Reading from the rest of the Coffee

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I didn't really care about Coffee readings, but I captured a few details.

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German Wikipedia mentions a Florentine Thomas Tamponelli, who has invented this art. A check at books.google.com leads to the insight, that the key "Tamponelli" gets no results before the year 1800.

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As earliest sign I've for the moment:

1742
Die Wahrsagerin aus dem Coffee-Schälgen
C. G. B.
Langenheim, 1742 - 31 pages
http://books.google.de/books?id=oUTUHAA ... edir_esc=y
no preview

1742
Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen:
auf das Jahr ...
Univ.-Buchh., 1742
http://books.google.de/books?id=AzNKAAA ... &q&f=false
.... this is book critique on "Die Wahrsagerin aus dem Coffee-Schälgen"

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Reading from the coffee shouldn't be too long time present in Germany ... according this text

1745
A full version of the same book
http://books.google.de/books?id=ebEUAAA ... &q&f=false

The book has only 31 pages. It gives no details of the reading process.

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I found recently that, what is for me in the moment the earliest Cartomancy in Germany (after an intensive check of book.google.com), and this leads to a text in 1763.
Here is the result of this research:
http://trionfi.eu/village/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1390

The 1763 text is
Das Carneval gelehrter Phantasien:
Oder Sammmlung einiger kleinen Schriften zum Nutzen und Vergnügen
Schäfer, 1763 - 148 pages
http://books.google.de/books?id=L9lDAAA ... en&f=false

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Cartomancy is a minor topic in this "Wahrsagerey" article, Coffee reading has more dominance. The whole article on this has a "funny ironical style", as many other later German articles to the theme "Wahrsagerei" are mostly opposed, ironic and NOT pro-Wahrsagerei.

It's said, that Cartomancy is a new art of divination, used by German and Dutch ladies (I've some suspicion, that the article might have been translated from Dutch, but this is not sure; if this is the case, the observing author likely saw the world from a Dutch perspective) and that also reading from the rest of the coffee is new (actually it seems to be older than Cartomancy in Germany.

Coffee reading got in this text an explanation list. This author knows 35 symbols. I analyzed this group:
coffee
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1. open ways ... lucky progress
2. closed ways ... blocked conditions, anger
3. birds ... good friends
4. dog or dogs ... good news
5. fox or foxes ... treacherous persons
6. vipers ... not favorable foes
7. trees ... favorable friends
8. four leaf cloves ... luck
9. flag ... also luck
10. point ... one has gotten a letter
11. various points together ... a present will arrive
12. key (upside) ... a work or position will do well
13. key (downside) ... opposition of 12.
14. coffin
15. leaning person ... sickness, "black points" indicate the position of sickness
16. grapes ... special luck and inner enjoyment
17. black point ... coming accident
18. double eagle ... if high or near to "Näpfgen" (?) it means lucky near marriage
19. double eagle ... if low or near to bottom of "Näpfgen" (?) it means not reasonable hope
20. messenger on foot, who brings a letter ... bad news
21. rose ... honor and good hop on future luck
22. cross ... trouble, sickness, danger and occasionally death
23. garden ... pleasant conditions
24. bouquet of flowers ... love of a good friend
25. dove ... good luck in games
26. fishes ... others tell bad stories about oneself
27. worms ... disrespect and slander by others
28. anchor ... hope
29. small child ... fatherhood
30. stork ... shifting, locomotion, travel
31. ships ... richness and good income
32. heart, within an apple ... noble character
33. heart, within many points ... changing character
34. high tower ... long life and happy age
35. if the signs are higher ... the things announced will arrive in near future
(35.) if the signs are near bottom, there are occasionally numbers (of days or months)


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Recently I found a list of "90-100" coffee figures in a text of 1798:

Ausführliche Beschreibung der Sprachmaschinen oder sprechenden Figuren:
mit unterhaltenden Erzählungen und Geschichten erläutert
Heinrich Maximilian Brunner
Zeh, 1798 - 154 Seiten
books.google.de/books?id=ZL85AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA142

The author had also made a list of divination meanings for French and Bavarian playing cards, which I used in the Spiel-der-Hoffnung thread.

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Coffee Reading naturally depended on the existence of coffee in Europe:
From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy. The thriving trade between Venice and North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East brought many goods, including coffee, to the Venetian port. From Venice, it was introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink." The first European coffee house opened in Italy in 1645.

