INTRODUCTION

 

       Palmistry was not for me a chosen profession. It was something I found I could do quite by accident when I was around 7 years old, upon seeing a boy holding up his hand while queuing for school dinners.

        As I gazed at his hand, the lines turned to visions of his life, which then began to superimpose one on top of another. First, he was older and standing in a smart suit with a flower in his buttonhole alongside a girl in white … then engrossed in a workplace setting … then playing with children … then  at some awards ceremony … then almost bald … then much older again, with a very lined face, crying at a funeral.

       I felt all these events in turn, as well as seeing them, and it was a ground-shaking experience for a young lad to see these layered visions, one on top of another, and to experience all the attendant emotions was a very  upsetting and confusing experience.

        I had no idea how it happened, but from that point on, I was able to read kids’ hands in the playground, and then the teachers’, and as news of my strange abilities grew, I would read for outsiders. Now, for a shy, awkward child, all this attention was something I did not like, and at various times in my life I promised myself not to read any more hands. ­But it would always catch up with me and I would be asked to begin again.

        I did not discover Astrology until I was 10, and Psychology until my teen-age years. Then I really began to study books on palmistry, and related subjects in some depth, and read everything in the English language on the subject several times over. At one point I had over 300 books on the subject, which over the years I have whittled down to just 30, as most on the subject are rehashed copies of other books and often not very scholarly.

        In my late teens, a friend and I went to the Spiritualist Church, where tests showed I had amazingly high psychic ability, and would then be a very popular draw at their fund-raising events, so much so that I had much jealousy from some other mediums, who had spent their lives developing various abilities. They were then very unhappy to find a shy, spotty little teenager who was streets ahead of them.

        I came from a family with developed intuitive abilities, and they saw nothing unusual in people traveling some distance to see me. It was many years before I charged a fee for this, and then only to deter time wasters, cranks and skeptics. Later, even when relying on my skill to feed my family, my fee has always been half, or even a third, of what others in the field -- even those I had taught myself --charged.

       One evening I was giving spiritual healing in a London Spiritualist Church, when I noticed a white-haired old man staring intently at me. I took no notice and, when he came over afterwards, I was very curious as to what he would say. He asked me if he could give me some healing tips and invited me to come to his home. This old chap talked me through some changes in healing technique, and I thoughtfully agreed to try them out.

       Next week at the church, I was flabbergasted to learn this man was Harry Edwards, the greatest spiritual healer of his day, and I then studied at several of his groups for quite some time.

       In the mid ’70s, a long-running Competition in a psychic bookshop in East London meant I was the one chosen to read people’s lives and give advice and sympathetic spiritual counseling, and it was here that I met several doctors from Whipps Cross Hospital and took part in an experimental study on patients’ hand prints. This then led to a larger study at Bart’s Hospital, and then with Professor Henri Rey at the famous Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital.

        At my workshops in the early ’70s, I taught my palmistry skills across London to various palmistry groups, and although today these same techniques are quite commonplace, I have great pride that many of today’s practitioners are using those same skills, and for almost 55 years I was the world’s only palmist to offer a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.

        In 1970, while at my London consulting rooms, I published my first small book, on which this one is based, and these early copies now fetch big prices on Ebay. I have been asked many times to update the book, so here it is, the culmination of my life’s work.

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