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Dowsing, historically referred to
as Rhabdomancy, has been practised for thousands of years throughout a number
of countries. So where does it originate from and how has it evolved to today's
modern practice? Our concept of dowsing today comprises of searching for
hidden objects (like water, iron, oil or precious artefacts) with the use of
equipment, be it a twig from a tree or specially designed pendulum that have
been proposed by people attempting to take a 'scientific' approach to the ancient
art. Yet no matter how many historical accounts or dowsing devices we can find
from Ancient Egypt or other cultures, dowsing is thought to originate from a
much earlier time; if you think about it, the idea of having 'intuition' as
to the whereabouts of an object or person, you are applying a dowsing-type ideology,
which has probably been used long before dowsing equipment was created. Artefacts from the time of the Egyptian Pharoahs suggest
that dowsing in its modernly recognisable form originates from the use of split
reeds, and from China, where Emporer Kwang Sung was thought to have engaged
in the art. In 1556 Georgius Agricola published De Re Metallica,
a book whose illustrations showed dowsers looking for veins of metal using a
forked stick that Agricola referred to as a Virgula Furcate. In Seventeenth
Century France, dowsing became popular, with Baron and Baroness de Beausoleil
establishing a mineral mining company using dowsing to search for new potential
mines. However, the art remained mystical, and was condemned by the Catholic
Church as it was believed that the Devil controlled the movement of pendulums,
leading them to hidden objects. The de Beausoleils ended their lives in the
Bastille after revealing their use of alchemy. Dowsing enjoyed a revival under the Victorians, perhaps
owing to their interest in the occult and unknown. It is thought to have been
popularised by German miners who arrived in Cornwall and located veins of tin
which resulted in the creation of mines. The most famous of Victorian dowsers,
John Mullins, was an English mason, who took up dowsing on a near full-time
basis more than two decades after the estate on which he worked was visited
by a dowser in 1859. He supported the use of a forked hazel twig, taking payment
from customers only if he was successful and on many occassions he was, finding
wells to improve water supplies. Mullins insisted on making pendulums from the
local environment in which he was working, and the success of the business resulted
in it later being taken over by his sons. Accounts show that dowsing was used in the World Wars,
but of all people, it was the scientific community's Albert Einstein who praised
the potential of dowsing. He acknowledged that the art was regarded on the same
mystical level as astrology, but explained it as a way of using the human nervous
system to detect factors that were "unknown to us at this time". Precisely a century after John Mullin's 1859 experience
with dowsing in Wiltshire, England, Californian dowser Verne Cameron offered
to locate the US Navy's fleet of submarines, which he achieved along with finding
many Russian submarines as well. But Cameron's success embedded itself throughout
his career: the South Californian city of Elsinore in which the dowser lived
was waterless, buying nearly all its water supply from Los Angeles. Cameron
helped locate one of the region's largest wells under the dried-up bed of a
lake. Staying in the US, the government's Department Office of
Environmental Management has spent significant amounts of taxpayers' money on
researching, and trying to justify the use of, dowsing in the search for underground
anomolies such as leaks. While one US Geological Survey report published in
1917 dismissed such research as a "misuse of public funds", the department
has since spent more than $400,000 researching one Ukrainian's offerings, the
scientifically named technique of Passive
Magnetic Resonance Anomaly Mapping or 'PMRAM'. The Ukrainian, the only
person in the world capable of using the method, claimed that it could be used
to detect underground leaks and other anomolies, a claim that has yet to be
conclusively proven. Dowsing continues to be used today, though dowsers and
the majority of the scientific community remain divided on its success. Nevertheless,
historical accounts have shown many occassions on which dowsing has proven useful
to mankind. See also:
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