The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large scale. The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon. The first exports of Indonesian coffee from Java to the Netherlands occurred in 1711.

Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England as well. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is still in existence today. Coffee was introduced in France in 1657, and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

So the Netherlands (where the author of 1763 likely detected coffee reading as a new custom) wrote (possibly) some coffee history.

Vienna, as I've read, had around 1740 more than 30 coffee houses (but naturally Vienna was rather special with coffee). However, coffee houses are found in every major city. Coffee was expensive and it was celebrated as a new culture. Part of this were the coffee houses. Would we have had the Tarock revolution of c. 1750 without coffee and coffee houses? That's indeed an intriguing question.

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Coffee likely opposed the general-in-use alcoholism. This naturally took strong influence at the general intellectual capabilities of all and everybody.. Would I personally write so much, if I hadn't opportunity to drink all this coffee daily? Likely not ... :-)
Last edited by Huck on 17 Jun 2012, 09:48, edited 1 time in total.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

2
I'm a espresso hobbyist, and most of us do not believe in puckology, that is in divining the taste of the espresso shot from the looks of the puck of spent coffee in the machine. It seems we just didn't know which signs to look for. :o)

More seriously: By the early 1700s, there were coffee houses in all western cities. The English ones were called penny-universities, since they were places one could freely discuss anything of interest. They were also places business was transacted, as the subsequent history of Llloyd's coffee house attests. (There is a Royal Society paper from the 1690s on how to roast and brew coffee. If this recipe was followed, the attraction of coffee houses would not have been in the taste of the beverage). In England, there were periodic attempts to shut down coffee houses, not for being Islamic, but for being seditious. There are writers who believe the primary setting for the English and French enlightenment is the coffee house. Even the boost caffeine gave to people's thought has been invoked as an explanation

Certainly coffee houses became the primary site for card and chess playing by the end of the 18th century; and it's the existence of such venue would have favored the revival of fortune telling as well.

It is an interesting historical exercise to think about the consequences of having or not having public meeting spaces where regular conversations can be held between friends and also with strangers. Perhaps there are social developments that were impossible in the interval from the closing down of the Roman baths to the opening of coffee houses.

The rise of fortune telling at the same time as the enlightenment has always been a bit of an oddity. Maybe the existence of the venue is just as important as the erosion of church sanctions. Legal sanctions remained; since while enlightenment legislation abolished punishments for heresy, it still punished magic, fortune telling, etc as fraud. It is only in this century that these practices get redefined again as legal therapuetics.

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

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Jim Schulman wrote: Certainly coffee houses became the primary site for card and chess playing by the end of the 18th century; and it's the existence of such venue would have favored the revival of fortune telling as well.
I would imagine, that this happened earlier, though I can't speak for the English situation. Recently I made some research on the German Tarock development. There's indeed a sharp line, starting with c. 1750. Before it had been known only "near Strasbourg and under the influence of Strasbourg", but with 1750 it soon is found in many regions.
Likely one could assume, that, if Germany and related countries hadn't found this massive interest in Tarock, Gebelin and Etteilla hadn't neither. Tarot was unknown in Paris, only South-East of France near Switzerland had it.
Well, and it's quick distribution surely had a lot to do with coffee-houses. The first Tarock-rules books are based on the Vienna society, which likely had the most coffee-houses (and which is still famous for them).
It is an interesting historical exercise to think about the consequences of having or not having public meeting spaces where regular conversations can be held between friends and also with strangers. Perhaps there are social developments that were impossible in the interval from the closing down of the Roman baths to the opening of coffee houses.
If one looks deeper, coffee-houses are only the consequence of coffee-import. And coffee instead of alcohol is a drug-change. and till the siege of Vienna the Osmans (which had coffee and alcohol was prohibited for them) were the dominant military force in Europe, but with the victory of Vienna Western society detected coffee ...
Legend has it that soldiers of the Polish-Habsburg army, while liberating Vienna from the second Turkish siege in 1683, found a number of sacks with strange beans that they initially thought were camel feed and wanted to burn. The Polish king Jan III Sobieski granted the sacks to one of his officers named Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who started the first coffee house. After some experimentation, he added some sugar and milk, and the Viennese coffee tradition was born. This achievement has been recognized in many modern Viennese coffeehouses by hanging a picture of Kulczycki in the window. Another account is that Kulczycki, having spent two years in Ottoman captivity, knew perfectly well what coffee really is and tricked his superiors into granting him the beans that were considered worthless.


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Franciszek_Kulczycki

... and soon the long-lasting Osman dominance was broken.

Well, and nowadays ...
Since October 2011 the "Viennese Coffee House Culture" is listed as "Intangible Cultural Heritage" in the Austrian inventory of the "National Agency for the Intangible Cultural Heritage", a part of UNESCO. The Viennese coffee house is described in this inventory as a place “where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_coffee_house

Vienna wasn't the first, but England preferred tea finally but when coffee (or another new social influence) had conquered Vienna, it easily could be developed at many other places. Big cities are imitated by others. Likely without Vienna's acceptance of Tarock the quick distribution of the game after 1750 also hadn't take place.

One also has to consider the weather and the climate. Likely coffee (and other "hot drinks") in Northern countries gets another social influence than in countries with more sunshine.
The rise of fortune telling at the same time as the enlightenment has always been a bit of an oddity. Maybe the existence of the venue is just as important as the erosion of church sanctions. Legal sanctions remained; since while enlightenment legislation abolished punishments for heresy, it still punished magic, fortune telling, etc as fraud. It is only in this century that these practices get redefined again as legal therapuetics.
Well, Cartomancy seems to have accompanied the coffee-houses. As the Dutch-German observer in 1763 notes: ...

... first the coffee reading ...
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... and later the Cartomancy:
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Coffee reading and cartomancy are combined by Dutch and German ladies ... so it happened in 1763.

Coffee houses were also the scene for some early woman liberation ... and if social rules didn't allow their presence there, they celebrated the coffee reading in their own domains.

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German Wikipedia contradicts the story around Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki. It has a Johannes Theodat as the first coffee house owner in 1685. 3 others (between them Kulczycki) also got a coffee house privilege a little later, but it isn't secure, if Kulczycki used the privilege).
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

4
The Venetians were importing coffee routinely from Yemen by 1600. This is also the point coffee is first mentioned in England. The Yemeni monopoly was already broken by the Indians in the late 1400s, but this had no immediate effect outside Sufi circles in India, who used the local coffee for their meditations. The Dutch broke the Yemeni monopoly definitively in 1616, with Peter van der Broeke planting a mocha tree in the greenhouse of the Amsterdam botanical garden. This tree is the ancestor of all of today's Indonesian and American coffees. The Dutch were growing in Ceylon, Southern India and Java by 1660, and the first coffee in the Americas came 1720. By the mid-1700s, Java and Caribbean islands were the major source of European coffee.

So there is nothing very special about the timing of Viennese cafes, and it is unrelated to the Ottoman siege. It could be that the Viennese cafes were the model for all the great 18th century coffee houses in Paris and London; but I've never read anything to that effect

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

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Jim Schulman wrote: So there is nothing very special about the timing of Viennese cafes, and it is unrelated to the Ottoman siege. It could be that the Viennese cafes were the model for all the great 18th century coffee houses in Paris and London; but I've never read anything to that effect
Well, they've this legend. But I don't find much about "Caffe" in German literature (1675, 1676 and 1681 in traveler literature) before the Vienna date, though it is claimed, that the first German Cafehaus was founded 1673 in Bremen (in far distance to Vienna) and then in Hamburg (1677; also far of Vienna, and both cities - Bremen and Hamburg .- have the advantage of sea traffic, which Vienna naturally has not). To Bremen it came from a Dutch trader.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

7
Italy is renowned for its espresso today - I think the very name is Italian, isn't it? I don't know how old that reputation is though. I imagine there were lots of ways to get coffee that weren't through English or Dutch traders. Strong coffee, although not necessarily espresso, is normal throughout France too. I haven't observed Spain's customs in the matter of coffee (I'll pay attention next time), nor Portugal, which had easy access to good coffee from Africa and Brazil.

