It was around the time of the book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when I first became familiar with the art of tasseography, or the practice of reading tea leaves for divination purposes. Upon learning about this practice, I immediately became interested in it.
I found out that tasseography is not actually limited to tea leaves alone, but may also be done through the use of coffee grounds or wine sediments. In the case of tea leaves, tea strainers should not be used. Reading of the patterns start after the rest of the tea is drunk or drained away.
The patterns are then interpreted using some pre-determined standard. For example, the presence of the snake may mean falsehood, the spade may mean good fortune, and the mountain may mean a big hindrance along the journey. It is common among diviners to discern the future chronologically by looking first at the rim of the cup, head down spiraling until the bottom of the cup, which represents the distant future.
In general, experts advise against using tea leaves from cut-up tea bags because of the fact that tea leaves in bags end to be cut more finely, which will restrict the diviner from accurately seeing any figure among the leaves.
Furthermore, while most diviners are already fine with using white tea cups, there still exists some specialized divination cups that mix other forms of the divination arts with tasseography. For example, using Zodiac cups will allow you to combine astrology and tasseography in your readings.
Tasseography, though a little bit less known than the other ways of seeing the future, has been proven to be effective and as accurate as the others. People may initially find it to be a difficult art to master, given the requirement that you should be able to see the hidden symbols, but with proper practice, they can do it. So can you.
