Before you can read a mount, you need to know how to look at it. There are three things to assess:
Prominence. How much does the mount rise from the palm’s surface? A well-developed mount stands out clearly; a flat mount is nearly flush with the surrounding tissue; an overdeveloped mount may feel exaggerated or dominating. You are looking at relative height compared to the other mounts on the same hand, not against some fixed standard.
Firmness. Press the mount gently with your opposite thumb. Does it feel firm and resilient? Soft and yielding? Dense? The texture and give of a mount is part of its character. Benham, writing in 1900, noted that a firm mount suggests active expression of its associated qualities, while a soft mount may point to passive or unrealised potential.
Displacement. Mounts are not always exactly centred below their assigned finger or region. A mount may lean toward an adjacent mount, which some practitioners interpret as a blending of those two areas’ associations. Notice whether a mount seems to drift — toward the finger beside it, or toward the palm’s center.
With those three points in mind, you’re ready to locate each mount.
The seven mounts
Mount of Jupiter
Look at the fleshy pad at the base of your index finger. This is the mount of Jupiter. It sits between the heart line below and the crease where your index finger meets your hand above. Press it gently and notice how it responds.
Jupiter is the mount most immediately visible on most hands — the index finger base tends to be the most developed of the four finger mounts. If yours is particularly raised, flat, or leans toward your middle finger, note that. It matters when you study this mount in depth.
Mount of Saturn
Move to the base of your middle finger. This is the mount of Saturn. It tends to be less developed than Jupiter or Apollo on most hands — sometimes barely perceptible as a distinct rise. Run your finger across the base of all four fingers slowly; you’ll feel the small ridges and dips. Saturn is often the lowest point in that sequence.
Mount of Apollo
At the base of the ring finger sits the mount of Apollo, sometimes called the mount of the Sun. On many hands this is the most developed of the three central finger mounts — more prominent than Saturn, and roughly comparable to Jupiter. It may overlap slightly with Saturn or Mercury depending on how broadly it sits.
Mount of Mercury
The pad at the base of the little finger is the mount of Mercury. Because the little finger is the smallest, this mount is often the narrowest of the four. It tends to run along the outer edge of the palm as well, blending with the area of the upper mount of Mars.
Mount of Venus
Now move to the base of your thumb. The large, rounded pad of flesh that sits there — inside the arc of the life line — is the mount of Venus. It is the largest mount on most hands and among the most tactilely distinctive: soft, full, and clearly set apart by the life line’s curve.
Press it. Notice its firmness compared to the smaller mounts at the finger bases. On most hands it will be the most substantial raised area on the palm.
Mount of Luna
On the opposite side of the palm — along the outer base, beneath the little finger side and extending down toward the wrist — sits the mount of Luna, also called the mount of the Moon. It is the outer counterpart to Venus: where Venus sits at the thumb’s base, Luna occupies the percussion edge of the hand.
Luna’s development varies considerably between people. On some hands it is a clear, cushioned ridge; on others it is barely distinct from the surrounding palm. Its lower edge tapers toward the wrist; its upper edge meets the area of upper Mars.
The mount of Mars — upper, lower, and the Plain
Mars is handled differently from the other mounts and causes the most confusion for beginners. Western palmistry identifies two areas of Mars on the palm, separated by the hollow center.
Lower Mars (also called Mars Positive, or Inner Mars) sits on the thumb side of the palm, between the mount of Jupiter above and the mount of Venus below — roughly in the narrow strip of palm between your life line and the web of skin at the thumb’s base. It is a small area, and on many hands it barely forms a distinct rise.
Upper Mars (also called Mars Negative, or Outer Mars) sits on the percussion side of the palm, between the mount of Mercury above and the mount of Luna below. It is similarly narrow. On some hands it merges perceptibly with Mercury above or Luna below.
Between these two areas of Mars — and between Venus on one side and Luna on the other — lies the Plain of Mars: the shallow hollow at the center of the palm. It is not elevated; it is the valley between the mounts. Press the center of your palm and notice how it gives way slightly compared to the surrounding areas. That is the Plain. Its depth and firmness are read in their own right: a well-developed Plain (one that is firm rather than hollow) is generally considered more favourable than one that sinks noticeably.
Reading mounts in relation to each other
The mounts are not read in isolation. They form a landscape, and the landscape has a logic: the mounts that are most developed on a given hand carry the most interpretive weight. A hand where Venus is dramatically full and Luna barely perceptible is a different map from one where the balance reverses.
Get into the habit, when looking at a palm, of scanning the whole terrain before focusing on any single mount. Which areas rise most? Which are flat or absent? Which lean toward their neighbours? That first scan is how you read mounts as a system rather than a checklist.
How other traditions handle the mounts
The mount system as described here is primarily Western palmistry — it is the framework codified by practitioners like Cheiro and Benham and the one you’ll find in most English-language palmistry texts.
Indian palmistry (Hasta Samudrika Shastra) works with a comparable set of raised regions and uses some of the same planetary associations, but the interpretive framework and the relative weighting of different areas differ from the Western system. The two are distinct traditions that happen to share some structural overlap, not alternate translations of the same source.
Chinese palmistry maps the palm into regions with different names and cosmological associations — the eight trigrams of the Ba Gua are sometimes overlaid onto the palm rather than the planetary mount system. The physical terrain is the same; the conceptual structure placed over it is different. When you encounter Chinese palmistry sources, the regions they describe will often overlap with Western mounts but should not be assumed to carry identical meanings.
This lesson uses Western names throughout. They are the working vocabulary for the lessons that follow.
What you’re not doing yet
You are not interpreting any of these mounts in this lesson. You are building the map — learning where each mount sits, how to find it by touch, and how to assess its three basic qualities: prominence, firmness, and displacement.
Spend a few minutes with your own hand. Press each mount in sequence: Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, Luna, Upper and Lower Mars. Feel the Plain of Mars. Note which rises most prominently, which feels firmest, which seems flat. You don’t need to know what any of it means yet. The habit of locating features deliberately is the foundation everything else is built on.
Lesson takeaway: The seven mounts are the raised fleshy areas of the palm — Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, and Mercury sit at the finger bases; Venus occupies the thumb’s base inside the life line; Luna sits along the outer base of the palm. Mars appears in two areas (Upper and Lower) with the Plain of Mars between them at the palm’s center. Mounts are assessed for prominence, firmness, and displacement, and read in relation to each other rather than individually. Each mount is covered in depth in the lessons that follow.