Pendulum users from the past

Moses was the best-known dowser of ancient times, through his success at finding water in the desert. The Bible makes many references to rods turning into serpents and being used to provide information. This was because the earliest known pendulums were flexible papyrus fronds which would sway and spin during dowsing.

Closer to home, English history is renowned for King Alfred the Great. He immortalised rod dowsing in the figure he commissioned holding two crossed 'pointers' known as the Alfred Jewel, which ca be seen in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Queen Elizabeth the First was interested in dowsing and brought German and French dowsers or 'sourciers' to England to develop tin and copper mining in Cornwall in the late 1500s.

In the 1600s, dowsing gained a mystique because it was used successfully in searches for gold. The Catholic Church banned it except for use by ordained religious members. Because of all this, somehow dowsing became labelled as witchcraft and the work of the devil. Did dread prevail in the Vatican, that self-empowerment through dowsing might damage an all-powerful church? Even today these allegations of witchcraft still arouse fear, though none have any foundation.

Modern dowsers owe a lot to religious specialists, particularly Abbe Mermet, a French priest and pioneer in the early 1900s, who successfully dowsed for water and minerals in Africa by first holding a pendulum over maps at his home in a French village. ~After solving enquiries from around the globe, including locating missing persons and helping the Vatican solve age-old archaeological problems, Mermet was honoured. He also used the pendulum as a tool for non-invasive exploratory diagnosis to locate and identify illness in the human body.

In the 1939-1945 war Abbe Bouly used is rosary to dowse for mines on the northern French beaches, saving many lives in the 1939 war and receiving the Croix D'|Honneur from Pope Pous X11.

Another Frenchman, Andre Bovis, a professional food taster, used a pendulum made of quartz crystal to rate the vibratory radiations of food. His invention for the purpose, the Bovis Biometer, is still used today.

Pendulum dowsing was also used notably by Evelyn Penrose in the 1950s for communicating with and healing animals. These healer communicators today are called 'animal whisperers'.

Penrose invited by governments, travelled the world, to advise on finding water. Somewhat eccentric perhaps, she would only make a site visit to that country after she had map dowsed in the UK and found some water with the aid of her pendulum.

In the 1900s, Ernest Hartmann, a German pendulum dowser, mapped lines of underground water flow. Areas where the water was not flowing, or its energies were out of balance, he called 'black streams'. He found that they created environmental disharmony, which he called 'geopathic stress'.

In modern times, Russian and Ukranian scientists have shown how, by living in a 'geopathic zone' of earth fault lines, geopathic stress can have a major impact on health. In the Ukraine, engineers and medical students, trained in dowsing, monitor the harmful impact of geopathic stress on wellbeing.

Because dowsing can be used for many reasons and purposes, new applications in the modern world are always developing. Traditional pendulum uses are already being mimicked by new, technological scanning devices.

Can dowsing provide as accurate, or even more detailed answers than technology?

Taken from A modern guide to dowsing by Rosemary H. C. Hudson