You don’t need a Libra sun, moon, planets, aspects, or houses to be Libran. Pure Libra, Gemini, and Aquarius character types have thinking hands with square palms and long fingers. Many Libran hands have carefully engraved gently curving unobstructed headlines that fork near or at their end.
Libra sees every side of an idea or situation. That’s why it’s notoriously hard for them to make up their minds. They hate limiting their options. Librans with straight and strong dominant pinkie fingers and large broad nails communicate clearly, effectively, and frankly. Strong index fingers rule ambitious managers, creative directors, and natural leaders. Dominant bottom and middle finger phalanges are designed for banking, real estate, and food businesses. Prevailing top phalanges make great public speakers, lawyers, directors, journalists, educators, and religious leaders. Librans can be idealistic, romantic, aesthetic, and refined. Thinking types in general dominate political, publishing, public speaking, public relations, marketing, sales, and entertainment fields.
Wide spacing between head and life lines reflect spontaneity, love of freedom, and a need to act. Wide spaces don’t care what others think and do what they want. Librans wield logic, tact, and diplomacy like a Samurai swordsman. They can analyze, rationalize, and compartmentalize their feelings until they achieve their desired goals. Changing a Libran mind is like playing mental monopoly. Be direct. Make good sense. Don’t get emotional or you’ll regret it.
Healthy Librans have firm sincere handshakes, pink elastic skin, and long graceful heart lines that flow from the pinkie to the index finger. Graceful hands embody a romantic and sentimental nature. Branches at the end of the heart line that reach down to touch the head line means that person probably had a parent who withheld emotions during their formative years. It’s easier for them to rationalize, analyze, and compartmentalize difficult feelings than it is to verbalize them. Black and white, love and hate, good sense and nonsense are threads in the weft and warp of the same cloth, differing only by degree. Strong stiff thumbs and firm percussions beneath the pinkie finger reveal strong will, dogged determination, and relentless persistence. Librans with gently curving vertical lines inside their life lines are lucky because they have intimate family ties and close friendships. Actually, anyone with lines running parallel to and inside the lifeline is blessed with potential to have real intimacy!
Athena is a powerful Libran and Greek archetype of Wisdom and Justice. Backed up by Aquarius and Gemini, Athena clasps the ‘Scales of justice’ in one hand and the sword of thinking in the other. She balances ethics and action. Athena rules the strategic thinking required to win wars. Odysseus (Libra), Achilles (Aries), and Theseus (Gemini) worshiped Athena. Sometimes pictured as a handsome Goddess dressed in battle armor, she sports a shield of Intuition and wears an owl of Wisdom on her shoulder. Athena’s sword is applied with icy detachment as she discards emotion in favor of clarity of thought and cuts to the quick.
Fall Equinox, Libra, 7th sign of the zodiac, 7th house of marriage, offer us an opportunity for partnership, sharing, and charitable giving without any expectation. Librans strive for balance and idolize harmony. They hate discord and despise confrontation. They’re decisive when it matters, and notoriously indecisive when it doesn’t matter. Where to eat, what to wear, and when to go is challenging. Librans can be aggressive and vague at the same time. Many prefer frank and direct and don’t understand why others don’t. ‘Nice’ is easy. ‘Safe’ is not satisfying. Dishonesty is easy. Honesty is hard.
Everyone has Libra in their psyche. As one of twelve equal, but different characters, Venus / Aphrodite rules our 7th and 2nd houses. We know our truths and have ethical values and moral boundaries of right and wrong. That’s how we get aphorisms like “Laws and locks keep honest people honest.” “Contracts are only as good as those who sign them”.
Librans must balance ethics with honesty. A lawyer friend often reminds me that rich people are innocent until proven guilty while poor folk are guilty until proven innocent. Great wealth empowers players to shirk social responsibility, manipulate laws, and justify personal and social behaviors and actions that are selfish, greedy, and clearly hurt have-nots. Poor folk will forever be scraping for pennies at the bottom of the barrel. American Dreams entitle the bearer an opportunity to earn a privilege that is a birthright of those who can afford it. Why must we always lose what we value to value what we had?
