Divination - Tessomancy

Hello, students, and welcome to Divination! In this class you will explore the art of fortune-telling through various methods. For this first class, we are going to be studying Tessomancy. The terms "Tessomancy", "Tasseomancy" and "tassology" derive from the French word for teacup; "tasse", and the Greek suffixes, "-graph", "-logy", and "-mancy". It is the art of reading tea leaves coffee grounds, or wine sediments to predict events in the future. The first inklings of Western tasseography can be traced to medieval European fortune tellers who developed their readings from splatters of wax, lead, and other molten substances. This evolved into tea-leaf reading in the seventeenth century, a short time after Dutch merchants introduced tea to Europe via trade routes to China. Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England have produced a number of practitioners and authors on the subject, and English potteries have crafted many elaborate tea cup sets specially designed and decorated to aid in fortune-telling. Cultures of the Middle East that practice divination in this fashion usually use left-over coffee grounds from Turkish coffee/Lebanese coffee/Greek coffee turned over onto a plate. After a cup of tea has been poured, without using a tea strainer, the tea is drunk or poured away. The cup should then be shaken well and any remaining liquid drained off in the saucer. The diviner now looks at the pattern of tea leaves in the cup and allows the imagination to play around [with] the shapes suggested by them. They might look like a letter, a heart shape, or a ring. These shapes are then interpreted intuitively or by means of a fairly standard system of symbolism. These tea leaf symbols are explained in  Unfogging the Future, pages five and six:
Acorn - "windfall, unexpected gold"
Club - "an attack"
Cross - "trials and suffering"
Falcon - "a deadly enemy"
The Grim - "death"
Skull - "danger in your path"
Sun - "great happiness"
I have equipped you all with teacups that have been strained. I would like for you all to practice reading the leaves. Once you are finished, you may move on to the homework.