viii Foraging Through Folklore Ella Leith

viii: Foraging through Folklore

Taking tea with a Highland Seer

Ella Leith

Reading tea leaves seems an innocent enough game, but predicting the future has been ascribed very different values by different communities. Interpreting omens was explicitly linked to sorcery and banned in Leviticus (19:26) and Deuteronomy (18:10-12), which led to fortune-telling being proscribed under some secular laws (e.g., the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563). Yet divinatory practices can be found peppering our everyday lives, from idly counting out cherry stones (tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…) to throwing apple peels over our shoulders and looking to see if an initial is formed. Anyone can perform these acts; others require a little more skill. Tasseography— the art of identifying and interpreting symbols in the dregs of a cup of loose-leaf tea —is one of these; for this to really work, many people believe, you need someone who is a little bit psychic.

Despite sometimes being seen as uncomfortably close to witchcraft (Godbeer, 1992), clairvoyance is more often conceived of as a gift: a talent, but also, as Bennett (1995: 136) puts it, ‘an unsought handout’ that leaves the recipient ‘uncontaminated’ by it. They may even be revered for it. In a 1956 interview, Robert Lamb (1904-1972) tells that, in his native Banffshire, any old caileach [woman] that ever I knew that was pointed out to hae the Second Sight, they were never put down, they were looked on with great respect. Stiùbhart (2020) describes the Second Sight as ‘a primal, hereditary phenomenon involving involuntary visions of future events’, and the hereditary element conferred particular families with the reputation for clairvoyance. Those with the surname MacGregor, says Robert Lamb, were “spoken of wi veneration, because often, by some strange means, they hed predictit the future.” One of the MacGregors “was supposed to be, as we would say, the Seer, the Highland Seer” and “a reader o cups”: Wan o the girls said wad he read her cup, and […] bein a favourite he wud read her cup. When he took it up, he looked at it and they said “whad’ye seein?” “I see the devil,” he says, “awalkin on the ground, and before we reach Torbain tonight there’ll be a sad disaster.” A disaster there was: later that night, another local man’s pony shied at some imaginary thing on the road and he was thrown out o the gig an’ his neck was broken. […] That gave greater emphasis tae the Second Sight of the MacGregors.

For Robert Lamb, the power of divination rested with the Seer and was only harnessed through cup-reading. But to A Highland Seer, the anonymous writer of the charmingly earnest instruction manual Tea-Cup Reading and Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves (1881), cupreading may be practised ‘with success by anyone who will take the trouble to master the simple rules’ (1881:7). Whether this author was actually a Highlander— or even Scottish —is unknown, but they chose an appropriately authoritative pen-name. As Stiùbhart (2020) observes, ‘in modern English-language scholarship and popular discourse alike, Second Sight tends to be regarded as distinctive to the people of the Scottish Highlands’, despite a much wider geographical spread of belief in the phenomenon. Indeed, while the material in the book was collected ‘in a desultory manner’ from all across Britain, the writer romantically frames divination as fundamentally Highland in nature, evoking the Highlander … coming to the door of his cottage or bothie at dawn, regard[ing] steadfastly the signs and omens he notes in the appearance of the sky … [and] the 'spae-wife,' who, manipulating the cup from which she has taken her morning draught of tea, … deduces thence such simple horary prognostications as the name of the person from whom 'postie' will presently bring up the glen a letter. (1881:10)

A Highland Seer tells of mundane divinations woven into the fabric of everyday life, Robert Lamb describes cup-reading Seers as venerated for their skill, yet in interviews with elderly American women from ‘a middle-class suburb of a large northern town’, Gillian Bennett found that ‘delving’— i.e. ‘the exploitation of psychic gifts’ by actively seeking answers about the future from cards or cups, rather than passively receiving visions —was ‘the ultimate taboo’ (1995:137). Every delving story was cautionary; in one, the narrator is approached by a friend of her mother:

Whatever I said, she took for gospel. […] The last time she asked me, she said, “Oh, you must read my cup!” And I looked at it and I said, “Oh!”, I said. “There’s nothing there!” “Oh!”, she said. “There must be!” I said, “No, there isn’t,” I said. “Honestly,” I said, “there’s nothing there at all!” […]

Well, she was very, very offended about this. […] [Later,] I said, “Look, mother! There was no future for her. None at all! […] I couldn’t see a thing in that cup,” I said, “and I got a queer feeling when I picked it up,” […] Do you know! That next week, […] she’d been taken ill. She’d had a stroke. And she only lasted three days. (‘Alma’ in Bennett, 1995:137)

Bennett’s interviewees felt that ‘any attempt to deliberately seek knowledge of the future is dangerously audacious, and retribution will surely follow’ (1995:139). But for our nineteenth-century Highland Seer, fortunetelling was an ‘innocent and inexpensive amusement and recreation round the tea-table at home’, cup-readers ‘suffering no harm in thus deriving encouragement for the future, even should they attach no importance to their occurrence, but merely treat them as an occasion for harmless mirth and badinage’ (1881:7,17).

