Often referred to as water-witching or water-divining, dowsing is not necessarity concerned with locating water, but can be used to discover the whereabouts of other natural substances, people, objects, or the souce of illness. Dowsing as a form of divination was practiced in ancient Egypt and may even be older; it is known all over the world. Because of its high success rate, in the Middle Ages dowsing was associated with witchcraft (Luther proclaimed that it was the work of the devil), but Christian dowsers managed to escape stigma by "baptizing" their dowsing rods and giving them Christian names.
In the popular imagination, the dowser's tool is a forked rod, but it may also be an angled rod, such as a coathanger; a wand or "bobber"-a weighted branch; or pendulum. Dowsing rods are usually fashioned from willow, rowan, ash or hazel twigs, but metal (particularly aluminium and copper), plastic and bone may be used too. In practice, the dowser concentrates hard when "turning" the rod, then walks across (or stands over the map of) the location believed to hold the substance in question. When the rod detects the presence of the substance, it jerks violently. No one knows exactly how dowsing works, but it is commonly believed that dowers have an innate psychic propensity. As in Feng Shui, the dowser's ability to "connect" with the inherent characteristics of the surroundings or lancscape is also important. Other explinations include the sensitivity of the dowser's tools to electromagnetic and electrostatic force fields.
With the nineteenth-century advances in scientific knowledge, dowsing correspondingly declined. It regained its popularity in the twentieth centry, largely as the result of the efforts of the French priests Alexis Mermet, Alex Bouly (who re-named it "radiesthesia) and Jean Jurion. Now quite well established and respected, dowsing has been successfully used in the fields of archeoloty and geology and in the search for oil, gas, and minerals-and even to try and locate missing persons and explosive mines (as in Vietnam). Although medical dowsing is prohibited in the United States, it has been used elsewhere to diagnose illness, usually by rotating a pendulum over the patient's body. |
