...in a recent admirable Life of St. Teresa of Spain, the following incident is narrated: Teresa in 1568 was offered the site for a convent to which there was only one objection, there was no water supply; happily, a Friar Antonio came up with a twig in his hand, stopped at a certain spot and appeared to be making the sign of the cross; but Teresa says, "Really I cannot be sure if it were the sign he made, at any rate he made some movement with the twig and then he said, ' Dig just here '; they dug, and lo ! a plentiful fount of water gushed forth, excellent for 'drinking, copious for washing, and it never ran dry.' " As the writer of this Life remarks: "Teresa, not having heard of dowsing, has no explanation for this event", and regarded it as a miracle. This, I believe, is the first historical reference to dowsing for water.[16][17]
The Middle Low German name for a forked stick (Y-rod) was Schlag-Ruthe[25][26] ('striking rod').[27] This was translated in the sixteenth century Cornish dialect to duschen[28][clarification needed] (duschan according to William Barrett[27]) (Middle English, 'to strike, fall'[29]). By the seventeenth century the English term dowsing was coming into common use.[30]
Dowsing
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The military have occasionally resorted to dowsing techniques. In the First World War Gallipoli campaign, sapper Kelly[who?] became well known for finding water for the British troops.[36] In the late 1960s during the Vietnam War, some United States Marines used dowsing when locating weapons and tunnels.[37] As late as in 1986, when 31 soldiers were taken by an avalanche during an operation in the NATO drill Anchor Express in Vassdalen, Norway, the Norwegian army attempted to locate soldiers buried in the avalanche using dowsing as a search method.[38]
Early attempts at an explanation of dowsing were based on the notion that the divining rod was physically affected by emanations from substances of interest. The following explanation is from William Pryce's 1778 Mineralogia Cornubiensis:
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a number of dowsing-like devices were marketed for modern police and military use, primarily as explosive detectors, such as the ADE 651, Sniffex, and the GT200.[47][48] In consequence of these frauds, in 1999 the United States National Institute of Justice issued advice against buying equipment based on dowsing.[49]
Traditionally, the most common method used is the dowsing twig, a forked (Y-shaped) branch from a tree or bush. Some dowsers prefer branches from particular trees, and some prefer the branches to be freshly cut. Hazel twigs in Europe and witch-hazel in the United States are traditionally commonly chosen, as are branches from willow or peach trees. The two ends on the forked side are held one in each hand with the third (the stem of the Y) pointing straight ahead. The dowser then walks slowly over the places where he suspects the target (for example, minerals or water) may be, and the dowsing rod is expected to dip, incline or twitch when a discovery is made.[30] This method is sometimes known as "willow witching." Some dowsers would hang a golden ring on the edge of the dowsing rod, or split the tip to slide in a silver coin.[50]
Science writers such as William Benjamin Carpenter (1877), Millais Culpin (1920), and Martin Gardner (1957) accept the view of some dowsers[71] that the movement of dowsing rods is the result of unconscious muscular action.[72][73][74] This view is widely accepted amongst the scientific community.[7][8][75][76] The dowsing apparatus is known to amplify slight movements of the hands caused by a phenomenon known as the ideomotor response: people's subconscious minds may influence their bodies without consciously deciding to take action. This would make the dowsing rod susceptible to the dowsers' subconscious knowledge or perception; and also to confirmation bias.[7][77][78][79][80]
Psychologist David Marks in a 1986 article in Nature included dowsing in a list of "effects which until recently were claimed to be paranormal but which can now be explained from within orthodox science."[84] Specifically, dowsing could be explained in terms of sensory cues, expectancy effects, and probability.[84]
Science writer Peter Daempfle has noted that when dowsing is subjected to scientific testing, it fails. Daempfle has written that although some dowsers claim success, this can be attributed to the underground water table being distributed relatively uniformly in certain areas.[85]
By now, it should be obvious that dowsing is not scientific. Nothing in our current understanding of the laws of physics could allow for such a phenomenon by which the mere presence of something hidden is communicated to a held object, irrespective of the material composition of the artefact and the detector. The closest scientific leap one can make is to the metal detector. Such an apparatus works not because it communicates with alleged spirit guides but because of the electromagnetic properties of metals. Similarly, de-mining efforts can capitalize on the metallic composition of some mines as well as to the smells of the explosives themselves, which is why trained animals such as dogs can also be used in these situations. But can underground water affect the movement of metallic rods?