So how should the amateur cup-reader proceed? The Highland Seer tells us to use China tea leaves, not Indian, and to choose an appropriate cup with ‘a wide opening at the top and a bottom not too small’, with a white interior with ‘no pattern printed upon it’ nor ‘any fluting or eccentricity of shape’ (1881:18). The bottom of the cup represents the far future; the rim, the present; and the handle, the person whose future is being foretold. The Seer continues: The ritual to be observed is very simple. The tea-drinker should drink the contents of his or her cup so as to leave only about half a teaspoonful of the beverage remaining. He should

next take the cup by the handle in his left hand, rim upwards, and turn it three times from left to right in one fairly rapid swinging movement. He should then very slowly and carefully invert it over the saucer and leave it there for a minute, so as to permit of all moisture draining away. If he approaches the oracle at all seriously he should during the whole of these proceedings concentrate his mind upon his future Destiny. If, however, he or she is not in such deadly earnest, but merely indulging in a harmless pastime, such an effort of concentration need not be made. (1881:18-19) The shapes formed by the dregs should be identified and interpreted according to the Alphabetical List of Symbols with their Significations. Of interest to the tasseographically-curious herbologist are the following plant symbols:

ACORN improvement in health, continued health, strength, and good fortune.

APPLES long life; gain by commerce.

APPLE-TREE change for the better.

CLOVER a very lucky sign; happiness and prosperity. At the top of the cup, it will come quickly. As it nears the bottom, it will mean more or less distant.

IVY honour and happiness through faithful friends.

LILY at top of cup, health and happiness; a virtuous wife; at bottom, anger and strife.

MUSHROOM sudden separation of lovers after a quarrel.

OAK very lucky; long life, good health, profitable business, and a happy marriage.

PALM-TREE good luck; success in any undertaking. A sign of children to a wife and of a speedy marriage to a maid.

PEAR great wealth and improved social position; success in business, and to a woman a wealthy husband.

PINE-TREE continuous happiness.

ROSE a lucky sign betokening good fortune and happiness.

YEW-TREE indicates the death of an aged person who will leave his possessions to the consultant.

Bubbling away in the background of the Highland Seer’s manual is the unspoken social aspect of the ritual. Not only does the writer encourage cup-reading for ‘badinage’, but they expressly forbid doing it for money: The moment the taint of money enters into the business of reading the Future the accuracy and credit of the Fortune told disappears. … No Highland 'spaewife' or seer would dream of taking a fee for looking into the future on behalf of another person. (1881:9, 11) You do this in the spirit of fellow-feeling, or not at all. Furthermore, ‘to read a fortune in the teacup with any real approach to accuracy … the seer must not be in a hurry’ (1881:26). The image conjured is of intimacy and leisure: friends sitting down for a cuppa and a chat about the future and the community.

Indeed, knowledge of the community is probably as crucial a ‘gift’ for cup-reading as any psychic skill. In a 1971 interview, an unidentified Tiree man reminisces about a fortune-teller who would read the cups of local girls and ‘see’ the boys they fancied— having first ascertained this information from gossip. For some, reading tea leaves may have given them a valued social role in the community, and perhaps bestowed other advantages: Katherine Dix, from Harris, recalls a local woman who used to read the tea leaves for anyone who asked— and would always tell them a good fortune, in hopes that they would visit her again and bring her more tea! I hope they did.

References A Highland Seer (1881) Tea-cup reading and fortune-telling by tea leaves. New York: George Sully and Company. Full text available at: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18241 Bennett, G. (1995) ‘“If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake”: The Folklore of Foreknowledge in a Neighborhood Group’, in Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural, ed. B. Walker. University Press of Colorado; Utah State University Press. Godbeer, R. (1992) The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge University Press. Stiùbhart, D. U. (2020) ‘The invention of Highland Second Sight’, in The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland, eds J. Goodare and M. McGill. Manchester University Press.

The interviews mentioned can be found on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o’ Riches website, the online portal for selected items held in the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archives at the University of Edinburgh: Robert Lamb: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/44 04 & http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/44 08 Donald Sinclair, Hector Kennedy, Donald Archie Kennedy, and Unknown: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/53 191 Katherine Dix: http://tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/60 460