March 30, 2023 • 44 mins
Dowsing, aka water-witching has been around a long time. And you might be surprised that's still a thing. We get into all the nitty gritty of this pseudo-science today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Attention, DC, Boston, Toronto and any place that can fly
to those cities. We're gonna be live on stage doing
our thing again. I'm May fourth, fifth, and sixth this year.
That's right. And I gotta say, we've done this topic
a few times already and it's a real banger and
we can't wait to come to your city and have
you see it with us. We're so excited and we
(00:22):
just can't hide it. So go to link tree slash
sysk and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,
(00:43):
in low data mode and this is stuff you should know.
What does that mean? I just got a message flashed
on my screen that Jerry's in low data mode. Oh really,
it means she's low key. Olivia helped us with this one.
And you know what Olivia has gotten great at lately
is titling these episodes in fun ways. Yeah, for sure,
you want to. You want to say this one too, Yeah,
(01:04):
And it's generally just for us, which I appreciate. But
this is about dousing aka water witching, the practice of
using sticks or metal rods or something to walk around
and have and tell you whether or not there is
water underground or iron ore or body being buried or whatever.
(01:27):
So we'll get into all that. But Olivia titled it
the surprisingly long lasting art of dousing, and I think
it's appropriate she called it an art because it's definitely
not a science, although people have tried to apply science
to it in interesting ways. Yeah, and a lot of
people say it's pure bunk. I just think it's very
(01:49):
interesting and I've never known much about it. And that's
how I'm kind of choosing topics these days, is what
do I want to learn about? You know? Sure me first,
that's right, and through me we can be the conduit
to others too, amazing new ideas like dowsing. And actually
we shouldn't say this is a new idea for us,
(02:11):
because this um we actually did a chapter in our book,
remember I dowsing, that's right, And in that chapter I
went back and reread it and I was very satisfied
that we basically took the stance that we're taking today,
that you just took that basically. You know, some people
call it bunk. I don't know enough about it to
say either way, and just to keep our minds open.
(02:33):
And even though it is bunk in a lot of ways,
we're not like gonna poop poo or tear it down
like we did crop circles, you know. Yeah, I agree. Um,
it's something that people have been doing for over five
hundred years and and like we said, it's got a
bunch of different names, but dowsing, basically as we think
(02:55):
of it today is something that started in sixteen century
what would now be Germany and the mining industry there,
which was a new thing that was really growing fast,
and they were looking for or underground veins of ore.
And it looks like as early as fifteen thirty there
was somebody, a mining expert name Yorg Ericola who talked
(03:20):
about dowsing and divining rods in a way that he
wasn't like, hey, this is what this is like, as
if people understood what it was right in his book
De ray Metallica, is that really what it was called? Yeah,
that's a great name. So yeah, the Germans are pretty
much unambiguously the people who created dowsing at least in
(03:40):
the roughly modern era, and it got imported to England
pretty quickly and France also, So in England they were
using it for mining, just like they were in Germany
to discover or but France also adopted it and they said, hey,
we're going to use this for water instead. I didn't
see where they got that idea from or why, but
they I don't know. There's like supposed references in the
(04:03):
Bible which may or may not reflect housing. Who knows.
It's possible that they thought that's what it was used
for in France. I'm not sure. But by the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century you had people a lot of
people in Western Europe walking around with forked sticks looking
for ore and water and basically being like this, this
(04:24):
really works. This is how we're going to find water.
And back then it made a lot of sense because
there wasn't any other way to find water, so why
not walk around with a forked stick? Yeah, and the
idea we'll get into sort of how people do it
later on, but is that you hold a forked stick.
Back then, at least that was sort of what they
were using exclusively, and it would dip down when there
(04:47):
was something underneath you of note, there was a man
named Robert Boyle, known as a father of chemistry in
the seventeenth century, who described it as a forked hazel twig.
I believe there were other woods used hazel as one.
It's kind of mentioned a lot. Yeah, what was one
of the other ones I've seen peach rowan, which I
am not familiar with the rowan tree, but apparently there's
(05:10):
plenty of them here and they bear fruit, but it's
a it's like a fruit wood that's supposedly really good
for it. Um, which hazel is another one. And then
willow um, which makes a lot of sense because willow
trees tend to grow where there's water near the surface,
so it would kind of make sense that you would
use the willow branch. And then you'd turn around and
(05:30):
point to the willow tree and say down there, that's right.
And then if it's the nineteen fifties through seventies, you
could switch your child with it. It's right. My grandmother, oh,
my dear sweet, my dad's mom opal, she would make
us go pick out our switch, no, which is I
think was a tradition. This ouf like, go pick out
(05:52):
the switch that I'm gonna use, And that was the
punishment that was the fear, and you would you go
out there and you pick the flimsy twig that you
could find and come back. And then she she never
touched us. She didn't. Oh that's good, she didn't do that. Similarly,
when you were really bad, Grandma Opal would make you
dig your own grave in the backyard, really get to you.
(06:16):
But she never. Oh man, I miss her. She was great,
lived to one hundred and one. I know, that's amazing,
not bad. So we mentioned other things that you could
find underground, like dead bodies. This happened for a while
in the late seventeenth centuries. They started getting into things like, hey,
(06:36):
we could find treasure using these y rods. We could
find we could find the bodies that we were talking about.
We could find a property boundary that no one can
agree on. Yeah, that one's really out there. Well, and
that's very like, I mean, you better agree on who's
doing doing that job between two neighborhoods who are at
(06:57):
dispute with one another. You know, yeah, for sure, it's
called the best dowser in your area. Let's use my guy.
He'll show you show us where the property line is exactly.
But there was a French peasant named Jacques Amar, who
in the latest seventeenth century, as the story goes, was
water dowsing, and the rod pointed down very sharply, and
(07:18):
he said, hey, let's get some guys out here, dig
down and get this water. And before you knew it,
they struck body and it was a murdered woman. And
he not only found the body, but then went to
the widower and the family basically and said, I'm going
to point this thing at you guys, and the thing
dipped at her former husband. He fled the scene and
(07:43):
was found out to be the murderer. And so now
all of a sudden, dowsing rods are, for a while
at least, and for this guy, for sure, a way
to root out murderers and dead bodies. So much so
that in leone Um there was a group of like
I think, a husband and wife who owned a wine
(08:03):
shop there who were murdered four years later after he
discovered that first body, and they actually contacted jack Amar
and said, can you come help us find who did this?
