DERMATOGLYPHICS OPENS THE DOOR
Dermatoglyphics (dermo = skin, glyphics = carvings), a name coined by Harold Cummins, MD, in 1926, is the scientific term for the study of fingerprints and related line and hand shape designations. Its main uses are in population studies, genetic research, and medical diagnostics. Dr. Cummins is commonly referred to as the father of dermatoglyphics, and his seminal work with Dr. Charles Midlo, Fingerprints, Palms, and Soles, is considered the standard in the field. Examining embryonic hands, Dr. Cummins documented the emergence of eleven ball-like structures at the eighth week after conception. These “volar pads” will later become the thumb, fingers, and the six sections of the palmar surface. At the fourteenth week, the skin corrugations (fingerprints) begin to appear, forming a topographic-like map of the developing fetal hand.
What? Fingerprints are arranged like a topographic map? I almost fell out of my chair. It was almost too obvious-human fingerprints look like a map. A map is a tool that tells you where you are and how to get where you need to go. How could this have been overlooked for so long?
For ten years, I had been deciphering the personality components of my hand reading clients by comparing the size and shape of their thumbs, palms, and fingers (plus looking at their lines). Each of these factors is subject to change over time. I had gotten pretty good at finding hidden talents and behavioral tendencies, but I still couldn't tell why people with the same traits sometimes behaved so differently. Now, in the medical stacks, I was reading that the fingerprints form a topographical map prior to birth, a map that will remain unaltered throughout life. Could this map contain the hidden variable for which I had been searching?
Dermatoglyphics and palmistry both derive from comparative hand topography. Both seek the inner condition based upon outer signs, but there the similarities end. One employs the scientific method, the other is based on folklore and thousands of years of anecdotal experience. One is high tech, the other, ancient wisdom. Arising as they do from such divergent cultures, could a marriage of the two disciplines be possible? When I overlaid the two systems and tested my findings in the human laboratory, it turned out they were made for each other.
DOWN TO THE CORE
After years of searching for isolated jigsaw puzzle tidbits, being in the Texas Medical Center library felt like having access to a giant puzzle-piece warehouse. Ca-chunk , ca-chunk: one new interlocking piece after another! Hour passed in an instant. I couldn't believe the library was closing and I would have to wait until 7:00 the next morning to resume. I was at the door at 6:45.
I learned that each fingerprint is composed of between fifty and one hundred lines, each line having its own signature. There are stops and starts to the lines, forks, and bubbles, a series of easily classifiable formations called pattern minutiae. The FBI does not need all ten of your fingerprints to identify you. Comparing the pattern minutiae of one line of one fingerprint may well do the job. The fact that each fingerprint is unique and unalterable but easy to categorize is what makes fingerprint identification the useful tool it is.
Interestingly, the same patterning system that appears on fingerprints shows up elsewhere in nature: on sand dunes, for instance. Sand dunes are not smooth; they are ridged, and ridges have stops and starts, forks and bubbles, just like fingerprint lines. So too at the beach. When the water recedes, we see a ripple pattern in the sand with markings just like those on sand dunes and our fingerprints. Apparently, the ocean waves have left their imprint on the shoreline. Is it only a coincidence that these patterns share the same characteristics with those on our fingertips?
As I stared at the diagrams in Fingerprints, Palms, and Soles, a shudder went across my shoulders and up and down my spine. The experience was similar to waking in the middle of the night from the power of a Technicolor dream. I felt sensationally calm, profoundly alert, as though I was remembering something long forgotten. The entire system of fingerprint identification appeared in my brain, whole, intact. And I knew, as I know now in my bones, that fingerprints are a soul-level imprint.
The LifePrints system joins the fingerprint census of arch, loop, whorl sequence of medical literature to the mythic interpretations of hand analysis. The result of this union is a tool as precise as a scalpel and as meaningful as a philosopher's stone: a life-purpose map that can be used as a daily compass to life-scale meaning and fulfillment.
Five months before you were born, a pattern appeared on your body, one with design characteristics similar to the wave impressions left on a beach. Call it a soul map, a holographic image, or a DNA printout, a bar-coded peek at the biological legacy of your ancestors. Consider it your transcript as you begin a new semester at the Earth University.
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