‘Where’s Greta?’
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.” Truman Capote…
The Libran part of you knows something would change an outcome, and yet fails to mention it. Philip Morris knew cigarette smoking was toxic. Monsanto knows ‘Roundup’ causes cancer. Bayer knows they’re killing bees and butterflies. Politicians in Flint, Michigan knew they were poisoning the people who were depending on them for protection. They chose partisanship over public health. Profit is more important than poor people. Donaldemort deceives and exploits us by preaching poisonous political propaganda, empowering spiritually bankrupt religious fanatics, encouraging morally and ethically bankrupt behavior, and enraging hordes of clueless bigots and gun lovers.
The most challenging task in reading hands is learning to judge hands. One person’s long may be another’s short. Firm can feel soft, compared to hard. Rigorous practice (examining many thousands of hands) and asking the right questions is key to seeing, understanding, and interpreting human character as reflected in the topography of our hands. Even so, it’s not what you see, but what you say and how you say it that matters.
Few of us are pure types. Many people behave contrary to their sun signs. It’s hard to see my brother Gary as a Pisces, a mutable feeling type. He may be Neptunian on the inside, but Gary’s hands reveal Libran behavior rooted in cardinal thinking and supported by a very practical firm thumb, healthy elastic skin, smooth texture, and pink coloring.
Gary is a geriatric psychiatrist, practical philosopher, and prankster with an adventurous spirit. I used to tease Gary that I’d go completely nuts with age and he’d be stuck with me, but then (luckily for both of us), as a Gemini, I decided not to get old. Gary’s analytical and logical thinking merge gracefully with his innate feelings, intuition, and compassion. Gary’s commitment to working with stressful and frustrated clients and situations reveals a natural empathy that many Librans lack because they’re too busy analyzing, rationalizing, and compartmentalizing their feelings to trust them. Gary’s an amazing psychiatrist, devoted husband, father, son, brother, friend, and human being.
Andrea is Gary’s middle daughter, my niece, and a healthy Libran. Independent, likeable, and easy to be with, Andrea is a great mother, care taker, and loving person. When sun signs and hands match, that can vary from very good to very bad, depending on the person’s choice, critical thinking, and right use of free will.
Cousin Richie, Libra extraordinaire, philosopher, sculptor, and inventor; is father of Tangle, the Infinite Sculpture (a series of interactive, interlocking elbows). Our mothers were sisters. We share the ancestral “happiness”, and “seeker” genes, and have similar existential queries. I once confronted Richie, “If you put the same religious fervor into saving the world as you put into plastic elbows, we’d be saved”. Richie replied, “I am saving the world, one Tangle at a time.” He meant it.
Richie has sold tens of millions of Tangles worldwide. I ran into a mutual friend on the streets of NYC who had visited a monastery in Tibet and saw a poster of the Dalai Lama with a chrome Tangle in his lap. I wasn’t surprised. When I visited Richie at his annual gift show booth in NYC, he was selling Tangles to a very conservative buyer from Wal-Mart. I leaned closer to hear what he was saying, “Let me show you the only product in this show worth more than money”. He meant it.
Blending astrology with behavior affects how I view hands. Few of us are pure types. Most of us are mutts. You might see Richie’s fingers as a bit short for a thinking type. They are, but he still has dominant air and lots of fixity in his astrology. Shorter fingers makes him more conceptual and less detail oriented. His Aquarian side is strong, confirmed by his love of new ideas, strong opinions, and incorrigible mental tenacity. I might have viewed Richie’s hands differently if I didn’t know him.
A Libra and Aries opposition is a quest for higher awareness. Libra opposes Aries as autumn opposes spring. Life is a journey from light into darkness and back into light. Odysseus’s wise counsel fanned the flames of Jason’s inspiration on his quest for the Golden Fleece. Richie’s quest is to untangle truth from inspiration, passion, and desire. Right thinking and careful planning will win the fleece.