And so he set about with his dowsing stick looking.
I think he actually got into a boat at one
point and sailed around looking for a murderer, rooted one out,
(08:23):
he found one in another town, and that guy actually
confessed and then fingered two other accomplices who had fled
France by that time. So you're like, well, that guy
was very special. As far as dowsing goes, there's a
lot of ways to interpret it to if you're going
to be a skeptic, where you could say, like, this
(08:44):
is the sixteenth century or seventeenth century in France, and
if people thought that you were a murderer, it didn't
matter whether you were a murder or not. You were
in big trouble, and so you might flee France if
you got worried that people were coming to look for you.
Who knows, Or you could also believe that Jacques amar
had some special talent or gift that allowed him to
(09:05):
douse murder suspects, among other things. And that's that's actually
a point that kind of underpins the entire dowsing tradition.
Most dowsers believe that it's innate in them, maybe innate
in everybody, and they're just a little more their sense
is a little more refined, but that it's not like
(09:25):
you're picking up some magic stick. It's the stick is
somehow an instrument that you're you're special innate ability is
using to kind of guide you. Yeah, and you also
forgot the last possibility there, which is through a rock
in the seventeenth century France, and you're probably gonna hit
two people who murdered wine shoff owners. Right, Yeah, that's
(09:46):
a good point too. Eighteenth century dousing was not so
much a thing for mining anymore in Europe because science
had improved such that they were like, now we've got better,
better ways to discover or this or under our feet.
And into the twentieth century, we'll get to kind of
where it stands today later. But of course the Nazis
(10:07):
got involved because they were into all sorts of weird
esoteric methods of doing anything, and the stupid Nazis and
Himmler of course said hey, let's look for explosives, let's
look for water, let's look for gold, or just get
some Nazis out there with dowsing rods and tell me
what happens. Yeah, apparently they trained whole units, because again
(10:29):
the Nazis were very stupid. And then in the twentieth century, chuck,
if you were educated by or employed at Harvard in
the nineteen fifties, there was a good chance you were
going to study dowsing. Well, a lot of Harvard people did,
weirdly sure, but I mean, how many really were there
(10:50):
out there at the time. This is probably a significant people,
probably like a dozen. So yeah, a full third of
Harvard educated people were studying dowsing in the fifties. One
guy Raid Hyman and another Elizabeth G. Cohen, they worked together.
They were sociologists from Harvard, and they studied dowsing by
by surveying agricultural extension agents, the people who were the
(11:16):
conduit between education and you know, the rural areas, right,
So these people had a foot in each camp, so
they were they were a really good group to study
dowsing or dowsing beliefs. They found that every single state
head dowsers, mostly in the rural areas, and that in
those rural areas where the dowsers were most densely concentrated.
(11:39):
There was about an average in the United States in
the nineteen fifties about thirty five dowsers per one hundred
thousand people. That's a huge number of dowsers in the
twentieth century. Middle twentieth century, still working in these rural areas. Yeah,
I would agree, that's a lot. Uh. Yeah. They also
did a bunch of, like you said, interviews with these
agricultural agents, and it was basically like a little more
(12:02):
than half thought it was bunk. About twenty percent said
they believed in it, about twenty four percent said they
were open minded to it, kind of on the fence.
And one thing that they discovered that Hymen and Elizabeth
Cummen discovered was basically people it's not that they so
(12:23):
much believed in dowsing as being like this foolproof thing,
but more like, hey, we can't get a lot of
guidance on where to find water, and like it doesn't
cost a lot to hire a dowser, so it's better
than nothing. If I can pay someone in the nineteen
fifties like five bucks to walk around my field for
a good place to drill, it's better than zero, right.
(12:44):
And it's not like they just tapped like todd to
go out there and like use a stick to be
like drill here. These dowsers that they were employing had
some sort of success in their track record, so yeah,
there it made it a little easier to be like
I'll just give this a try, because what else, what opportunity?
(13:05):
What other alternatives do I have? Yeah, there was another
Harvard or named Ivan zee Vacht who did some studying
of this, and like he said, he found that there
were certain people who just seemingly were more gifted than
others at it. It was a part time thing. Usually
people did make some pretty good money doing it, and
(13:26):
it was almost always something that men did and not women.
And like you mentioned, they they generally believed it wasn't
like a snake oil thing where they were like, let
me see how many people I can rip off with
this stick. Um, they believed in what they were doing.
It seems like about across the board. Yeah, he said,
universally basically. Um. He so he studied specifically Homestead, New Mexico,
(13:49):
U and he found that Um that he well, he
basically lumped it in with folk magic, which I think
is that's fair. Um. And he said that that DAL
is the most commonly used type of folk magic and
agriculture in these rural areas. Like another type would be
using the zodiac to predict when to do certain farming
(14:11):
like harvesting or planting or something like that. But you're
more much more likely to find find people who were
willing to believe in dowsing than than that. Yeah, and
that even educated people believed in it in the area.
And one reason you can kind of give for that
is that these areas were hard up for water, so
(14:32):
it kind of I would guess that like the lack
of availability of water or at least easy access to
it would kind of help suspend your disbelief more than
somebody who you know has a municipal water supply running
into their house, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Speaking
(14:53):
of VAT, he continued his work into the late sixties
along with his colleague Linda K. Barrett, and they started
researching Urban Dowsers, which is a pretty good band name.
Yeah it is. What are they? What kind of music?
