Tasseography: tea-leaf reading in modern Europe
A history of tasseography: the arrival of tea in Europe, the English fashion after Catherine of Braganza, tea-leaf readers and the symbols of the Victorian cup.
The word tasseography is a curious compound: it joins the French tasse, «cup», and the Greek graphe, «writing», and refers to reading the shapes left by a residue at the bottom of a cup. The term is used above all for tea leaves, the protagonists of a tradition centred on the British Isles. Its history is young compared with other divinatory arts, yet it tells us a good deal about the relationship between everyday consumption, imagination and popular culture.
Tea reaches Europe
Tea arrived in Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century thanks to Dutch merchants, and in England it began to spread towards the middle of the century. The fashion was boosted by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess who married Charles II in 1662 and brought the habit of drinking it to court. In the eighteenth century the East India Company made it a mass-consumption commodity.
Until the introduction of tea bags in the twentieth century, tea was made with loose leaves, and some of them inevitably remained in the cup. As with Ottoman coffee, it was precisely this material feature that made possible a new way of looking for signs in everyday life. The spread of tea across all social classes during the nineteenth century brought the cup and its leaves into almost every British home.
Leaf readers and village fairs
Evidence of tea-leaf reading becomes frequent during the nineteenth century. In England, Scotland and Ireland the practice was common in domestic kitchens, among servants and mistresses of the house, and among the fortune-tellers who worked at fairs. In the imagination of the time it was often associated with old women or travelling groups.
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries numerous popular booklets appeared that listed the symbols and their traditional meanings. These pamphlets, sold cheaply, helped to fix a common repertoire which until then had been passed on mainly by word of mouth. Leaf reading thus moved from the kitchen to the printed page, and from there to lower-middle-class parlours, where it became a game played among friends.
The grammar of symbols
In the tasseographic tradition the cup was regarded as an oriented space. Leaves near the rim were associated with the present or the near future, those at the bottom with a distant future; the handle stood for the person who had drunk. The shapes were compared to familiar objects: an anchor, a ring, a bird, a key, a tree.
To each figure the manuals assigned a traditional meaning, linked to travel, marriage, fortune or news on its way. It was a symbolic language very close to that of dreams and cards, made of simple, easily memorised analogies, suited to a convivial reading. There was no single canon: each booklet offered its own variants.
Tasseography belongs to the history of private life rather than to that of the great doctrines. Through a cup of tea it shows us an age in which foretelling the future was also a domestic pastime, a way of conversing and of giving shape to everyday hopes, lightly and yet seriously at the same time.