Ramblings on water divining

The person in the photo could be divining, but isn't. Wirrabara Forest, South Australia

We think of ourselves as rational beings, but at this time when science has reached enormous heights, so called 'new age' beliefs are rife and most of the old superstitions are still active in some minority or another. Many people believe that a successful site for a well can be chosen by a gifted person walking over the land with a 'divining rod'. Belief in astrology and in the efficacy of many forms of medicine not supported by valid evidence is common.

A rare flow of water in the Crystal Brook, South Australia. Recharging the subsoil and perhaps an aquifer or two

Introduction

What makes me believe that it doesn't work?

1. I have worked in the groundwater field for about thirty years. I have never seen or heard of a convincing demonstration of divining.
2. I have read of many scientifically conducted studies into divining. I have never read one that indicated that it worked.
3. Groundwater is very common, almost ubiquitous. For example clays can contain up to 50% water, although they will not yield a significant amount to a well. Do divining rods discriminate between water contained in clays and water contained in sands, gravels, and fractured rocks?

   How many deluded diviners have walked their wires or forked sticks across country like this in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia?

4. Diviners usually talk of finding narrow underground streams. In most geological settings these do not exist. The many diviners that I have talked to seem to believe that these streams are less than a metre wide and are spaced every hundred metres or so across the landscape. If this were true, then in my work locating well sites, because I ignore these 'streams', my success rate in selecting well sites would be less than one percent; however it is more like 40%. (I most often select well sites in the Australian desert.)
5. There are only four known forces in nature: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Of these, only the first two are significant over the distances people usually deal with. (The force exerted by wind or water currents is due to the electromagnetic forces between the electrons 'attached' to the molecules of the fluids and those of the body they are interacting with. A similar thing applies when one solid body presses against another: the force comes from negatively charged electrons reacting against each other.) Scientific instruments are much better at measuring these forces than are unassisted people. Why can't any instruments measure the 'force' that the diviner claims to feel? In all other fields Man has been able to produce instruments that are more sensitive and more reliable than the Human sense of feel.
6. The Australian Skeptics Association has a standing US$10 000 prize for anyone who can demonstrate that they can effectively divine water beneath the ground. No-one has ever claimed the prize, although many have been tested after agreeing to the terms of the test. (The Australian Skeptics Web site referred to above also mentions a prize of $40 000, but seems unclear about whether this was a once only, or a standing offer.)
7. The James Randi Eductional Foundation has a "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge" "to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event". I believe that this includes water divining/dowsing/witching, but I am not sure on this point.

   Well fed woolly sheep and a full farm dam. It's a good year at 'Elysium' in the Clare Valley of South Australia. Less call for diviners in a year like this.

8. Then there is the old saying; "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich". If I could reliably divine groundwater I could be a very rich man. I'm sure numerous diviners are just as clever as I am, many would be more clever; why haven't they taken advantage of their skill? As an example, suppose a new mining town requires a water supply in a difficult groundwater area. If I had the skill I could contract to select sites at $2000 for each successful one, while I would pay the drilling costs for any failed wells. The mining company would be foolish not to accept my offer, and I could not fail.
9. Finally, some say that it has been demonstrated that wells drilled on sites chosen by divining have no better a success rate than those drilled elsewhere. I'd go further, wells drilled on divined sites have a poorer success rate than when the sites have been selected by rational means. See divining success rate below.
10. There are no skills that come naturally to us and do not need training and practice; are we to believe that divining is unique in this way? We cannot walk, swim, garden, hunt, work wood, work steel, even dig a hole in the ground without learning how. Yet diviners, we are told, just have the 'knack'?

Other questions and curiosities...

A limestone sea cave in Southeastern South Australia Limestone country like this is the only place that you may really find the underground 'streams' that the diviners generally believe are all over the place.

1. Does the 'force' diviners feel only propagate vertically? Why should it? Why shouldn't it propagate at 45 degrees from the vertical in some places and 60 degrees in others; or in different directions at different times? How can anyone know how it propagates? Yet, in my experience, all diviners assume it propagates vertically.
2. I met a man who claimed to be able to divine for both precious opals and water. He said that the rods worked for opals in country where you would expect opals and worked for water where you would expect water. I find this incredible (especially when one considers that groundwater can be found almost anywhere). I think it was Pliny who recorded that some people believed they could divine for metals. How do these people learn to discriminate between - for example - water, iron, and aluminium, all of which occur almost everywhere. (Presumably divining rods didn't respond to aluminium until it was discovered. It is now known to be the third most common element in the Earth's crust.)
3. There are so many different methods. Some people use a forked stick, some use 'L' shaped wires, some (mainly in the USA?) use a pendulum. Some claim to be able to divine over a map - they don't even need to go to the land where the water supply is required.
4. Some people claim to be able to differentiate between fresh and saline groundwater. Yet how did they learn to recognize a salt stream and a fresh stream? Did they attend a water divining school where they were taken over a known salt stream at one place and a fresh stream at another place so that they could learn the difference? Or is it just some sort of 'gut feeling'?
5. Others claim to be able to detect moving water, but not still water; apparently they don't know how very slowly most groundwater moves.
6. One man who claimed to have the gift explained why diviners are never rich with the theory that when any diviner asks money for using his power he looses the power. What a wonderful explanation!

Some errors of diviners

• Any diviner can find a water pipe. In fact tests such as those conducted by the Australian Skeptics show that diviners cannot detect water pipes.
• A diviner told me that he detected two streams that cross each other. I asked him if they were at different depths. He said no, the same depth. How does one stream cross another? Can the reader imagine one surface stream (river, creek) crossing another?

Extracts from Geological Survey of South Australia Bulletin No. 23, 1946

Some divining history

Divining rods dug out of an abandoned mine and exhibited at Zeehan Mining Museum in Tasmania.

"The Scythians, Persians, and Medes used them. Herodotus says that the Scythians detected perjurers by means of rods. The word rhabdomancy, originated by the Greeks, shows that they practiced this art; and the magic power of Minerva, Circe, and Hermes or Mercury is familiar to classical students. The lituus of the Romans, with which the augurs divined, was apparently an arched rod. Cicero who had himself been an augur says, in his treatise on divination, that he does not see how two augurs, meeting in the street, could look each other in the face without laughing. At the end of the first book of this treatise he quotes a couplet from the old Latin poet Ennius, representing a person from whom a diviner had demanded a fee as replying to this demand 'I will pay you out of the treasures which you enable me to find.'

Marco Polo reports the use of rods or arrows for divination throughout the Orient, and a later traveller describes it among the Turks. Tacitus says that the ancient Germans used for this purpose branches of fruit trees. One of their tribes, the Frisians, employed rods in church to detect murderers. Finally, if we may trust Gonzalez de Mendoza, the Chinese, who seem to have had everything before anybody else, used pieces of wood for divination."

Divining success rate: A major study in NSW, Australia

End of extracts for Geological Survey of SA Bulletin

Index

On this page...
Divining history
Divining success rate
Geological Survey of SA
Introduction
It does not work
Other questions and curiosities
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