Dowsing:
Ancient History
Written by
Lloyd Youngblood
ASD Trustee
The Ancient
art of dowsing has been practiced throughout
millennia, although the names used to identify
it may have changed in different cultures and
eras, the techniques have not.
In this vein,
in 1949, a party of French explorers (while
searching for evidence of lost civilizations in
the Atlas Mts. of North Africa) stumbled upon a
massive system of caverns known as the Tassili
Caves, wherein many of the walls were covered
with marvelous pre-historic paintings.
Among the many fascinating wall murals, not only
did they locate an art gallery devoted
exclusively to the depictions of spacecraft and
ET's, they also found a remarkable huge wall
painting of a dowser, holding a forked branch in
his hand searching for water, surrounded by a
group of admiring tribesmen. These wall
murals were carbon dated and found to be a least
8000 years old.
During
several research journeys to Egypt and the
Middle East, I have photographed etchings on
4000 year old temple walls of pharaohs holding
devices in their hands resembling dowsing tools.
Cairo Museum is holding ceramic pendulums which
have been removed from thousand-year old tombs.
In China,
there is an etching of Chinese Emperor Yu who
ruled China 2500 years ago, and in his hands he
holds a rather bulky turn-pronged device that
resembles a dowsing device.
Many passages
in the Bible allude to dowsing, relating in
considerable detail how both Moses and his son,
Aaron, used a dowsing device referred to as "the
Rod" to locate and bring forth water. In
the Old Testament, the Prophet Eziekiel reports
that King Nubucadnezzar of Babylon, uncertain as
to which city he should attack. Jerusalem the
capital of Judah or or Rebath of the Ammonites
(today's modern-day Amman, Jordan) directed his
dowsers or deviners to select the best target
and they chose Jerusalem, leading to its seizure
and the long "Babylonian captivity of the Jews".
The Jews
learned the ancient art from their captors and
in the Old Testament Prophet Hozea wrote:
"They now consult their pieces of wood then the
wand makes pronouncements from them!"
The
historical records of Greece refer to dowsing
and the art was widely practiced on the Island
of Crete, as early as 400 BC. Researchers
have uncovered evidence that the Pytheon Oracle
of Delphi used a pendulum to answer the
questions posed by her clients, kings, queens,
nobility and military commanders who traveled
great distances to confer with her.
In this
regard, E.S. Cumbie in his fine book entitled,
"The Psychometric Pendulum and the Pendulum
Board" has this to say about dowsing and the
ancient priesthood. "In ancient times, the
priesthood felt that the layman did not have the
belief, knowledge or training to contact the
cosmic mind for enlightenment. So the poor
people were forced to rely upon the priests to
gain the guidance they sought from a higher
source and the priests used dowsing devices to
make this contact."
For example,
in Ezra 3:63 of the Old Testament, it is
written: "The governor told the people not
to partake of the most holy food until the
priest contacted Urin & Thummin". In
Samuel 28:6 it says, "When Saul inquired of the
Lord, the Lord did not answer either in dreams
by the prophets or by Urim & Thymmin".
Cumbie is convinced that the words Urim & Thumin
referred to dowsing devices which could have
supplied crucial information and sometimes
refused to do so because the priestly dowser
held the wrong attitudes or phrased their
questions in an incorrect manner.
The blind
Greek poet Homer refers to dowsing as
Rhabdomancy, which means Devining Rod in Greek.
That same word is still used today in the
Italian language to denote dowsing. In his
monumental work "The Oddesy" Homer also called
the dowsing rod the Caduceus, which was passed
from Apollo (or Hermes) to Asclepious, the
ancient Greek God of healing. This
mystical, legendary staff with its entwined
serpents has become the universal symbol of
healing, used by medical societies around the
planet.
Back in the
1400's, dowsing as we think of it today, was
called "Virgula Devine" in Latin which meant
dowsing with the rod shape. In
Germany, during this period of time, dowsing
devices were used extensively by miners seeking
mineral ore, who referred to the forked stick as
"Deuter" - an umbrella word in German - meaning
"to show", "to indicate", "to point out", "to
auger", "to strike".
