"The Order of the Occult Hand" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Palm Reading for Beginners: Find Your Future in the Palm of Your Hand"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 25
The Order of the Occult Hand
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disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost
to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
Not
every entry in this blog's history involves a real ceremony, a real ritual, or
a real belief system. Some involve a group of newspaper reporters getting drunk
in a Charlotte, North Carolina bar in 1965 and deciding, entirely as a joke, to
found a secret society. Sixty years later, journalists were still quietly
initiating themselves into it, one purple sentence at a time, and most of their
readers never noticed a thing.
The
Order of the Occult Hand may be the only “occult” tradition in this magazine's
coverage that its own founders will happily admit, on the record, means
absolutely nothing at all… But then again, it’s kept a legacy in mainstream
print for years…
The Origins of the “Hand”
The
phrase itself predates the joke by well over a century; a search of newspaper
archives turns up “some occult hand” describing shadowy political maneuvering
in Britain's Manchester Guardian as early as April 1848, and similar flourishes
turn up steadily on both sides of the Atlantic for the next hundred-plus years,
describing everything from Hollywood's Orient-inflected 1930s films to the
changing colors of autumn leaves in a 1957 poem.
What
launched the actual Order was a specific sentence, published on August 25th,
1965, in the Charlotte News. Police reporter Joseph Flanders, covering
the shooting death of an eighteen-year-old millworker named Freddie Lee Harr,
closed his third paragraph with: “It was as if some occult hand had moved pawn
after pawn until they were in the right place and then—tragedy.” His newsroom
colleagues, reviewing the piece over drinks afterward, found the line so
gloriously overwrought that they decided, according to founding members
Flanders and R.C. Smith, to commemorate it by forming a mock secret society
dedicated to sneaking variations of the phrase past unsuspecting editors from
then on. Some accounts even describe an actual banner, a bedsheet painted with
a bloody hand reaching out of a purple cloud, presented to Flanders in his
honor.
The phrase spread by word of mouth as initiated reporters moved between papers, eventually surfacing in the New York Times, the Boston Globe (courtesy of Globe writer M.R. “Monty” Montgomery, who used it at least four times, once memorably explaining a Harvard president's quiet influence over a course outline as “the work of an occult hand”), the Washington Times, and the Associated Press wire. It crossed over into sportswriting, prompting one Boston Globe football reporter to note dryly that the club now apparently accepted sportswriters, adding, “I'm not sure I want to belong to any club that would accept a sportswriter as a member.” It even turned up three separate times in a single 2000 newspaper feature about chocolate hazelnut truffles, which may be the least occult context the phrase has ever occupied.
Membership
required nothing more than successfully publishing the phrase, or a close
variant, without an editor catching and cutting it, a surprisingly difficult
bar given how purple the prose reads to anyone actually paying attention.
CrimeReads contributor Keith Roysdon, recounting his own failed 1980s attempt
to join, notes that his own submission was trimmed for space by an editor
before it ever saw print, ending his bid for membership before it began.
Even
the Order's “secrecy” is worth a gentle correction. Popular retellings often
credit a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation by James Janega as the
definitive public exposure of the practice. Still, the Order had already been
openly discussed decades earlier, including columns by journalism dean Reese
Cleghorn in the 1970s and a 1975 Associated Press piece tracing its
Charlotte origins. Some researchers point out it had already surfaced in Tony
Hillerman's 1971 novel The Fly on the Wall. (There's even a minor
dispute buried in the origin story itself: Paul Greenberg, the Pulitzer-winning
editorial writer who kept the tradition alive for decades at the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, has credited Cleghorn as the Order's true originator, a
claim Cleghorn himself denied.) A society this openly, repeatedly “exposed”
over fifty years was never operating with especially rigorous operational
security, which is rather the point; being caught was always part of the fun,
right up until Greenberg's own full public confession after Janega's piece
finally ran, followed by the Order's cheerful 2006 announcement of an entirely
new secret phrase to carry the tradition forward.
There's
something quietly delightful about closing out this blog's run of genuine
myth-checking with a tradition that was never trying to fool anyone about its
own realness in the first place. No lost lineage, no contested authenticity, no
ancient wisdom misattributed to a modern invention, just a group of writers who
found a ridiculous sentence funny enough to spend six decades sneaking it past
their bosses. If there's a lesson in it for this magazine, it's a fond one:
even an invented, self-aware, entirely fictional “occult hand” is enough to
build a genuine tradition around, given sixty years, a few hundred willing
conspirators, and just enough purple prose to make it worth the risk.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of journalism's
entirely fictional occult hand, we're recommending a guide to the genuine
article.
Palm Reading for Beginners:
Find Your Future in the Palm of Your Hand
By
Richard Webster | Llewellyn Worldwide
If
newsrooms have spent sixty years sneaking a fake occult hand into print,
Richard Webster's Palm Reading for Beginners, part of Llewellyn's
long-running “For Beginners” series, offers the genuine tradition their little
in-joke borrowed its name from. Webster, a prolific and reliably approachable
author across numerous branches of divination, walks new readers through the
actual practice of chirology from the ground up: reading the major and minor
lines, interpreting the mounts, and drawing character and life insight directly
from the hand in front of you, no editor required to sneak anything past.
The
book's real strength is its total absence of intimidation; Webster's own pitch,
that palm reading requires “no cards, no coins, no charts of the planets, just
a hand and the knowledge in this book,” is a genuinely accurate description of
how accessible this entry point is compared to more equipment-heavy divinatory
practices. It's designed explicitly for total beginners, walking through
terminology and technique with the patience of an actual first lesson rather
than assuming prior familiarity.
This
is an introductory text rather than an exhaustive reference, and serious
students will eventually want a deeper, more clinical treatment of the subject
as their practice develops. But for readers who finished today's post amused by
journalism's entirely invented occult hand and curious what an actual,
centuries-old reading of the hand looks like, Webster's book is exactly the
right place to start taking your own palm seriously.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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