The power of Tea

Douglas Adams, in the voice of Arthur Dent, tried to pin down what it was about tea that was so important to the British. Uncharacteristically, I don’t think he succeeded exactly - the question still hangs: what, exactly, is so special about the dried leaves of a Camellia plant soak in hot water?

Few things in all of history have gathered around themselves the depth of tradition that tea has. In Eastern and Western cultures, this beverage and its preparation have become elaborately imbued with spiritual meaning. Adams, outside of his fiction, often discussed the proper way to make a cup of tea - emphatically specifying the temperature of the water (exactly boiling) and the time of steeping. Even the most cursory glance at the rules of a Japanese Tea Ceremony will reveal a mind-boggling array of rules on the correct methods of preparing and drinking the beverage. Elaborate tea procedures pop up in the Arab world, in India, and in Tibet, and in the American south where Iced Tea is not just some cold tea, but a very specifically brewed and sweetened concoction. Throughout all of this lore, there runs a core of empirical truth - the best flavor comes of tea steeped in water that is at boiling temperature when added to the leaves. Oddly enough, virtually no other aspect of tea procedure seems directly, or at least reliably, related to the flavor of the actual cup of tea produced.

What is it about tea that have made it such a universally consumed and also universally ritualized substance? Sure, it is a mild stimulant, and debatably addictive. But then so is coffee. It is ancient, which is on edge it has over coffee, but in England, in which both beverages arrived contemporaneously, Tea has become a stereotypical cornerstone of British culture, while coffee is simply consumed.

Tea has several things going for it. First, it is pleasant to drink, and second, it has a procedure.

Procedures have a way of turning into rituals, and there are a few good reasons why. It takes a few steps to prepare tea. Not just a few steps in fact, but a few steps performed correctly. The tea will be lousy if you don’t get the water hot enough, or steep long enough, or put too much in. The ritual is the mnemonic that encodes the procedure so you don’t forget all the steps - in the same way little rhymes take advantage of the brain’s intrinsic love of rhythm to recall things like the States, musical notes, or the order of the planets. Humans evolved language long before we figured out how to write things down, and oral history was the only history for a very long time. The natural rhythms of the body were used to memorize the carefully constructed stories that comprised our known history, and those same rhythms and mental grooves are used to remember not just words but actions.

It’s deeper than that, even. Those mental grooves are part of the structure of our brains, they are not only the channels down which we can pour the actions of making tea or the names of the planets, but using them gets down below our conscious thought. Rituals act on us below the level of consciousness itself. (I suppose it could be argued that the names of the planets must be having a deep emotional impact on school children all over the world, and I haven’t seen any compelling reason to think they don’t. )

So Tea has become not just a nice soothing beverage, but a ritual. Something whose proper observances can become an issue of considerable emotion in a Briton confronted with weak and tepid American tea. Something more elaborate and proscribed than simply boiling some water and soaking some leaves. In a word, something Important.

The fact that the human mind works this way is something we owe to evolution, but also something that turns out to be quite useful and powerful when consciously examined. Evolution may see no particular value in the ceremonies of Tea, but having prepared us to spread and store knowledge in this way, it has provided us with a terribly useful tool. Practitioners of neuroscience have recently begun to understand some of the mechanics of our ritual memory and its emotional ties, but the earliest leaders of the earliest religions surely knew how to use the trick to good advantage. Because ritual connects to deeper parts of us, its practice can affect us in ways that seem almost supernatural. A sense of profound peace, connection, divine presence or personal power can result from simple rituals, which in turn give those rituals the feel of magic - easy enough to attribute to spirits, cosmic energy, psychic powers, or God.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been in a church crowded with believers, during a sermon. The connection and coherence of the emotional soundtrack is palpable. This phenomenon of experiencing the same emotions through the same rituals at the same time combines a room full of disparate individuals for a short time into something much greater. One can’t help but feel that enough people thinking and feeling on the same track could move mountains - they hardly need their god to be real if they can turn that coherence of thought into coherence of action. There is great power in ritual, and like any other power inherent in our own minds and bodies, it is one we can think about and use rationally. We are perhaps lucky that most such rituals consist of ancient political, hygienic or monetary considerations long since divorced from our modern reality. Any brief research into the elements of a modern wedding ceremony (pick a culture) should be enough to convince you that in general, our everyday rituals are the result of long forgotten social pressures whose embodiment in ritual long outlived their use.

New rituals of course, are created all the time. From the most mundane of daily habits that become stylized and ingrained (the morning Starbucks for instance) to the carefully constructed new rituals of the young pagan or alternative lifestyle communities, ritual is woven out of old threads and new ideas all the time. One doesn’t have to be superstitious or even of a spiritual nature to see the value in using our minds own learning tools to embody our beliefs and ideas into a more lasting, communicable, and emotionally connected vessel.

Now let us all bow our heads….. and consider carefully the rituals we wish to construct for ourselves. I’ve got a pot of water on the boil already.