I know this is your specialty. I'm going to just
(15:17):
go fall back on the standby of math rock. I
would say Pavement, like maybe a Pavement tribute band. Even
that's kind of what it sounds like to me. But yeah,
I'm gonna just go with math rock, Okay. They study
the American Society of Dowsers the ASD. They were founded
(15:38):
in Vermont in the early nineteen sixties. I think they're
about a thousand strong. And these are people that lived,
you know, these are urban dowsers. They live where they
have city water systems and plenty of water, and they
used dowsing for other things, sometimes to detect if you
had a medical problem, sometimes to look for something that
someone lost. They basically argued like, hey, you should be
(16:03):
using us all over the world where people don't have water,
Like why is everyone against dousing when you should be
enlisting us? Right, And the ASD still survives today. They
have multiple chapters all over the world. As a matter
of fact, even though it's the American Society of Dowsers,
they do have other chapters in other countries and they
(16:26):
still dowse. They still meet, they share tips and tricks
with one another. I believe they have newsletters. So they're
still around for sure. So should should we take a
break and then talk about how to do it? Definitely? Okay,
we're gonna take a break, We're gonna get our coat
hangers out, and we're gonna get going right after this.
(16:56):
I've still stumped. There's a about ten percent of my
brain is still working out what music urban dowsers play.
I'll come up with it. I can't that's a that's
a tough one. So I mean, if it were like,
if they were clever and they wanted to kind of
engage in a bit of word play, then I would
say they're like neo country pop, you know what I mean,
(17:17):
like Billboard chart pop Urban Dowsers, like they can their
music can be enjoyed in the city or the country.
You mean, like the guys that sing about tailgating and
stuff like that. Precisely, I mean, what you got, Luke
Bran or Urban Dowsers? Which one you're gonna do? I
predict Luke Bryan's gonna change his name to Urban Dowsers
in the next five years. Hey, I'm not gonna not
(17:39):
Luke Bryan. I don't know it's music, but he seems
like a good guy from what I understand he is.
All right, So, how did dows you take the Well,
there's a couple of ways. You can have that y
shaped rod and you hold it by the why and
have the the single stem pointing out with your palms upward,
(18:02):
the why pointed upward. In fact, that about a forty
five degree angle. Then you walk around and you wait
for that thing to I guess to move in your hands.
You will you wait for it to make a barrier
on your own son, and it difts down. Like we said,
we mentioned the different kind of sticks that were used.
The kind of dowsing I see a lot on YouTube
(18:22):
because I did a lot of watching of this stuff
is the coat hanger. One where they take and it's
not always coat hangers, but just two metal L shaped
rods and you hold it by the small side of
the L in each hand and walk around and then
these rods, you know, come together and cross one another
at a place where you're standing. Right. Apparently, the American
(18:45):
Society of Dowsers says, far and away the most frequent
tool these days to use for dowsing is the pendulum. Yeah,
which can be anything from a crystal on a piece
of hemp string to a paper clip on some leftover
thread or down flossy even who knows it doesn't matter
because again, remember this this is a tool that the
human is a conduit for. It's not like the tool
(19:07):
itself is super important. Yeah, it's just it just kind
of points out what the human can sense innately. And
with the pendulum, they basically say, if it's swinging forward
to backward, that's yes meaning okay, there's some water here,
or it swings from side to side for no. And
because you can get a yes or a no out
(19:29):
of this pendulum, you can use it for plenty of
other stuff. In fact, there's something called information dowsing, which
is essentially like fortune telling. You ask the dows the
dowsing rod or dowsing pendulum certain questions in the way
it responds will give you the answer you're looking for. Yeah,
it's interesting to think. It just kind of hit me
today that they said that this is usually man, and
(19:52):
this is sort of the one area there where that's true. Like,
have you ever heard of a of a man that's
a fortune teller or palm reader? It seems like that's
usually women, right, Yeah, there are plenty of women dowsers
these days. I think it was just in that fifties
survey though. Yeah, yeah, because I've seen interviews with multiple
(20:14):
women who are dowsers. All right, all right, so that
that clears that up. We talked about walking across the
field and stuff. That's sort of what everyone usually thinks
of when they think of dowsing or water witching is
something they call it here in the States, but there's
also map dowsing, which that pendulum comes in handy, or
you might just use like a pencil or something where
(20:36):
you go to like a map and do the same
thing to narrow down what field you should walk in
to find whatever you're looking for. The pencil one. I
think there's a writer named Robert Ader who wrote a
pamphlet that's on the American Society of Dowser website where
he talks about using that pencil to find whatever, and
(20:57):
you'll hold that pencil over a map, try and tune
in whatever that means to what you're trying to find
and feel for the location. And he's like, listen, I've
looked for water on the moon with my Moon maps.
I've looked for the grave side of Bigfoot, and I
didn't big dig a Bigfoot up, but I found a
spot on the map where there are definitely some large
(21:20):
humps of earth right full stop, so exactly so um.
Also in that pamphlet, Robert he basically says like how
you ask the question and how you word it is
really important. And he gave an anecdote about when he
was looking for water on the moon with the map
of the Moon. He asked the he asked the pencil, like,
(21:43):
show me where water on the moon is, and he
said the pencil started to float over in his hand over,
don't be ridiculous here over his shoulder and point toward
the moon behind him out the window, and he realized,
oh no, I had to ask it where on the map?
Show me on the map where there's water on the moon.
And then the pencil pointed it out. So I feel
(22:04):
like here we kind of reached like the point between
finding water on the moon and finding bigfoot graves where
most people are going to take their leave of dowsing
and be like this, this doesn't work. But if you
step back and kind of strip away all the add
ons and stuff that's been you know, put onto it
over the years, and just go back to searching for
oars or water using this stuff, um, you can kind
(22:28):
of not regain credibility. That's not the word I'm looking for.
The phrase. It's more it comes it's yes, sure, it's
at least less loony. How about that? Yeah? Did that
guy also in the pamphlet say I found the Tykondo
Rogan number two to be quite cheeky. Man, that's an
arcane pencil reference right there. Shout out to David Reese. Yeah,
(22:51):
he got that all, but he's slapping his knee right now.
So how does this um supposedly work? You know, it's
not like they're just like, hey, this is magic or whatever.
