Of Thumbs

Tacitus reports that among certain Germanic kings, it was the custom, when confirming a peace or sealing a treaty, to interlock the right thumbs and press them hard enough to draw blood; this compact, sealed in so small a wound, was held the most binding of all. There is something in this I find strangely moving — that the tiny, opposable joint which distinguishes us from nearly all other animals should be the chosen seat of honour.

The Romans used the thumb as a signal of life or death in the amphitheatre. The crowd’s turned thumb was mercy; the pointed thumb, execution. A whole moral transaction — the difference between a man living and a man dying — conducted through the smallest of gestures.

It is a narrow mind that draws all its examples from its own corner of the world.

Among some peoples, the thumb is held sacred; among others, it is considered indecent to point with it; in others still, an oath sealed with the thumb carries legal weight that no document can equal. What is one to make of all this? Simply this: the human race, confronted with the same handful of bodily parts, has found entirely different meanings in each of them — and each people considers its own reading to be the natural and obvious one. The thumb teaches us, in miniature, what the whole catalogue of customs teaches us in full: that our certainties are local.