Tea-Leaf Reading

Tea-leaf reading, or Tasseography, is a perennial favorite of the divinatory arts. It can be fairly easily learned. For best results use China tea, brewed in a pot without a strainer, of course. The tea is poured into a cup which should have a wide top and small base. Do not use a cup with any form of pattern on the inside-it could be very confusing!

The subject should drink the tea but leave sufficent in the bottom of the cup to distribute the leaves around the sides when turned. Ask her to take hold of the handle and rotate the cup slowly, three times clockwise, allowing the remains of the tea to come up to the rim of the cup and so to be distributed. Then she is to invert the cup completely on its saucer.

Taking up the cup from there, you can begin your divination. You are going to interpret the various shapes and forms made by the tea-leaves on the sides and bottom of the cup. To do this, with some sort of accuracy, there is a time scale you must remember. The rim of the cup, and close to the rim, represents the present and the coming in two or three weeks. As you move down the sides, so you go further into the future. The very bottom of the cup is the very far distant future. Your starting point is the handle of the cup. This represents the subject, while symbols close to the handle affect her directly, while symbols on the opposite side of the cup may only have a passing effect.

If the symbols you see are particularly well defined, then she is very lucky. The less well defined, the less decisive and more prone to hindrance. Stars denote success; triangles fortune; squares mean protection; circles mean frustration. Straight lines indicate definite plans; wavy lines uncertainty; dotted lines mean a journey. Any numbers you see could be indicators of years, months, days or hours. Usually if you see them in the upper half of the cup you can think in terms of hours or days; in the lower half, weeks, months or years. Letters are the initials of people of importance to the subject, be they friends, relatives or business associates.

As with more forms of divination, you should interpret what you feel about what you see, rather than going by hard and fast "meanings". As a start, however, here are the traditional interpretations of some of the most common symbols. You may find it interesting to compare them to symbology used in dream interpretation.

A form of tasseography, known as Geomancy, can be done using dirt or sand. Mark a circle, about three feet in diameter, on the ground and have the subject throw a handful of dirt into it. You then interpret the symbols made by the dirt in the same way that you would the tea-leaves. Similarly, on a smaller scale, draw a circle on a sheet of paper. Blindfold you subject and let her fill the circle with random dots, with a felt-tip marker or similar. These dots can then be interpreted in the same manner. For both of these you would need to make a mark where the subject stands/sits, to indicate the equivalent of the cup handle.