Also called: The three zones · Upper, middle and lower worlds · Chirognomic zones · Mental, Practical and Material worlds · The Three Gunas overlay · Vertical zones of the hand

Where on the hand: Three horizontal registers across the whole hand — fingers and finger-base mounts down to the heart line; heart line to head line; head line to wrist — and the same scheme repeated inside each finger as its three phalanges. · Three horizontal bands running across the whole hand — fingertips to first knuckle, the middle phalanges, and the base phalanges together with the palm. The same three-fold division repeats fractally on every single finger and on the thumb.

What it looks like: Not a mark but a proportion: compare the depth, firmness and quantity of lines in each of the three bands. Whichever zone is largest, firmest and best-lined dominates the character. · Rule three parallel bands across an open palm; then draw one enlarged finger beside it and rule the same three bands on it. The repetition of the same map at hand-scale and finger-scale is the whole idea.

An old chirognomic scheme originating with D'Arpentigny and Desbarrolles and popularised by Cheiro. It divides both the whole hand and each finger into a mental world, a practical world and a material world, and reads the balance between them as the balance of the personality. · The upper zone governs mind, intuition, ideals, spirit and abstraction. The middle zone governs reason, business, method and application. The lower zone governs body, appetite, sensuality, money and possessions. Whichever zone is longest, thickest or best-developed tells you which world the person actually lives in.

Western reading: D'Arpentigny and Desbarrolles originated the scheme; Cheiro popularised it in English. · D'Arpentigny's and Cheiro's three worlds — mental, practical, material — are read from phalange proportion on each finger.