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Reverend Tristan wrote:I thought the origin of psychometry was to do with objects?

Psychometry can be used with anything, but yes normally objects such as rings, watches etc. Psychometry can equally be done also with things like signatures on a piece of paper (and placed inside envelopes! ). And one form of palm reading (sneered at by palmist purists) is really just psychometry - the intuitive holds the sitter's hand and lets the feelings, emotions, etc enter them with no regard for the actual lines or shape of the palm. I personally practice palmistry by combining both the more "scientific" lines and shape method and also the more "airy fairy" psychometry.

I thought it was in Waters but it might have been on Max Maven's Nothing. Psychometry evolved first from a process where the reader forced cards to a number of people. These were placed in containers, mixed, read and returned to the correct choosers. Later, the subjects were asked to place a personal object and a (forced) playing card in the containers, so both card and object was read (the fun here being that the forced cards effectively became a way to mark the objects). Then, as it became apparent that, if you were going to use containers anyway, you'd be better off marking the containers and dispensing with the playing cards all together, the solely object-orientated psychometry came about. Presumably along this continuum the notion of picking up vibrations from the objects came to replace the more tarot-esque notion of selected cards revealing the character of the subject.

I may have that fudged up, but am sure I'll be corrected if that's the case.

Psychometry is an "accepted" psychic skill that has been adopted by mentalists and magicians as a good idea for a routine. I believe.

You may be right. Maven cites Roterberg (1897) and talks about the effects evolution within the performance world rather than Buchanan who coined the phrase in 1842.