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 that should have a wide top and a small base. Do not use a cup with any from or pattern on the inside – it could be confusing!
The subject should drink the tea but leave sufficient in the bottom of the cup to distribute the leaves around the sides when turned. Ask her or him to take hold of the handle and rotate the cup slowly, three times clockwise, allowing the remains if the tea to come up to the rim of the cup and so to be distributed. Then she or he is to invert the cup completely on its saucer.
Taking the cup from there, you can begin your divination. You are going to interpret the various shapes and forms made by the tea leaves in 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 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 distant future. Your starting point is the handle of the cup. This represents the subject, so that symbols close to the handle affects her or him directly, while symbols on the opposite side of the cup may only have a passing effect.
If the symbols you see are the particularly well defined, the she or he 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 indicating years, months, weeks, days, or hours. Usually, if you see the, in the upper half of the cup you can think in the terms of hours or days, in the lower half, weeks, months or years. Letters are in the initials of the people of the importance to the subject, be they friends, relatives, or business associates.
As with most 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, there are the traditional interpretations of the most common symbols. You may find it interesting to compare them to the symbology used in dream interpretation.
A form of tasseography, known as a 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 the same way that you would the tea leaves. Similarly, on a smaller scale, draw a circle on a sheet of paper. Blindfold your subject and let her or him fill the circle with ransom dots, with a felt-tip marker or a similar item. These dots can then be interpreted in the same manner. For both of these you would need to male a mark where the subject stands/sits, to indicate the equivalent of the cup handle.
