Rituals

A ritual is what happens when a culture stops improvising with tea and settles on a sequence. The leaf is the same leaf; what changes is the order of the acts around it, and who is allowed to perform them.

Filed here: chanoyu, where four hundred years of written theory sit behind the placement of a single cloth; gongfu cha, where a small pot and a great deal of leaf are used to pull a tea apart across a dozen short infusions; the Moroccan pour, which is a demonstration of hospitality before it is a method of brewing; the samovar, the Tibetan churn, the Argentine gourd passed around a circle, and the British afternoon, which is a ritual whatever anyone who performs it thinks they are doing.

These pages are not brewing instructions, and they are not quite culture either. Brewing asks what happens to the leaf in the water. Culture asks what the drink came to mean. A ritual is the hinge between them — the part that has to be done in a particular order, in front of particular people, for reasons nobody involved can usually state.

A ritual anyone practises is one anyone can describe. If the way tea is made where you are is not here yet, it belongs here.