There have been people that have tried to explain like
how this might work, and some of the explanations, you know,
early on were obviously some kind of magnetism or magnetic
(23:13):
field or something that people can pick up on on
planet Earth. There was a a German alchemist name Johann
Tolde who wrote under the pen name Basilius Valentius, great name,
and put out this theory that the metals in the
earth basically breathe a breath that rises out from the
(23:35):
earth that attracts the rod, and that you know, the
trembling rod would would shake when it hits that breath. Yeah,
and this is back in the day, right, And the
German miners of his day were like, we think it's
just magnetism, right, that's a kind of a convoluted theory
you got there, Valentis. But um, yeah, So I feel
(23:58):
like there have been people over the years who've kind
added unnecessarily to the mystique. Because if you think about it,
you're like, Okay, this is just magnetism. Somehow we're picking
up magnetism. That makes sense, that that's logical. It doesn't.
We don't have any way to explain it. But it's
a lot better than breath coming up. But if you
stop and think about it, you know, maybe this guy
(24:18):
was just basically using a different word or a different term,
or embellishing on the idea of magnetism or something like that.
And if you kind of read into the explanations over
the years buy dowsers for what dowsing is or how
it works, you kind of get the same premise that
somehow the person is picking up on something that's invisible
(24:40):
to us, but that person can still sense. Yeah. I
watched this school YouTube. There was this guy. It had
one hundred and eighty five thousand music. I don't know
if he even said his name, but he's a YouTube
dowser guy who came on to kind of talk about it,
and he just he had a very nice demeanor. He
had this big beard and he was just sort of like, listen,
this coat hanger isn't magic. I'm not magic, he said.
(25:04):
I just believe that there are certain people who can
sense voids in the earth under their feet, and some
people are better at this than others. Other people have
pointed to like certain animals that could do this. I
know that, of course he's are all anecdotal, but like
mister ed, like, hey, put peanut butter in that guy's
(25:25):
teeth and he'll say anything you want. Or but like
you know, animals like mules plowing fields would there are
anecdotal stories of them like stopping at places and like
refusing to sort of walk over an area that later
turns out there was something buried underground that would have
like harmed the plow or something like that. To say,
but this YouTuber was he was a good guy and
(25:46):
he was just like, listen, you believe it or not.
I'm not saying you should go do this stuff or
you should believe it, but this is just what I
feel like people, there are certain people who can sense
avoid in the earth. I was waiting for you initially
to say where he was saying, like the rod's not magic.
I'm not magic, my beard, that's magic. No. He turned
(26:09):
out to be fairly sensible, And this is something I
remember from childhood though from church, is that Christians have
long sort of had this. You know, it's kind of
the dark arts in a way, and so anytime it's
something in that realm, Christians are going to be very
much like, no, no, no, I don't remember specifically what
it was, but I have some vague recollection from my
(26:30):
childhood of hearing about water witching and someone saying I
don't know who it was, but someone in my life
could have been someone at church and in my family
even saying like no, no, no, that's like, that's like,
you know, black magic basically, right, exactly, call it folk magic,
call it whatever it's. It's still not it's still not
(26:51):
God performing a miracle. It's you exactly yet, and therefore
it's blasphemous and demonic and the devils somehow involved. We
just know it. I'm sure it's you, just priest's fault
to some degree. That's that same impulse, So we don't
understand it, so it must be demonic. The irony here
is that what they're afraid of and don't understand probably
doesn't even exist. It's not even necessarily real. So they're
(27:14):
afraid of chance happenings, of people just randomly getting something
right once in a while. Yeah, Martin Luther apparently was
not a big fan of dowsing. That doesn't surprise me.
And there was a guy named Johann Gottfried Ziedler. He
wrote a book that was basically like, Hey, these people
are tapping into something called the world spirit, and if
(27:36):
you tap into that, man, you can find out anything
you want, like whether somebody who died went to heaven
or hell. You're not supposed to know that, you're not God.
He's keep away from dowsing. Essentially, what Zidler's message was, Yeah,
I'm sure there was a lot of Christian pushback on
that guy. So as as science kind of progressed people,
(27:57):
there's a really long tradition of people trying to apply
science to explaining dowsing UM. And I say we take
our second break and come back and get into some
of those because there, this is where it gets super
fascinating to me. Let's do it all right. So we
(28:25):
were going to talk a little bit about the beginnings
of UM, sort of the modern take on things, and uh, well,
I guess this is less modern because this is the
seven late seventeen hundreds. But in sixteen ninety three there
was a French priest and a doctor of divinity named
Ley Lorraine de Valmont. Great book, great name, but not
(28:45):
a good hotel name at all. He really attract attention
to you. I think it's a great book, great name.
I wrote a book about um Amar. Remember Amar who
found the I think the murderer Jacques Amar the probably
the most famous dowser of all time. I think, Well,
did he have a one hundred and eighty five thousand
views on YouTube? Would? He would? He was quite a showman.
(29:08):
So he wrote a book when he basically wrote about
Amar success where he claimed that certain particles um arose
from water underground, from treasure, from a dead body, let's say,
and they would enter the body through the pores and
that some people, like this YouTube dowser said, were just
particularly sensitive and that seems to be the sort of
(29:30):
the refrain that, like he said earlier, some people just
claimed to be more sensitive to this either magnetic field
or these this energy coming out from the ground or
these voids in the earth, right um. And this is
about where science starts to kind of try to be
applied to explaining dowsing. And that Dave Almont termed these
(29:55):
particles lays at tombs because Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry,
had already identified that they're probably something called adams in
the world and that they are just out and about.
And so what low Lorraine de Almont was saying was
that we're some people are sensitive to those last homes,
(30:16):
and that kind of kicked off that tradition of like, oh,
there's this new science. Let's figure out how it applies
to dowsing, right, or hey, let's I believe In the
nineteen hundreds there were French priests that practice what they
called radiaesthesia, which was let's use dousing to detect a
radiation a various kind. Let's find it to diagnosed disease.
(30:38):
And this, you know this again is when it veers
away from like water and iron ore or something right
to a little more of the hokey pokey. But again,
radiation had just been discovered, and in no time, three
French priests are applying it, saying like, that's really detecting.
That explains it. Some other people have said, oh, it's electricity.
