Tasseomancy

People have been drinking tea for about five thousand years, and it is likely they have been reading the leaves that long as well. Tea-leaf reading, also known as tasseomancy or tasseography, began with the ancient Chinese, who read the residue in the bottom of their cups for patterns, signs, and omens. As tea found its way into the Western world, the art of tea-leaf reading took hold in Europe. In the mid-seventeenth century, tea drinking was still mainly an aristocratic affair, but as trade, and hence, availability increased, so too did the popularity of this exotic brew, with all its ritual, social, and purporative curative possibilities. Soon, the lower classes, who had been burning their extremities for centuries in such outmoded divinatory practices as molybdomancy (reading the future from molten lead in water), and ceromancy (reading the future from melted candle wax), saw the error of their ways and turned to reading the dregs of their drinks; everything from wine to coffee. Tea was quickly adopted as the revelatory beverage of choice (why waste perfectly good wine?) By the mid-nineteenth century, the "Gypsy" soothsayer, calling door-to-door to read leaves, was a social fixture. According to one "Highland Seer," author of what is probably the oldest book in English on the practice of tasseomancy, generations of Scottish spae-wives (from the old Norse spa meaning prophesy) used their skill and intuition to examine the dregs of their morning teas for signs of things to come.

Traditions has established a generally accepted canon of symbols and their implications, but reading leaves is among the more imaginative and intuitive of the divinatory arts, and discovering the patterns and their deeper meanings in the bottom of a cup is much like seeing shapes revealed in cloud formations. Occult lore finds a correlation between the bowl shape of the cup and the celestial dome of the Heavens, and between the leaves and the stars; some companies market teacups with the signs of the Zodiac printed in the bowl to facilitate such readings. This is an unnecessary complication, for tasseomancy is really just a homey variation of geomancy, the reading of seemingly random marks and patterns on earth or ink on paper. Among the most accessible of divinatory systems, tasseomancy requires nothing more than a plain cup, a bit of tea, and a quiet receptive mood.

Now of course, the first thing one does for a tea leaf reading is to prepare a cup of hot tea. You want to use loose tea, not bagged, and preferably a coarser. The darker Chinese and Indian teas work particularly well for tasseomancy, particularly Ooolong and/or Lapsang. Just remember, the coarser the cut of the leaves the stronger the patterns will appear. This makes it easier to read from. The cup is equally important to the reading. The cup should have a white or light colored interior to make it easier to view the patterns and should also be wide enough to for the querent to be ably to swirl the dregs of the tea slowly without having to worry about wearing them. Practice swirling from different sizes and styles of cups to find the best results for you.

Once the tea is prepared and pour, the querent then drinks most of the tea. Encourage them to drink it slowly, and possibly let their mind wander a bit while they sip. Another method that works especially well from my experience, is to encourage the querent to chat with you while they sip their tea. Tell them to talk about anything that does not relate to their questions. Lore suggests that for best effect, they should hold the cup in the hand they do not write with.

When there remains only enough liquid to cover the dregs of the tea, the querent takes their cup and swirl the dregs three times around (clockwise for male, counterclockwise for female). Just as the third swirl is made, the cup is then inverted over a saucer (yes this gets messy, practice over the sink a couple of times). Wait three seconds and turn the cup over and look inside. The tiny pieces of leaf will have clung to the interioir, forming designs that can be interpreted as elements of the future or the past. Examine the cup carefully. What you are looking for is images; shapes that resemble actual things. The position of an image in the cup is also significant. The closer it is to the rim of the cup, the closer you are in time; the closer to the bottom of the cup, the farther backward or forward in time. When you discover a recognizable symbol, you may use the following list of the most commonly found images and their definitions.

 

Of course, there are other patterns that can be seen in the bottom of a cup. Numbers, letters, punctuation marks, and other standard graphic symbols will have significance, interpret these in conjunction with the other images. For example, you might observe the shape of a chair, meaning "an unexpected visitor," and near it the figure three. This would indicate that the number 3 was relevant to the situation, perhaps the visitor will come in 3 days, weeks, hours, months; or there may be 3 people in the group. If you let the patterns act as a catalyst for your intuition, you will be quite surprised at the accuracy of your interpretive perceptions.