Andor's Tome of Stuff : )

Tasseography / Tea Leaf Reading

Essential Requirments:
Tea cup, Tea pot, no strainer
Tea spoon
Tea in leaf form
Water at the boil
An imaginative eye
A dose of good humour

Optional Extras:
Napkin
Milk and your choice of sweetner
Or you could also use coffee grounds if tea isn't your forte

Warm the teapot and cup with hot water. Tip out the warming water from the pot then add to
the empty warm pot one teaspoon of tea for each person drinking plus one more 'for the pot'. Let steep the desired amount of time. Pour tea for each person WITHOUT the use of a strainer. Leaves should enter each persons cup. No leaves indicates that their future is hidden at the moment. No reading for them today. The Querent should sip their tea and enjoy its aroma and taste. Gossip at this point is appropriate. When the tea is nearly cleared from the cup, leaving about a tablespoon of liquid remaining in the cup begin the swirling-and-turning

Tipping Ritual.
Holding the cup in your less dominant hand, swirl it three times sunwise. Take the cup in both hands and slowly carefully turn the cup on its rim as you invert it onto the saucer. If youre worried about spills over the edge of the saucer, a clean napkin can be waiting on the saucer to catch your tea slops. Complete the action by placing the cup upside down on the saucer immediately after completing the turn out.
Leave the cup upside down for approximately one minute, then slowly turn the cup and saucer three times sunwise. Turn the cup back up the right way with the handle facing the readers heart. The read runs from handle sunwise, from rim to base. The rim being the near future, the base is the distant future. Saucers can be read as well. All tea leaf reading should be taken with a light heart and treated as speculative.

Milk and sweetners do not change the read and should be used if it makes the tea more enjoyable.

AN ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SYMBOLS WITH THEIR SIGNIFICATIONS
A question that will very naturally occur to persons of an enquiring turn of mind in regard to the figures and symbols seen in the tea-cup is: Why should one symbol necessarily signify one thing and not something quite different?
The answer, of course, is that the meanings given to the symbols are purely arbitrary, and that there is no scientific reason why one should signify one thing and not another. ...

It is obviously necessary, however, in attempting to read the future by means of any kind of symbols, whether pips, dots, numbers or anything else, to fix beforehand upon some definite meaning to be attributed to each separate symbol and to hold fast to this meaning in all events. In the case of tea-leaves, where the symbols are not mere 'conventional signs' or numbers but actual figures like the pictures seen in the fire or those envisaged in dreams, there is no doubt that the signification of most of them is the result of empyrical experience. Generations of spae-wives have found that the recurrence of a certain figure in the cup has corresponded with the occurrence of a certain event in the future lives of the various persons who have consulted them: and this empyrical knowledge has been handed down from seer to seer until a suf- ficient deposit of tradition has been formed from which it has been found possible to compile a detailed list of the most important symbols and to attach to each a traditional meaning. These significations have been collected by the writer—in a desultory manner—over a long period of years chiefly from spae-wives in both Highland and Lowland Scotland, but also in Cornwall, on Dartmoor, in Middle England, in Gloucestershire and Northumberland. Occasionally it has been found that a different meaning is attributed to a symbol by one seer from that given it by another. In such cases an alternative signification might, of course, have been given here, but as the essence of all such significations is that they shall be stable and unvarying, the writer has fixed upon whichever meaning has been most widely attributed to the symbol or appears to have the best authority for its adoption, so that the element of doubt may be excluded.