(30:58):
Some people say yeah, it actually is radiation, or it
is magnetism or something like that, and then you've got
the other camp that's like, no, it's esp or these
people are conduits for God or something like that. Um,
what was the thing you found that I in reply
sent you a picture of Professor Frank. I don't remember
where I saw that, but it was a really neat
explanation of it. Um. So it was basically saying that
(31:22):
we have, like our cells are capable of accepting electricity
or some sort of charge or whatever, and that that
ores in water emanate things that can charge those cells,
and that that's kind of how we pick it up. Okay,
it's I mean, it's just another way of putting it.
It's just again, we know about cells. We know that
(31:44):
cells currency is electricity or that they can transmit electricity.
So therefore maybe those that were on a cellular level,
some people are picking it up. And that's what dowsing is.
It's it's that same tradition. Now we understand something a
little more about the universe's figure out how it applies
to dowsing. Right, perhaps it is the when in terms
of human bodies, it is the soul. Perhaps you know,
(32:08):
maybe that's dowsing is the is the window to the soul.
I thought the eyes were Nope, that's wrong. It's dowsing
as far as modern science goes. And this is something
that you reminded me that we talked about in our
Wigia Boards episode, is that people were doing this with
their hands with something that's called idiomotor movements, which is
(32:33):
your muscles are twitching because of some kind of subconscious
mental activity that's going on. Yes, and that ties into
that last explanation I was mentioning about the cells and
the electricity. They were basically saying like, yeah, that's totally correct.
The ideomotor movements are triggered by the emanations from the
ground that enter your cells and trigger your muscle movement
(32:56):
unconscious to you. Yeah, someone may be good at finding
water because they've spent a lot of time in a
particular area finding water, and there they have this subconscious
thing to where they're picking up on the vegetation or
the way the ground is and they don't realize it.
So then they'll stop at a place that their body
is saying, here is water, and it's translating to that
(33:20):
idiomotor movement making the rod dip. Right. That's one explanation, right,
that they have some sort of what's called non conscious intelligence. Okay, Um.
The other explanation I was saying. Is like they were saying, No,
the water or the ore itself is putting something up
from the ground that's triggering your muscles to engage in
(33:43):
the idiomotor movement. So they're both saying, yes, there's idiomotor movement.
The dows or the people the person holding the dowsing
rod is causing these movements without being aware of it.
But the different explanations of why is that either the
person is noticing some vegetation that they're out of where
they have linked to water unconsciously, right, or the other
(34:04):
one is that the water itself is emanating something that's
triggering that idea motor movement in the person. It's a
little more than potato potato that there's a pretty big
difference between those two, even though they share the majority
of the explanation in common. No, I agree, they're quite different.
I mean, if you're out there screaming at your phone, guys,
(34:26):
there's water under the ground all over the place, So
anyone can take a couple of coat hangers and dig
down twelve feet and find water. Probably the YouTuber acknowledges
this and says, yeah, there's water all over the place.
He said, but some places are better to get water
than others because you don't just go dig a well
anywhere on your property. You try and home in on
(34:48):
a place that has got you know, better water, more
readily available to pool and where you can get it easier.
That's why people bring in geologists. That's why people bring
in dowsers. They have done experiments where I think BBC
Science Focus reported on them, where they did like randomized
experiments with water pipes underground, they found that dowsers had
(35:12):
no success at finding the water. There have been other
experiments under control conditions where they find that dowsers don't
do any better at finding water than chance would. Our
old buddy James Randy offered a million dollars to anyone
that could prove it. That has not gone claimed to
my knowledge, No, and not just proved that, but proved
(35:36):
like any real paranormal ability. Proving dowsing would have probably
won that prize for sure. Yeah. The thing is is
um if you're a if you're a dowser, if you're
a geologist, you poop poo dowsing. If you're a dowser,
you probably poopoo geology. And if you're involved in excavating
um wells, you probably poop poo both um. There was
(35:59):
a there was a guy interviewed in an Aon article
that Olivia turned up written by Lois Parshley, to where
the guy this guy whose job it was was to
excavate wells in California. As part of his job it
was to hire either a geologist or a dowser or both,
(36:19):
and he was saying, neither one's particularly good at at
reliably finding a good water source. They're both used different techniques,
but neither one's you know, dead on. So it's not
like in this guy's mind, geology is just supplanted dowsing
in rural water thirsty areas because the geologists you pay
(36:42):
a lot more for a geologist and then they may
or may not turn up water, whereas the dowser you
pay I think I saw about a tenth of what
you pay a geologist for a day, and they may
or may not turn up water. So it just kind
of makes sense in that rural area, like, hey, if
neither one's going to reliably turn up water, but there's
(37:02):
a chance either one will, I'm gonna go with the
person who charges away. There was also the case of
this science blogger from the UK, Sally Lapage, who was
having a water pipe installed, and I believe the UK company,
the water company sent out at dowser and Sally was like,
(37:26):
wait a minute, what is going on here? Like what
century are we living in? And the UK water company
kind of shrugged and Lapage did a little investigating and
found that ten out of twelve water companies in the
UK use water dowsing, and one of them, I believe,
the one that did her parents' house said in a
(37:46):
tweet a we found that some of the older methods
are just as effective as the new ones. We also
use drones and satellites. But you know, a little bit
of money spent toward dowsing is no big deal, whereas
a lot of other people were like, you shouldn't be
spending any of our money on this. Yeah, because again
it's pseudoscience, right, So yeah, you can understand how people
(38:11):
would be upset about that, and then at the same
time it really kind of undermines a lot of geologists work.
If water companies are using dowsers still too, I have
a question. I'm naive. I don't know a lot about machinery.
Isn't there some kind of machine that can look into
the earth and find good water pretty easily. I would
(38:34):
guess that there is as well, but I don't necessarily
think so, because if I wouldn't geologists just be employing that,
And if so, why would they have a reputation for
not being able to find water very reliably? I mean,
the answer is there can't be otherwise of course they'd
be using that, But like, I don't know, it seems
like some kind of seis mcgrab and someone a lot
(38:55):
smarter than me is going to explain why, which I
that's what I love doing about the show. Someone's going
to explain to me and we'll read it on the air.
I would guess, though, Chuck at this point, So that
really cool tool where you put a shotgun shell in
and it stamps the earth and then it gets an
image back on radar or something. Yeah, that's what I'm
talking about, right. Those things are awesome, but I think
they only go so deep, and you're probably looking for
(39:17):
water much deeper than that. That would be my guess.
