Reading in tea

Tasseography or divination in tea can be done with three types of tea: red tea, green tea and black tea. Once it arrived in the west, however, any kind of plant can be used to read the future in tea, the only condition being that the plant must be crushed before the drink is prepared.

The first attempts at reading in a tea cup in Europe come from the European medieval era when diviners developed their technique by reading in wax or melted lead. It was only in the 17th century that divination in tea really entered Europe, along with the trade routes established between the Dutch and the Chinese. The idea of ​​divination in tea caught on very well in Scotland, England and Ireland where this practice developed rapidly. Numerous tea readers have sprung up, many of them even creating their own dictionaries and books in which they explained their techniques for reading the future in tea.

The English potteries caught wind of the news that tea is becoming more and more popular and that fortune-telling in tea is indispensable in every home, so they began to increase the number of sets of tea cups. All kinds of sets of special tea cups with special designs and decorated as extravagantly as possible became the "paper" on which tea diviners carried out their activity, "reading" the future of those who wished. Not only the cups were in the center of attention in this case, but also the saucers, because if the cup looks fabulous, not even the saucer on which it sits can be inferior.