Why Egyptians Love Coffee Fortune Telling
Ezz Al-Turkey
If you’ve ever had a Turkish coffee with an Egyptian auntie, odds are, she’s tried telling your fortune through the maps left behind by the coffee beans at the bottom of the cup. A part of Egypt1§ian culture is the custom of using one's depleted coffee (Qahwa) cup to reveal another person’s past and future. There's no denying Egyptians have adopted a spiritualist coffee culture.
Five centuries before coffee was used for Egyptian women to show off at family gatherings, it was initially discovered and cultivated in Yemen. Before long, every culture would craft its unique concoctions and aromas. Egyptians, however, remain infatuated with the thick and strong Turkish coffee.
The process of making Turkish coffee requires extreme precision and creativity. The coffee is heated in a tiny copper kanaka very carefully, before slowly pouring it into your cup before it boils over. Urban legends say that letting the mixture boil over is unlucky, especially if a bride is making it for her future husband. A further sign of bad kitchen manners is when coffee spills into the cup, which also conveys carelessness and bad taste. If the coffee completely spills over, however, is good luck!
However, one of the most widespread superstitions in Egypt is called tasseography, and it involves reading a cup after a person has finished drinking their Turkish coffee. Since Turkish coffee beans are thicker and stick to the bottom of the cup, the gradient maps of coffee grounds at the bottom may be used as a way to predict almost any aspect of someone’s life, including marriage, death, and love. This tradition was inspired by the Ottomans in the eighteenth century, only to develop into a form of bonding between friends, or just a cool party trick.
It is customary to flip a cup of coffee over and let the liquid drip completely onto a saucer. After a little while, the fortune-teller, often a superstitious older Egyptian woman, will want to see what's in the cup of leftover Turkish coffee grounds and brew. For the majority, it's just an atlas of meaningless lines of coffee beans, for others, this is serious business.
Greater goals are represented by vertical lines; the darker and wider the line, the more promising the outcome. The fortune is nearly guaranteed to come true if it teeters dangerously close to the cup's rim. Triangles represent transformations and fascinating discoveries, but dots are more indicative of prosperity and money. There are a plethora of symbols to be aware of, each laden with a healthy dose of superstition and blind belief. A good fortune teller will be more engaging as a storyteller, instead of just a reader of the cup. There's never a boring moment when you stare down into the bottom of a coffee cup, have it look like just lines of coffee, and listen to a fortune-teller who seems to see further in the brew than your eyes do.
While most of these fortunes and predictions have to be taken with a grain of salt, there’s no denying that anyone would jump on the opportunity to have their fortune read through their cup after finishing their coffee. Maybe it’s our undying curiosity as humans or our need to know things before they happen, but tasseography doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. For as long as Egyptian aunties exist, so will tasseography!