Like if I was watching a movie and it was
about one part of it had a family trying to
dig a well and they called up some guy, well,
wells are us came out and like just planted some
funky machine down on the earth and and he said,
this thing's gonna it's on wheels, and it's gonna drive
(39:38):
around this acre of property and tell you exactly where
the water is. I would totally believe that's a thing.
Sure I would too. And in the exact same way
people who hire dowsers and watch somebody walk around their
property with the stick believe what they see too. Probably
wouldn't be a very good movie, but that is a huge,
huge area for improvement from what I can tell researching this.
(39:59):
Unless somehow dousing community has managed to completely science silence
the geological community as far as like water finding goes,
I don't. It just seems like the geologists aren't like,
of course we can find water, and here's how. I
just haven't really seen it that where there's like this
(40:19):
reliable way to find water. Yeah, I just don't understand it.
So if you're a geologist who finds water, we would
love to hear how you do what you do and
how reliable it is. Yeah, one more thing, chuck, before
we go. In that AEON article, there was mention of
(40:40):
a study that was done at the University of British
Columbia by a psychologist named Helene Gaucho and she is
the one who seems to have turned up that idea
of non conscious intelligence where people using a Wuiji board
we're actually better at ants in questions. They got more
(41:01):
questions right when they were using a Wuigi board than
when they weren't using a Wuiji board, which is really
really weird. And so Gaucheou explained it by saying, like,
we might have some type of intelligence or intellect or
memory that we can't access consciously, but if we kind
of put the power of answering off onto something else,
(41:25):
like a Wuiji board, were able to access it because
I guess we get our conscious mind out of the
way a little bit. And that kind of was applied
to this idea of dowsers that these people, like you said,
could recognize vegetation in the wild. There's certain kinds of
rocks that suggested there's water somewhere, and they didn't realize
(41:45):
that they've done this, that they've made that connection, but
it's still there. It's non conscious intelligence, and when they're
holding those dowsing rods, they're able to kind of put
the power of explaining into the dowsing rod and access
that nonconscious intel diligence, and that that's how they'd turn
up water when they managed to turn up water. Interesting.
I thought that was pretty interesting too. Well, I certainly
(42:08):
don't have everything figured out, so who knows? Who knows? Well,
if you're a member of the geological community, let us
know how you find water and how reliable it is.
We'd love to hear that. And since I spoke to
the geological community directly, that means, of course it's time
for listener mail. I'm going to call this overdue read.
This came in at the end of last year, and
(42:31):
this is from Emily Kenyon and the UK okay specifically
in England specifically, and I know I'll always get these
shires mispronounced, but Leicestershire. This is apparently we have gotten
Emily going on a lot of fun things because of
our show. I want to say thanks for all the
excellent work. Let you know that your podcast has I'm
(42:53):
sure we'll continue to make subtle and positive impacts on
my life. And Emily listened to some highlights and now
have an active post up here composting episode. Very nice
we now regularly have breakfast for tea as I wanted
every breakfast you discussed in that episode, but as we
don't breakfast together as a family to solve the problem. Okay, okay.
(43:15):
I asked for the book Radium Girls by Kate Moore
for Christmas from the Dial Painters episode and I've just
finished it. It was stunning, rage inducing, and inspiring all
at once, and I just ordered a copy for a friend.
Very nice. I'm planning on making the water Shed fried
Chicken recipe this week off the back of the Fried
Chicken episode. Nice. That's gonna knock your socks off. And
(43:38):
my house has never been cleaner and my garden more
well kept since I found you guys during Lockdown. You
made pottering around a joy, learning and chuckling at the
same time, although I'm with Chuck on the economic stuff,
which is to say, I guess no. Thank you, thanks
again for all these positive impacts on my life, and
Happy New Year to you guys and the team from
(43:59):
Emily Emily Kenyon. Thanks a lot, Emily. That's fantastic. I'm
glad we could have some positive effects on your life.
That was very nice. Chuck, good good selection. It's good.
If you want to be like Emily and let us
know how we've impacted your life, hopefully for the better,
you can send us an email. It's stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(44:22):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Attention, DC, Boston, Toronto and any place that can fly
to those cities. We're gonna be live on stage doing
our thing again. I'm May fourth, fifth, and sixth this year.
That's right. And I gotta say, we've done this topic
a few times already and it's a real banger and
we can't wait to come to your city and have
you see it with us. We're so excited and we
(00:22):
just can't hide it. So go to link tree slash
sysk and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,
(00:43):
in low data mode and this is stuff you should know.
What does that mean? I just got a message flashed
on my screen that Jerry's in low data mode. Oh really,
it means she's low key. Olivia helped us with this one.
And you know what Olivia has gotten great at lately
is titling these episodes in fun ways. Yeah, for sure,
you want to. You want to say this one too, Yeah,
(01:04):
And it's generally just for us, which I appreciate. But
this is about dousing aka water witching, the practice of
using sticks or metal rods or something to walk around
and have and tell you whether or not there is
water underground or iron ore or body being buried or whatever.
(01:27):
So we'll get into all that. But Olivia titled it
the surprisingly long lasting art of dousing, and I think
it's appropriate she called it an art because it's definitely
not a science, although people have tried to apply science
to it in interesting ways. Yeah, and a lot of
people say it's pure bunk. I just think it's very
(01:49):
interesting and I've never known much about it. And that's
how I'm kind of choosing topics these days, is what
do I want to learn about? You know? Sure me first,
that's right, and through me we can be the conduit
to others too, amazing new ideas like dowsing. And actually
we shouldn't say this is a new idea for us,
(02:11):
because this um we actually did a chapter in our book,
remember I dowsing, that's right, And in that chapter I
went back and reread it and I was very satisfied
that we basically took the stance that we're taking today,
that you just took that basically. You know, some people
call it bunk. I don't know enough about it to
say either way, and just to keep our minds open.