According to
Christopher Bird, author of the classic book,
"The Divining Hand", no one is absolutely
certain of the origin of the verb to dowse".
But it seemingly made its first official
appearance in 1650 in an essay written by the
famous English Philosopher John Locke whose
noble writings inspired the framers of our own
Declaration of Independence and The Constitution
of the United States. In his essay, Locke
wrote that by the use of the dowsing rod, one
could devise or discover water and precious
minerals (such as gold & silver and mineral ore)
Locke has appropriated his phrase from the long
dead English west country language of Cornwall -
where in Cornish Dewsys meant "Goddess", and "Rhod"
meant tree branch, and from which he "coined"
the phrase - Dowsing Rod.
In the 1700's
and 1800's in England, Germany and France
various books on mining and engineering referred
extensively to dowsing, including the "1747
Mining Dictionary" and again in Bordlase's 1758
"Natural History of Cornwall", and also "The
1831 Quarterly Mining Review". Because the
ancient art was widely used by miners in Germany
for hundreds of years to locate water and ore
deposits, today in that country libraries and
museums of natural history, science, mining and
engineering, private collections of art and
sculptures have displays of woodcarvings,
paintings and drawings, porcelain creations,
coins, etc ... featuring dowsers holding forked
sticks.
Interestingly, London, England's 1912 edition of
"Mining Magazine" published the first
translation of a Latin Opus into English.
It was called "On Metals" in praise of dowsing
which had been first published 356 years
earlier. The translators were a
professional American mining engineer and his
wife. The engineer later gained fame and
won notoriety as the 31st President of the U.S.
-- Herbert Clark Hoover. As Chris Bird
notes, "God knows, had President Hoover been an
expert dowser himself, he might have predicted,
and therefore, prevented the great stock market
crash of 1929."
Collectively,
in some of the world's finest libraries (e.g.
The Library of Congress, The Widener Library of
Harvard, The Sterling Library of Yale) you can
find approximately 3,500 specialized books on
the ancient art and the list grows steadily all
the time.
First the
question -- what is dowsing? Well, for
those of your who are unfamiliar with the term,
let me say that you won't find anything of value
in current dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Those comments, prepared by orthodox scholars,
are incomplete and inaccurate, giving only a few
descriptions, generally summarizing all with the
cryptic comment, that dowsing is simply
"folklore".
But as
Christopher Bird points out in his "The Divining
Hand", ... "throughout history, men and women
characterized as diviners, dowsers, soothsayers,
seers, mystics, mediums, clairvoyants, shaman,
witch doctors, wizards & etc., have developed
and practiced arts regarded as divine or demonic
(depending on the viewpoint) and are able to
answer questions that logical reason could not
provide. in essence, these people
through self training, diligent practice and a
profound knowledge of how the universe really
functioned, simply "knew things" via the faculty
of what has been called the "hidden senses" or
E.S.P.
Engineer
Raymond C. Willey's (one of the founders of ASD
back in 1961) 1970 book "Modern Dowsing" gives
on the the best definitions I have encountered.
Willey says: "Dowsing is the exercise of a
human faculty, which allows one to obtain
information in a manner beyond the scope and
power of the standard human physical senses of
sight, sound, touch, etc."
Author Chris
Bird says that "to dowse" is to search for
anything. This is generally down with the
aid of a hand held instrument, such as a forked
stick, a pendulum bob on a string, L-shaped
metal rods or a wooden or metal wand.
The next
question is simply: How does dowsing work?
Countless theories abound, even today, yet, I am
not absolutely certain that any one, or even a
combination of such theories, discloses the
whole story.
I am
persuaded that Moses and the ancient priesthood
clearly understood the mechanism by which it
worked, however, they never released such
critical data to the masses. Therefore,
recognizing that to have done so, would have
meant a loss of power and prestige for them.
The premier consideration is simply this -
dowsing works - and with proper understanding,
training, time, patience, study and regular
practice (especially in the beginning stages) it
will work for the most important person in the
world - you!
When inventor
Thomas A. Edison, was once asked, "What is
electricity?" He replied: "I don't
know either - but its there - so lets use it".
