You don't need an almanac to know the day of the week — just hold up your hand. In the Hastasaṃjīvana, an eighteenth-century treatise composed under the patronage of Rājā Mādhavarāo Vināyaka Peśve, the fingers carry the entire cosmos: planets, days, elements, colors, even the five tastes. The palm is a divination chart you carry with you.
Planets on the fingers
The text maps each planet to a specific part of the hand, from the nails to the wrist.
On the nail is the clear Moon. Mars is at the tip of the index finger, Mercury is at the king's seat (thumb base). Jupiter is in Lakshmi (middle finger), Venus is in Gauri (ring finger), Saturn is in the mind (little finger). Rahu and Ketu are on the back of the hand — thus are the days and planets.
The same page reads the day from the palm: daybreak at the thumb, midday at the middle finger, evening on the back of the hand. The day belongs to the right hand, the night to the left — and whichever finger is reached at the moment of asking gives the weekday.
A finger for every taste
The system is not content with planets. It maps the five elements, the five colors, and the five tastes onto the same five fingers.
The thumb is yellow, the index finger is green, the middle finger is red, the ring finger is pale, and the little finger is white. The thumb is sweet, the middle finger is bitter and pungent, the index finger is astringent, the ring finger is salty, and the little finger is the group of five tastes.
What looks like elaborate symbolism is actually a working index: each finger is a category, and everything in the world — a planet, a day, a taste, an element — can be filed under one of them. That is what makes the hand usable for divination.
The fingers as a language of omens
Later pages turn the fingers into a language of omens, where each digit stands for a figure of power.
Lakshmi is indicated by the thumb, the king by the index finger, eloquence by the name of the middle finger, Shiva by the little finger, the crow by the ring finger — thus established in the fingers.
The Hastasaṃjīvana is a striking blend of traditions — Jaina invocations, Hindu cosmology, and the practical craft of hand-reading — produced in eighteenth-century Maharashtra, where scholarly patronage kept such compendia alive. It is a reminder that divination was not mysticism for its own sake, but a systematic way of organizing knowledge — with the hand as its index.