Done over the course of two years in the mid-1980s and to the tune of a quarter of a million American dollars (invested by the German government), the experiment tested 500 dowsers in a barn outside of Munich. Many dowsers believe that what their rods or pendulums are picking up on is a form of radiation, and this radiation could be harmful to our health. Thus, the German government wanted to prove that dowsing was real so that these dowsers might be useful in better understanding this type of radiation. How they went about testing these dowsers is fascinating. It involves a two-story barn.
This set-up was further cheatproofed by being inspected by a professional magician beforehand and by having the position of the wagon in each test be randomly picked by a computer on the spot. These trials were also double-blinded: neither the dowser nor the researcher standing next to them knew where the wagon was during the trial. Even so, there were issues that could have helped dowsers along, such as the possibility that the sound of water turbulence coming from the floor below could have been picked up by the dowser. But this would only have helped the dowsers look more proficient than they were, and since dowsers have often explained their duds by the nearby presence of skeptics, the fact that both the German government investing in the Scheunen trials and the experimenters in charge of them professed a belief in water witching meant that dowsing was primed to prove itself once and for all.
Belief in dowsing may seem innocuous but it has actually claimed lives. In 2010, BBC Newsnight reported on a number of deaths related to the use of a bomb detector exported out of Great Britain and into countries such as Iraq, Thailand, and Kenya. When one of these so-called bomb-detecting wands was disassembled, it was shown to be an empty plastic casing. No functioning electronics were present; rather, it was a plastic handle with a metallic rod that could swing left to right. It was essentially a dowsing rod, primitive and utterly useless. People died because such an instrument failed to detect roadside bombs.
It may sound like some rather hokey hocus-pocus, or something from, say, 500 years ago. But by one estimate, some 60,000 water dowsers are practicing in America today. That's almost 10 times the number of hydrologists, who provide many of the same services as witches, substituting science for dowsing rods.
The dowsing that most people are familiar with is water dowsing, or water witching or rhabdomancy, in which a person holds a Y-shaped branch (or two L-shaped wire rods) and walks around until they feel a pull on the branch, or the wire rods cross, at which point water is allegedly below. Sometimes a pendulum is used held over a map until it swings (or stops swinging) over a spot where the desired object may be found. Dowsing is said to find anything and everything, including missing persons, buried pipes, oil deposits and even archaeological ruins.
Part of the reason for dowsing's longevity is its versatility in the New Age and paranormal worlds. According to many books and dowsing experts, the practice has a robust history and its success has been known for centuries. For example in the book "Divining the Future: Prognostication From Astrology to Zoomancy," Eva Shaw writes, "In 1556, 'De Re Metallica,' a book on metallurgy and mining written by George [sic] Agricola, discussed dowsing as an acceptable method of locating rich mineral sources." This reference to 'De Re Metallica' is widely cited among dowsers as proof of its validity, though there are two problems.
Furthermore, it seems that the dowsing advocates didn't actually read the book because it says exactly the opposite of what they claim: Instead of endorsing dowsing, Agricola states that those seeking minerals "should not make use of an enchanted twig, because if he is prudent and skilled in the natural signs, he understands that a forked stick is of no use to him."
If dowsing could be proven to work, what could the mechanism be? How could a twig or two metal wires know what the dowser is looking for (water, money, minerals, a lost item, etc.), much less where it could be found? The proposed mechanisms are as varied as the dowsers themselves. Some sources claim that strong psychic energy is radiated by the object and detected by the dowser; others believe that ghosts, spirits or mysterious Earth energies direct the dowser to their targets.
Skeptic James Randi in his "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural," notes that dowsers often cannot agree on even the basics of their profession: "Some instructions tell learners never to try dowsing with rubber footwear, while others insist that it helps immeasurably. Some practitioners say that when divining rods cross, that specifically indicates water; others say that water makes the rods diverge to 180 degrees." 589ccfa754
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