A Brief History of Dowsing

A brief history of dowsing

Christopher Bird defines dowsing as searching ‘with the aid of a hand-held instrument such as a forked stick or pendular bob on the end of a string – for anything.'  (The Divining Hand, p. 1)​.

Speculations about ancient history.
The first reference to dowsing in Western culture may be in the Old Testament narrative of Moses and the Exodus: ‘Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.’ Exodus 17:6​).
Images at Tassili n'Ajjer Rock Art, in the Algerian Sahara  (dated between 10,000 and 7000 BCE)​ suggest a human carrying a dowsing rod. An image from China (c. 100BCE-100CE) suggests the Emperor Yu holding a dowsing device of some kind.
Being able to find water, and in Emperor Yu’s case, to be able to control it through dams and dykes, was an important (possibly shamanic) skill in ancient societies.

Dowsing can be used to find anything.
The dowsing rod is ‘programmed’ by the question that the dowser has in their mind (so that, if asking the dowsing rod to show you water, it will react only to water; if you ask it to show you iron, that same rod will only react to iron).
So, while dowsing is primarily associated with finding water, the earliest clear historical references to dowsing are in the context of mining. Dowsers would use forked sticks (often of hazel), that would dip down when the dowser was over iron ore or another mineral. Athanasius Kirchner describes dowsing techniques in his Magnes sive De Arte Magnetica (1643).
A dowser was routinely part of the company needed for mining in the late middle ages. But throughout the middle ages and beyond there was much debate about how dowsing worked, and indeed whether it worked.
The first reliable account of water dowsing is associated with Saint Teresa of Avila. A Friar Antonio found water for her at the proposed site of a convent in 1568.
There is evidence of dowsing being used to select appropriate herbal remedies for patients as early as the 1650s.
The most famous early dowser was Jacques Aymes Verney. He had to ability to track (and indeed identify) criminals. Thomas Trench and William Burgoyne had similar abilities in the 20th century.

Pendulums.
In the late nineteenth century the pendulum emerged as a dowsing tool alongside the rod (or Y shaped stick). While a rod, at this early point in dowsing history, would typically have only one response in the presence of the substance being dowsed for, the pendulum gave ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses, allowing dowsers to ask more abstract questions.
Johann Karl Baehr (in The Dynamic Circle, 1861) went further, to suggest that the chemical properties of substances could be identified through the distinctive pattern that the movements of a pendulum would make when suspended over particular substances.​

Explaining dowsing.
There have been many attempts to understand dowsing through experimental research, including those of Armand Viré in early twentieth century France, and Dr Zaboj V. Harvalik in the USA in the 1950s.
In 1850 Michel-Eugene Chevreul offered a useful (and still largely valid) summary of the ‘dowsing enigma’: ​
A dowsing device's movement can be explained either
(1) As being part of the moral world and having a spiritual cause derived from: ​
(a) God or the angelic hierarchy​
(b) The devil or his minions​
(c)he mind of the dowser​
(2)  As being part of the material world and having a physical cause derived from 'occult' properties associated with matter which:​
(a) The Aristotelian peripeticians called sympathy and antipathy​
(b) The Cartesians called corpuscles, vapours, or subtle matter​
(c) Chevreul's contemporaries referred to as electricity, electro-magnetism, or electro-organism (Galvanism)​
[(d) Or, I would add, today, quantum entanglement, plasma, and information theory and the Akashic record.]​

The mysterious nature of water.
Dowsers have developed distinctive theories associated with water.
The Norwegian scientist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld argued (in 'About Drilling for Water in Primary Rocks' (1896)), for the existence of 'primary water'.  Such water is created in the earth.  It is not part of the usual hydrological cycle.​ Michael H. Salzman (New Water for a Thirsty World (1960)), and the dowser Stephen Riess, explored this idea further, and it is accepted by many dowsers today.
Dowsers have also identified 'blind springs' (or in American terminology 'water domes'). These are springs that do not break the earth's surface, so that the water spreads in underground veins. They are often associated with sacred sites (e.g. beneath the altar of an ancient church).
Following the work of Gustav Freiherr von Pohl (in 1929, Vilsbibung, modern Germany) a link is also established between water veins and ‘energies’ that cause illness in humans beings living close to them (e.g. in the veins run under a person’s house​).
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The BSD
The British Society of Dowsers was founded in 1933 by Colonel Arthur Hugh Bell DSO, OBE, MRI of the Royal Engineers (and he remained President until 1964).​ The British Army issued regulation dowsing rods up to the 1970s.


Leys
Dowsing has, in the twentieth century, been strongly associated with ley hunting. Leys are alignments of typically ancient buildings or constructions (e.g. earth works) in a landscape. While there are leys that stretch over very long distances, typically a ley should be an alignment of five sites within ten miles of each other. The width of the straight line that these sites touch is defined as a line drawn with an H or finer pencil on a one inch to one mile (or now 1:50000 Landrange) OS map.
Ley hunting, and in particular the way in which a ley hunter looks at the landscape, has its origins in the antiquarian studies of the likes of John Aubrey and Willian Stukeley in the 17th and 18th centuries. Stukeley’s argument that the landscape around Avebury represents a dragon is particularly important, suggesting that serpentine force (akin to a Chinese dragon line) running through the landscape.
In the nineteenth century William Pidgeon saw Indigenous American sites as lying in straight ‘lineal ranges’ (Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah (1858)).
In Britain, Arthur Watkins offered, in The Old Straight Track (1925), a careful defence of what he at first called ‘leys’ (and later ‘straight tracks’). Watkins claims to have had a moment of revelation while resting one day in the Herefordshire countryside. He recognised that significant features of the landscape were aligned. These alignments were understood to be lines of sight between monuments (and some natural features such as ponds and clefts in hill tops) that allowed the pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain to navigate.
While orthodox archaeology vigorously rejects his theory, he was responding to an important archaeological problem. We know that pre-Roman peoples were highly mobile. How did they manage this without modern maps?
Ley hunting clubs became popular in the 1930s (facilitated by increased access to private motoring, and the development of the modern OS map), but died out at the advent of war.

Leys and Dowsing
In 1939 Arthur Lawton suggested a strong link between water features and the routes of leys. Leys might then, he argued, be something that one could dowse for. Leys were not just lines of sight but ‘cosmic forces’.
Leys re-emerged as a topic of study in the 1950s, at first in association with UFOs. Leys, Tony Wedd proposed, were UFO flight paths.
John Michell moves from this interest in UFOs to a recognition that leys have dowsable ‘energies’ in his book The View over Atlantis (1969). In particular he identified a long-distance ley running through Glastonbury.
Hamish Miller set out to dowse this Glastonbury ley. He, along with co-author Paul Broadhurst, discovered not a single straight line, but two entwined and serpentine lines – a masculine Michael line (often running through churches dedicated to St Michael), and a feminine Mary line (often running through churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary). The line runs from St Michael’s mount in Cornwall, through Glastonbury, Averbury, Uffington, and to Hopton on the East coast.
Other long distance line have been found, including the Belinus line or Line of Albion, running from the Isle of Wight through Uffington, the Rollright Stones, Stratford-upon-Avon, Birmingham, Alderley Edge, and Manchester, to the north Scottish coast.
The dowsing and study of these lines typically takes in a great deal of local history and folklore. Leys may be associated with traditions of ‘death roads’ (the often straight path a coffin travelled from village to graveyard) or spirit paths (the believed routes taken by ghosts and other spirits).

Dowsing places and objects
Ley hunting takes the dowser on a journey between places. The places themselves can, of course, also be dowsed.
Guy Underwood explored many ancient sites in the 1950s and 1960s. He argued that ‘geodetic lines’ underpinned these sites, determining their location, and often their features. So, for example, the chalk figure of the Uffington white horse reflects lines that can be dowsed. These lines move over time, leading, Underwood argued, to the re-carving of the figure (from a dragon to a horse, and back again). Sacred sites are thus typically associated with dowsable energies.
Paul Devereux’s dragon project attempted to produce scientific measurements of the energies associated with the Rollright Stones.
Tom Graves has identified bands of energy on standing stones. Sometimes the dowser, when touching such stones, can receive a significant ‘electric’ shock.
For Graves, ancient megaliths work akin to acupuncture needles. Such needles move and control the energies (chi) in the human body. So, megaliths control the energies flowing through the earth, for the health of the landscape, its inhabitants, and farms.
Billy Gawn argues that neolithic burial chambers (such as the West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury) were constructed to generate a particular types of energy. This was required to re-balance the landscape as farming began to disrupt its original energy patterns.
Gawn also carried out many experiments (including building his own burial mounds and stone circles) on dowsing objects. He found that alignments of objects (such as small stones arranged on a table) would create dowsable lines between them, and that objects have dowsable auras and even ‘signatures’ (the distinctive manner in which the pendulum will react to the object, responding to its energetic properties and patterns).
Dowsers (such as ex-president of the BSD, Patrick MacManaway - https://patrickmacmanaway.com/) still work to enhance the energies and health of landscapes, farms, and communal spaces.