Caffeine and the Sacred

My ideology of tea- and coffeeism

Electroplate teapot, designed by Christopher Dresser in 1878-9 (Image: British Museum)

I’ve only ever managed two viral posts on social media, and curiously, both were about coffee or tea pots. The first was a tweet last year celebrating the Bialetti, a stovetop espresso maker which I use religiously. In the other, more recent post, I asked twitter for examples of artefacts that, in hindsight, seem to have anticipated the future. My own illustration was an electroplate teapot designed by Christopher Dresser in the late 1870s. Based on its stark geometric appearance, you would think it had been made fifty years later.

Maybe the popularity of these two metallic kitchen devices was just a coincidence (a bizarre coincidence, given how similar they look), but the author of a publication called “the pathos of things” is hardly going to settle for that conclusion. I’m not surprised people can be so appreciative of something as ordinary as a coffee maker or teapot, because these sorts of objects provide our most intimate encounters with design. Across a very wide range of cultures, the drinking of warm brews – and caffeinated ones especially – has been a daily source of comfort, sociability and rest. It is an intriguing and wonderful aspect of human nature that such basic pleasures have, in various times and places, given rise to more or less elaborate forms of ritual. 

The most famous of those rituals is surely the Japanese tea ceremony, a tradition dating back to the sixteenth century. Unfolding in the distinct setting of the tea hut, which in turn is bounded from the chaos of the world by the surrounding tea garden, the classical tea ceremony is somewhere between liturgy and art. It is rooted in the Zen Buddhist principles of wabi sabi, which venerate a kind of authenticity that comes with humility and the acceptance of imperfection. But according to the great proponent of the Japanese craft tradition Soetsu Yanagi, the “way of tea” is inseparable from the spaces and simple ceramic objects that accompany the ceremony. “It was not an intellectual concept,” Yanagi writes, “but rather consisted of concrete objects that acted as intermediaries – the tea house, the garden path, the utensils. It was these that allowed the tea masters to plumb the depths of beauty.”

In Yanagi’s interpretation of the ceremony, the ideal of sabi aims at “the cessation of self, the cessation of greed, and the superseding of dualism,” so as to experience “the beauty of simplicity.” This all sounds rather New Age today, but I think it can be put in terms that most tea and coffee drinkers will appreciate. When we step aside from the flow of life to prepare and drink these substances, we feel, however briefly, a sense of completeness, a sense of being at home in the world. This doubtless has something to do with the psychoactive properties of the liquids themselves, but it also stems from our emotional connection to the ritual with its familiar choreography and objects.

We can view the significance of tea and coffee from a much wider angle. There are few better examples of commonplace products that have been entwined with major historical processes. Britain’s longstanding association with tea is, of course, a result of its connections with Asia; first its commercial dealings in China (the original source of Europe’s tea and porcelain tableware), and then its empire in the Indian subcontinent, where plantations were established on an enormous scale. The 1840s saw the appearance of another famous aristocratic ritual, afternoon tea. But thirty years earlier, a Swedish visitor to Britain had already noted the role of tea in working class life, observing that “in the morning one may see in many places small tables set up under the open sky, around which coal-carters and workmen empty their cups of delicious beverage.” A century before that, many Londoners had preferred the wine of Arabia, as coffee was nicknamed. The city’s coffee houses, where people of various backgrounds came to trade news and opinions, played a part in the emergence of modern banking, journalism and political parties. There were also some unfortunate developments involving tea in Boston harbour.

Ukiyo-e woodblock print by Mizuno Toshikata, c. 1895, showing preparations for a tea ceremony.

The surprising resonances of tea and coffee have continued in more recent times. In response to my tweet about the Bialetti, a number of people pointed out that this object brought together two substances – espresso and aluminium – at a moment when, in Mussolini’s Italy, both were being cast as emblems of national dynamism and virility.

If you wanted a symbol for our own way of life, you might choose the takeaway coffee cups that overflow from the bins of train stations, high streets, and just about every other public space. Alongside anti-depressants, attention deficit medication and various stimulants, caffeine is now part of a pervasive chemical regime that allows our productivity-obsessed societies to maintain their relentless pace. But this only underscores how precious are the more reflective, convivial and civilised ways of enjoying it. Maybe we could repurpose the Japanese phrase “way of tea” (I’ve also seen “teaism,” which I like even more) to represent this simple virtue of human cultures: that something as mundane and primitive as the pleasure of a warm drink can evolve into the beauty of ritual, a glimpse of the sacred in the midst of the profane.