Who Were The First People To Read Tea Leaves?
The not so ancient art of tasseomancy
For millennia, humans have tried to understand the world around them, and some have even dared to try and predict the future ahead of them. Over time how we’ve done this had changed, but it almost always involved divination, which simply means ‘to seek knowledge from a supernatural source’.
Early humans, and many today, believed that things vastly beyond our understanding are trying to communicate with us — if only we’d listen.
Astrology tries to divine truth from the stars, molybdomancy was the art of divining molten metal, practitioners of carromancy sought truth in melted wax, while the infamous believers in haruspicy found meaning in the entrails of animals. Divination was a huge part of many religions for centuries, but it slowly became relegated to a few outliers, the last vestige of superstition that the Church couldn’t stomp out.
This is where the history of tasseomancy — the art of reading tea leaves — begins. It comes from the French tasse for ‘cup’ and the Greek suffix mancy, meaning ‘divination’. Literally, it would mean something akin to ‘divining from the cup’. It can also be called tasseography and tasseology.