(02:33):
And even though it is bunk in a lot of ways,
we're not like gonna poop poo or tear it down
like we did crop circles, you know. Yeah, I agree. Um,
it's something that people have been doing for over five
hundred years and and like we said, it's got a
bunch of different names, but dowsing, basically as we think
(02:55):
of it today is something that started in sixteen century
what would now be Germany and the mining industry there,
which was a new thing that was really growing fast,
and they were looking for or underground veins of ore.
And it looks like as early as fifteen thirty there
was somebody, a mining expert name Yorg Ericola who talked
(03:20):
about dowsing and divining rods in a way that he
wasn't like, hey, this is what this is like, as
if people understood what it was right in his book
De ray Metallica, is that really what it was called? Yeah,
that's a great name. So yeah, the Germans are pretty
much unambiguously the people who created dowsing at least in
(03:40):
the roughly modern era, and it got imported to England
pretty quickly and France also, So in England they were
using it for mining, just like they were in Germany
to discover or but France also adopted it and they said, hey,
we're going to use this for water instead. I didn't
see where they got that idea from or why, but
they I don't know. There's like supposed references in the
(04:03):
Bible which may or may not reflect housing. Who knows.
It's possible that they thought that's what it was used
for in France. I'm not sure. But by the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century you had people a lot of
people in Western Europe walking around with forked sticks looking
for ore and water and basically being like this, this
(04:24):
really works. This is how we're going to find water.
And back then it made a lot of sense because
there wasn't any other way to find water, so why
not walk around with a forked stick? Yeah, and the
idea we'll get into sort of how people do it
later on, but is that you hold a forked stick.
Back then, at least that was sort of what they
were using exclusively, and it would dip down when there
(04:47):
was something underneath you of note, there was a man
named Robert Boyle, known as a father of chemistry in
the seventeenth century, who described it as a forked hazel twig.
I believe there were other woods used hazel as one.
It's kind of mentioned a lot. Yeah, what was one
of the other ones I've seen peach rowan, which I
am not familiar with the rowan tree, but apparently there's
(05:10):
plenty of them here and they bear fruit, but it's
a it's like a fruit wood that's supposedly really good
for it. Um, which hazel is another one. And then
willow um, which makes a lot of sense because willow
trees tend to grow where there's water near the surface,
so it would kind of make sense that you would
use the willow branch. And then you'd turn around and
(05:30):
point to the willow tree and say down there, that's right.
And then if it's the nineteen fifties through seventies, you
could switch your child with it. It's right. My grandmother, oh,
my dear sweet, my dad's mom opal, she would make
us go pick out our switch, no, which is I
think was a tradition. This ouf like, go pick out
(05:52):
the switch that I'm gonna use, And that was the
punishment that was the fear, and you would you go
out there and you pick the flimsy twig that you
could find and come back. And then she she never
touched us. She didn't. Oh that's good, she didn't do that. Similarly,
when you were really bad, Grandma Opal would make you
dig your own grave in the backyard, really get to you.
(06:16):
But she never. Oh man, I miss her. She was great,
lived to one hundred and one. I know, that's amazing,
not bad. So we mentioned other things that you could
find underground, like dead bodies. This happened for a while
in the late seventeenth centuries. They started getting into things like, hey,
(06:36):
we could find treasure using these y rods. We could
find we could find the bodies that we were talking about.
We could find a property boundary that no one can
agree on. Yeah, that one's really out there. Well, and
that's very like, I mean, you better agree on who's
doing doing that job between two neighborhoods who are at
(06:57):
dispute with one another. You know, yeah, for sure, it's
called the best dowser in your area. Let's use my guy.
He'll show you show us where the property line is exactly.
But there was a French peasant named Jacques Amar, who
in the latest seventeenth century, as the story goes, was
water dowsing, and the rod pointed down very sharply, and
(07:18):
he said, hey, let's get some guys out here, dig
down and get this water. And before you knew it,
they struck body and it was a murdered woman. And
he not only found the body, but then went to
the widower and the family basically and said, I'm going
to point this thing at you guys, and the thing
dipped at her former husband. He fled the scene and
(07:43):
was found out to be the murderer. And so now
all of a sudden, dowsing rods are, for a while
at least, and for this guy, for sure, a way
to root out murderers and dead bodies. So much so
that in leone Um there was a group of like
I think, a husband and wife who owned a wine
(08:03):
shop there who were murdered four years later after he
discovered that first body, and they actually contacted jack Amar
and said, can you come help us find who did this?
And so he set about with his dowsing stick looking.
I think he actually got into a boat at one
point and sailed around looking for a murderer, rooted one out,
(08:23):
he found one in another town, and that guy actually
confessed and then fingered two other accomplices who had fled
France by that time. So you're like, well, that guy
was very special. As far as dowsing goes, there's a
lot of ways to interpret it to if you're going
to be a skeptic, where you could say, like, this
(08:44):
is the sixteenth century or seventeenth century in France, and
if people thought that you were a murderer, it didn't
matter whether you were a murder or not. You were
in big trouble, and so you might flee France if
you got worried that people were coming to look for you.
Who knows, Or you could also believe that Jacques amar
had some special talent or gift that allowed him to
(09:05):
douse murder suspects, among other things. And that's that's actually
a point that kind of underpins the entire dowsing tradition.
Most dowsers believe that it's innate in them, maybe innate
in everybody, and they're just a little more their sense
is a little more refined, but that it's not like
(09:25):
you're picking up some magic stick. It's the stick is
somehow an instrument that you're you're special innate ability is
using to kind of guide you. Yeah, and you also
forgot the last possibility there, which is through a rock
in the seventeenth century France, and you're probably gonna hit
two people who murdered wine shoff owners. Right, Yeah, that's
(09:46):
a good point too. Eighteenth century dousing was not so
much a thing for mining anymore in Europe because science
had improved such that they were like, now we've got better,
better ways to discover or this or under our feet.
