The Centuries-Old Art Of Reading Tea Leaves (And Why Victorians Loved It)

Posted by Delta Gatti on Saturday, May 4, 2024

Around the time that many people of the Victorian era were getting into tasseography, the practice also became associated with the Romani people. Also known as the Roma, this ethnic group began to travel out from their original homelands in India sometime during the medieval period, taking up a nomadic lifestyle throughout the world. In Europe, they gained a complicated reputation, with many Gadje (as Romani sometimes call outsiders) wrongfully assuming that these people were all rootless criminals. Perhaps also because they were itinerant and separate from more settled communities (in part because of frequent non-Romani efforts to exile them), Romani people likewise gained a reputation for exotic mysticism.

Thus was born the romanticized image of a Romani woman in a dimly-lit tea parlor, reading someone's future out of someone's cup. At first, it appears that some went from household to household, knocking on doors and offering to read the leaves. As the 19th century continued, the association between the Romani and tea leaf reading was strong enough that some made money reading fortunes in homes and tea houses for well-heeled outsiders.

As Katelan Foisy told StyleCaster, her Romani grandmother provided her with an extensive knowledge of herbal medicine and dream interpretation that served Foisy well when she became interested in tasseography. Foisy also said that she felt a kinship with distant Romani ancestors who may have read the tea leaves to make a living.

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