Also called: Two-hand doctrine · Left and right hand rule · Severity escalation

Where on the hand: Both palms compared side by side — the non-dominant (usually left) against the dominant (usually right).

What it looks like: Not a mark: the comparison step. The same mark is looked for in the other hand before any weight is placed on it.

This is the single most important moderating principle and the one most often dropped by popular articles. In Benham's doctrine the passive hand shows the life as naturally designed and the active hand what the subject has altered that design into. Classical texts reserve their gravest readings for marks present in both hands; a mark in one hand only is read as a tendency, a phase, or something already worked through. This alone defuses most of the alarming single-hand findings people bring to a reader.

Read with care: The both-hands escalation exists in the sources only to justify the gravest claims — “death on the scaffold,” “fatal injury,” “family extinction,” “shortened lifespan.” These are catalogued here as tradition, not fact; none has evidential support. Used the other way round, the same rule is the strongest built-in defuser in the system: a mark found in one hand only is, by the traditions' own doctrine, a phase or a potential, never a verdict.

death on the scaffold if strongly marked in both handsSaint-Germain

good lives shown in the left hand and ruined lives shown by the rightBenham