Tea leaf reading symbols and what they mean

Turn the cup over on the saucer and count to three. When you lift it, the leaves have stopped moving. For a second it looks like nothing at all, and then it does not.

That second is the whole practice. Everything else is a vocabulary.

Where the word comes from

Tasseography. The first part is the French tasse, a cup, which arrived in French from Arabic. Add a Greek ending and you have writing in a cup, which is a better description than fortune telling ever was.

The practice travelled the routes that tea and coffee travelled, which is why versions of it turn up from Istanbul to the Baltic. In Britain it is bound up with Romani readers, who kept it alive as a spoken craft rather than a written one. Then, from the late nineteenth century, English and American potteries began making cups and saucers printed with symbols and sold with little instruction booklets. Those sets are a good part of the reason so many of the meanings are written down at all.

How the cup is divided

Before the symbols, the geography. Hold the cup with the handle towards you.

• Near the handle is you and yours. Home, and the people in it.
• Near the rim is what is close. This week, this month.
• The bottom holds what is still forming. Further off, less fixed.
• Left and right of the handle traditionally read as coming and going. What is arriving, what is on its way out.

A shape means something slightly different depending on where it sits. An anchor at the rim is steadiness now. The same anchor at the bottom is steadiness you are still building.

Ten symbols worth knowing

Stems stand for people. A thick stem is a large presence, a thin one somebody on the edge of things. There are well over a hundred more, which is exactly the point. The dictionary is long enough that the shape you find is the shape you brought with you.

What it is actually for

Nobody here is going to tell you the leaves know something. What the ritual does is quieter and more useful than prediction. It makes you hold one question for four minutes with no phone in your hand, and then look at something with no screen in it.

Most people find the answer was already theirs. The cup slows them down enough to hear it. That is not a small thing in a week that has not had four quiet minutes anywhere else in it.

Which tea, and why a bag will not do

This is the one ritual that needs the leaves loose in the cup. No bag, no infuser, nothing that keeps them out of the water, because the leaves are the thing you are going to read.

Finer cut blends give you detail and fussier shapes. Fruit pieces give you bold, obvious forms, which is easier if it is your first time. Psy-chic Powers is named for exactly this, and it starts at £7 for fifteen cups. Use a pale cup with a wide bottom, because you cannot read leaves you cannot see.

Then let it steep in the cup, drink slowly, leave a little liquid behind, swirl three times, and turn it over on the saucer. If you would rather have the symbols read back to you than guess at them, our reading takes you through the six steps and keeps the ones you have done.

It is a good thing to do with somebody else in late October, when it is dark by five and nobody wants to go out.

Never brewed loose leaf before? Start here.

JoJo