Espresso is a very different way to drink coffee though, than diluting it with twice as much water, and milk.
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Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

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English Wikipedia has Leonhard Rauwolff ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Rauwolf
... as the first traveler, who noted coffee (1576 back in Augsburg, published 1582):
Here is Rauwolff describing the drinking of coffee (which was unknown in Europe at the time): "A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as they can, sipping it a little at a time."
But Germany had a 30-years-war and a big loss of infrastructure after this early period - and it had no colonies. And "free trade" was complicated through all these smaller territories after the war
But also France and Paris (living in this time with the catholic aim to get rid of the Huguenots) was late with the "first coffee-house", if these wiki-articles are right: 1686

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Procope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Procope

But French wikipedia speaks of an earlier cafe ...
En 1670, arrive en France un Sicilien de Palerme, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli (qui francisera son nom en François Procope-Couteaux). Il travaille comme garçon chez un cafetier arménien du nom de Pascal qui possédait un café rue de Tournon, à la foire Saint-Germain3, Il se met à son compte deux ans plus tard et, en 16864, il rachète à Grégoire son établissement, qu’il fait luxueusement décorer et l'ouvre en 1689.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Procope

This mentioned Pascal is called an Armenian, the first cafehouse owner in Vienna 1685 had been also an Armenian. So both likely stood for catholic mediterranean trade, not for protestant Far-East-trade by Holland or England.

Italian wikipedia has as first Italian coffee house an installation 1645 in Venice, and London is named for a first coffee house in 1652 (3 years after the English king was beheaded, perhaps this might be a context and a warning to other monarchs, that they shouldn't allow coffee use).
Dutch wikipedia notes "Het eerste Europese koffiehuis is in 1645 in Venetië geopend. Andere, grote Europese steden bleven niet achter: in 1650 volgde Oxford, in 1651 Londen, in 1664 Den Haag, in 1677 Hamburg en in 1689 Parijs, Boston en New York.", so the first coffee house in Den Haag 1664.
German Wikipedia notes 1659 in Marseille.

Pope Clement VIII (died 1605 - with some good contacts to the Austrian Habsburger) is mentioned: (English Wikipedia) "Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink." I detail this is given in his biography (wiki)
Coffee aficionados often claim that the spread of its popularity is due to Pope Clement VIII's influence. Being pressured by his advisers to declare coffee the "bitter invention of Satan" because of its popularity among Muslims and it being a sort of antithesis or substitute for wine (which was used in the Eucharist), upon tasting it he instead declared that, "This devil's drink is so delicious...we should cheat the devil by baptizing it." The year often cited is 1600. It is not clear whether this is a true story, but it may have been found amusing at the time
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
... speaks mainly from prohibitions in Islam, but also some Western prohibitions
Coffee was initially used for spiritual reasons. At least 1,100 years ago, traders brought coffee across the Red Sea into Arabia (modern-day Yemen), where Muslim dervishes began cultivating the shrub in their gardens. At first, the Arabians made wine from the pulp of the fermented coffee berries. This beverage was known as qishr (kisher in modern usage) and was used during religious ceremonies.

Coffee drinking was prohibited by jurists and scholars (ulema) meeting in Mecca in 1511 as haraam, but the subject of whether it was intoxicating was hotly debated over the next 30 years until the ban was finally overturned in the mid 16th century.[159] Use in religious rites among the Sufi branch of Islam led to coffee's being put on trial in Mecca: it was accused of being a heretical substance, and its production and consumption were briefly repressed. It was later prohibited in Ottoman Turkey under an edict by the Sultan Murad IV.[7]

Coffee, regarded as a Muslim drink, was prohibited by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians until as late as 1889; it is now considered a national drink of Ethiopia for people of all faiths. Its early association in Europe with rebellious political activities led to Charles II outlawing coffeehouses from January 1676 (although the uproar created forced the monarch to back down two days before the ban was due to come into force). Frederick the Great banned it in Germany in 1777 for nationalistic and economic reasons; concerned about the price of import, he sought to force the public back to consuming beer. Lacking coffee-producing colonies, Germany had to import all its coffee at a great cost.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Reading from the rest of the Coffee

9
I found a French article to the Florentine Tomaso Tamponelli ...

http://cafe-turc.pagespro-orange.fr/ani ... selda.html

... who is said to be somehow the inventor of "Reading from the rest of a coffee".

My own research led me to think about a relation between Minchiate (from Florence) - Coffee reading - Bolognese Cartomancy concept - Spiel der Hoffnung, which all are related to the number 35 (36) from which the Minchiate looks as to be "the oldest".
And the Minchiate is from Florence ... as the assumed oldest Coffee reader.
Huck
http://trionfi.com
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