I had left my coffee cup in the car, and when I
picked it up I saw a serpent in it! Well, not a real one, but the grounds had
dried into a Rorschach “coffeeblots”. I took a picture before I wash the cup.
So, it was an opportunity to proceed with a
self-psychoanalysis, and to revisit an essay I had written a decade ago about
reading coffee grounds https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2015/08/reading-tea-leaves-in-arabic-coffee.html
Immediately, I saw a threatening canine head, jaws
open, a fierce look in the eye. Wolf?
Dog? Coyote? And, the snake was growing out of the canine head with a perfectly
shaped head of its own, even its tongue was out. The canine and the snake were
in a similar posture but looking in opposite directions.
Here is a crop of the canine
And the one of the snake
Ok, now that I let my imagination transform a dirty
coffee cup into a story, I wondered what these interpretations meant in tasseography.
As I was inquiring about this ancient art of reading
coffee grounds and predicting the future, I learned a few things about coffee
and the human propensity to see things where things did not exist (pareidolia).
It is
believed that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia and found its way to
Yemen and today’s Iran. From there coffee became the prime social drink in the
Levant, the region of the Middle East with all the ceremonies associated with
its preparation and serving, including fortune telling by reading the grounds
left in the cups. Eventually it found its way to present day Turkey and from
there to the world in the 17th century.
The human propensity to see predictions in various
organic media proceeded that period of time and tasseography, though. Indeed
reading tea leaves was popular in China, so was reading goat entrails part of
ancient Greek and Roman cultures. And let us not forget the macabre practice of
Druids in ancient Celtic societies (Britain, Ireland and Gaul) of examining the
entails of human sacrifice victims to consult deities.
As I was doing my research, I had a smile on my face
reading that during the Ottoman period coffee ground readings, of course in
cups of Turkish coffee, were popular in harems. Indeed, there were “professional”
tasseographers who read the ladies’ cups to make predictions about love and
pregnancy. However it is believed that
this art was primarily a matriarchal one, where older women taught the secrets
of interpretation to their daughters.
And that was the reason for my smile, as an old
memory, somehow hidden in the remote storage areas of my brain, came back as I
washed my cup of coffee.
… I was perhaps 6 years old when I first witnessed
an old tradition. Women in our neighborhood would periodically gather in our apartment
to have a “Doing the Sugar Day.” It was a socialization day when women would
bring pastries and sugary treats, make coffee (Turkish, Arabic or Greek) all
day long, and help each other with epilation! It was called a “sugar day”
because the full body removal of hair was done via a paste made of melted sugar
and lemon juice, not wax per se. So, no men were allowed in the place for that
day, only prepubescent boys and girls for whom that gathering, plus the sweet
treats, were a much anticipated play day.
I recall the women drinking coffee, listening to the
gossip born from reading the grounds, smoking cigarettes, and often sighing in discomfort
as their bodies were covered in that sugary paste which were lifted and pulled abruptly
to pull hair from their roots. Eventually, especially when the epilation was
for facial hair, these women had swollen and reddish skin. But they were happy,
as were we kids mimicking the sugar paste epilation on each other.
And at night, my father was always happy to have a
few of my mother’s the left over vol-au-vent
pastries filled with homemade apricot jam, with his own cup of coffee.
In retrospect, these gatherings were like a scene from a harem, and I think those sessions were my initial and comprehensive
introduction to female anatomy…
The
last mystery from my cup: As I was looking at the pictures
I took of the coffee grounds, I discovered yet another animal at the very
bottom of the cup – it was a black cat, in perfect posture, ears perked, with his tail
showing, looking at the snake and the canine!
A black cat and a snake are interpreted as a bad omen and a deception in tasseography. That cannot be a good thing, I thought.
So I forewent another cup of coffee, make my favorite lemon drop mate with matcha
and green tea leaves, and sat by my laptop to write about the moment and my
memories.
I wonder what my readers will see in these pictures
during their own fortune telling.
May 17, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025
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