A report on the November 1996 meeting
Professor Wayne Pryor of the University of Cincinnati has studied groundwater geology for three decades and has many years experience with water problems and in prospecting for oil. In this work he has encountered many dowsers also known as water witchers or doodle buggers. These persons search for water and much else by psychic, magic, or spiritual means.
The practice of dowsing is very old, and may go back five thousand years to Babylonian civilization. In the Bible, Moses striking a rock to bring forth water has been interpreted as describing dowsing. The first published examination of these practices was made by Georg Agricola1 in his famous book on mining and minerals in the early Renaissance. Professor Pryor thought Kenneth Roberts2 naive praise of dowser Henry Gross in the fifties may have revived the ideas and the practice. A definitive scientific source is The Dowsing Rod3, a water supply paper of the Geological Survey. More recently, the Rand Corporation has made a controlled study of dowsing with negative results. The recent article on dowsing in the Smithsonian4 magazine can only be characterized as shallow.
The major oil companies have, of course, looked into all possibilities for finding underground minerals. Most of their studies are proprietary. Results are thought to have been uniformly negative, at least no positive results have been announced or published.
The tools used by dowsers are in the first place a forked stick cut preferably from willow or witch hazel. The first, Salix saliforma, has an affinity for growing near water, so its use is a form of sympathetic magic. Witch hazel, Hamamelis virginiana, actually has a tendenc of growing in metalliferous ground. Other tools may be balanced pieces of wood, L-shaped rods in which the short leg is held and the sought after material affixed to the long end. Various pendulums are used, often weighted by a vial of the material searched for. Hanging this from a gold chain, and wrapping it around the wrist near the pulse is said to improve the power of the instrument. Some "sensitives" use no tools at all, just their psychic or shamanic powers of divination to find things and answer questions.
Finally, some doodle buggers use a black box which contains a variety of highly secret materials selected by and only known to the practitioner. Professor Pryor mentioned one who used a "devonian period fossil octopus tentacle" to find devonian age oil! These black boxes may in turn be hooked up to electric power or batteries, to an antenna, to a probe or wand, and may display dials for the operator to use. Black box users are more likely to claim ability to find valuable minerals, such as silver, oil, copper, or even gold. Such operators are also more likely to lay claim to a certain technical expertise, calling their dowsing rhabdomancy or radiesthesia. In fact, their talk and promises may include scientific or technical terms, or even achieve a "high plane of techno-babble."
Among things sought after by dowsers is first of all water. Success rests on the fact that groundwater is virtually ubiquitous at some depth. It is distributed in the pore spaces and fractures in the rock, not in veins of any kind. The flow of a well depends on how readily and quickly the water will trickle from the rock into the casing. In Professor Pryor's experience there will be few dowsers in areas where water is difficult to find, but many where water is plentiful. In such areas well drilling contractors are likely to maintain their own dowsers in order to prevent interlopers from insisting they drill in an inconvenient location, far from electric connections or from the house or barn where the water is wanted. Nor do contractors enjoy being accused of having "crushed the vein" with their heavy equipment, when little water is found where the forked stick indicated. Most water witchers are honest believers and themselves convinced of their power. Consequently their charges are likely to be modest, with a money back policy, if no water is found. Nobody, neither dowsers, nor well drillers, nor geologists are a hundred percent successful, since the success of a well is difficult to predict. And, none of them is likely to advertise their failures.
Oil is probably the second most sought after material. This is more the domain of the black box men, some of whom are charlatans. Prospecting for valuable metals also attracts dowsers. Beyond these, almost anything may be sought by psychic methods. All manner of lost objects are dowsed for. Among these water dowsers have some success with finding old drain tiles in the swampy glacial lake plains south of the Great Lakes. These were laid in the last century, and sometimes surface indications of their presence are noticeable. Dowsing methods have been used to find dead bodies or lost persons, as well as to detect crimes, both with rather indifferent success. Where dowsing rod and pendulum are used to determine the sex of unborn children, diagnose illness, or generally predict the future, it shades off into the vast plethora of weird, supernatural methods.
Various theories are put forward to explain why these non-scientific methods should work. Sympathetic attraction to wands or pendulums weighted with the thing sought is an ancient concept. The thought that individuals possess special psychic powers was already held by shamans and doctors of primitive peoples. Related is the idea that the dowsing instrument or the vein of mineral may be guarded by spirits, which in turn may be thought to represent either good or evil. To the skeptic the practice represent merely another belief in magic. In the case of water witching and tile finding the lay of the land, the hillsides and swales, or the presence of green plants may give a dowser useful indications where water is available near the surface. This is particularly the true if the dowser knows the local region and is familiar with its plant life.
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought