Dowsing for Answers

In western Zambia, a team of technicians is working with the local people to give them access to a precious commodity: water. These experts aren’t scientists or linguists. They’re dowsers.

David Dixon and his team have been traveling to Zambia for the last five years, at their own expense, to dowse for water in the arid area near Angola. Using dowsing rods and other tools, the team helps the local people locate underground streams and when they sense that the water is high enough, they instruct the locals where to install a pump. The team claims they have brought water to dozens of communities and more than ten thousand villagers. But, to quote the article where I found this information, their claims “leave scientists cold. For how on earth can dowsing work?”

I found this article, cited at the end of this post, because I picked out one of most interesting books in our library – about Earth mysteries. I was reading a section on dowsing this evening and the obvious struck me – that it’s a form of divination. And since Jung considered all types of divination to be based on synchronicity, it’s worth a deeper look.

In a nutshell, dowsing is the ability to locate something that’s usually beneath the surface of water or earth, using a hand-held tool – normally a wooden rod shaped like a Y. Dowsers watch for and interpret their body’s involuntary movements. It’s not the rod that moves on its own – but the dowser’s hands that twitch seemingly through unconscious signals. So when the rod tips downward or to the right or left or does nothing at all, the dowser has to be able to interpret what it means. In this way, it’s similar to the I Ching, the tarot, astrology – you have to interpret the pattern.

Guy Underwood, a leading British dowser in the 1950s and author of The Pattern of the Past, identified three “dowseable patterns” of underground water lines: aquastats, geostats, and tracklines. He claimed that many of them coincided with ancient sites like Stonehenge, Salisbury cathedral, and some of the ancient roadways. Many of them apparently follow the earth’s ley lines – the supposed lines of energy that form a grid across the planet.

The only dowsing rod I’ve ever used was a metal clothes hanger that I twisted into a Y to look for a missing wallet or keys or something. But I’ve used a pendulum, another form of dowsing, with some success from time to time, usually to answer yes or no questions.

Dowsing is probably the manifestation of psychic ability and has been used at archaeological sites with some success, with diagnosis and healing, as well as locating water and oil. There’s plenty on the Internet about this ancient technique. But I found two really intriguing articles about it.

Check out the New Scientist on this topic and here for a story about using dowsing in Africa to find water. The Africa story appears to be a translation from a language I don’t recognize.
– Trish