And into the twentieth century, we'll get to kind of
where it stands today later. But of course the Nazis
(10:07):
got involved because they were into all sorts of weird
esoteric methods of doing anything, and the stupid Nazis and
Himmler of course said hey, let's look for explosives, let's
look for water, let's look for gold, or just get
some Nazis out there with dowsing rods and tell me
what happens. Yeah, apparently they trained whole units, because again
(10:29):
the Nazis were very stupid. And then in the twentieth century, chuck,
if you were educated by or employed at Harvard in
the nineteen fifties, there was a good chance you were
going to study dowsing. Well, a lot of Harvard people did,
weirdly sure, but I mean, how many really were there
(10:50):
out there at the time. This is probably a significant people,
probably like a dozen. So yeah, a full third of
Harvard educated people were studying dowsing in the fifties. One
guy Raid Hyman and another Elizabeth G. Cohen, they worked together.
They were sociologists from Harvard, and they studied dowsing by
by surveying agricultural extension agents, the people who were the
(11:16):
conduit between education and you know, the rural areas, right,
So these people had a foot in each camp, so
they were they were a really good group to study
dowsing or dowsing beliefs. They found that every single state
head dowsers, mostly in the rural areas, and that in
those rural areas where the dowsers were most densely concentrated.
(11:39):
There was about an average in the United States in
the nineteen fifties about thirty five dowsers per one hundred
thousand people. That's a huge number of dowsers in the
twentieth century. Middle twentieth century, still working in these rural areas. Yeah,
I would agree, that's a lot. Uh. Yeah. They also
did a bunch of, like you said, interviews with these
agricultural agents, and it was basically like a little more
(12:02):
than half thought it was bunk. About twenty percent said
they believed in it, about twenty four percent said they
were open minded to it, kind of on the fence.
And one thing that they discovered that Hymen and Elizabeth
Cummen discovered was basically people it's not that they so
(12:23):
much believed in dowsing as being like this foolproof thing,
but more like, hey, we can't get a lot of
guidance on where to find water, and like it doesn't
cost a lot to hire a dowser, so it's better
than nothing. If I can pay someone in the nineteen
fifties like five bucks to walk around my field for
a good place to drill, it's better than zero, right.
(12:44):
And it's not like they just tapped like todd to
go out there and like use a stick to be
like drill here. These dowsers that they were employing had
some sort of success in their track record, so yeah,
there it made it a little easier to be like
I'll just give this a try, because what else, what opportunity?
(13:05):
What other alternatives do I have? Yeah, there was another
Harvard or named Ivan zee Vacht who did some studying
of this, and like he said, he found that there
were certain people who just seemingly were more gifted than
others at it. It was a part time thing. Usually
people did make some pretty good money doing it, and
(13:26):
it was almost always something that men did and not women.
And like you mentioned, they they generally believed it wasn't
like a snake oil thing where they were like, let
me see how many people I can rip off with
this stick. Um, they believed in what they were doing.
It seems like about across the board. Yeah, he said,
universally basically. Um. He so he studied specifically Homestead, New Mexico,
(13:49):
U and he found that Um that he well, he
basically lumped it in with folk magic, which I think
is that's fair. Um. And he said that that DAL
is the most commonly used type of folk magic and
agriculture in these rural areas. Like another type would be
using the zodiac to predict when to do certain farming
(14:11):
like harvesting or planting or something like that. But you're
more much more likely to find find people who were
willing to believe in dowsing than than that. Yeah, and
that even educated people believed in it in the area.
And one reason you can kind of give for that
is that these areas were hard up for water, so
(14:32):
it kind of I would guess that like the lack
of availability of water or at least easy access to
it would kind of help suspend your disbelief more than
somebody who you know has a municipal water supply running
into their house, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Speaking
(14:53):
of VAT, he continued his work into the late sixties
along with his colleague Linda K. Barrett, and they started
researching Urban Dowsers, which is a pretty good band name.
Yeah it is. What are they? What kind of music?
I know this is your specialty. I'm going to just
(15:17):
go fall back on the standby of math rock. I
would say Pavement, like maybe a Pavement tribute band. Even
that's kind of what it sounds like to me. But yeah,
I'm gonna just go with math rock, Okay. They study
the American Society of Dowsers the ASD. They were founded
(15:38):
in Vermont in the early nineteen sixties. I think they're
about a thousand strong. And these are people that lived,
you know, these are urban dowsers. They live where they
have city water systems and plenty of water, and they
used dowsing for other things, sometimes to detect if you
had a medical problem, sometimes to look for something that
someone lost. They basically argued like, hey, you should be
(16:03):
using us all over the world where people don't have water,
Like why is everyone against dousing when you should be
enlisting us? Right, And the ASD still survives today. They
have multiple chapters all over the world. As a matter
of fact, even though it's the American Society of Dowsers,
they do have other chapters in other countries and they
(16:26):
still dowse. They still meet, they share tips and tricks
with one another. I believe they have newsletters. So they're
still around for sure. So should should we take a
break and then talk about how to do it? Definitely? Okay,
we're gonna take a break, We're gonna get our coat
hangers out, and we're gonna get going right after this.
(16:56):
I've still stumped. There's a about ten percent of my
brain is still working out what music urban dowsers play.
I'll come up with it. I can't that's a that's
a tough one. So I mean, if it were like,
if they were clever and they wanted to kind of
engage in a bit of word play, then I would
say they're like neo country pop, you know what I mean,
(17:17):
like Billboard chart pop Urban Dowsers, like they can their
music can be enjoyed in the city or the country.
You mean, like the guys that sing about tailgating and
stuff like that. Precisely, I mean, what you got, Luke
Bran or Urban Dowsers? Which one you're gonna do? I
predict Luke Bryan's gonna change his name to Urban Dowsers
in the next five years. Hey, I'm not gonna not
(17:39):
Luke Bryan. I don't know it's music, but he seems
like a good guy from what I understand he is.
All right, So, how did dows you take the Well,
there's a couple of ways. You can have that y
shaped rod and you hold it by the why and
have the the single stem pointing out with your palms upward,
(18:02):
the why pointed upward. In fact, that about a forty
five degree angle. Then you walk around and you wait
for that thing to I guess to move in your hands.
You will you wait for it to make a barrier
on your own son, and it difts down. Like we said,
we mentioned the different kind of sticks that were used.
The kind of dowsing I see a lot on YouTube
(18:22):
because I did a lot of watching of this stuff
is the coat hanger. One where they take and it's
not always coat hangers, but just two metal L shaped
rods and you hold it by the small side of
the L in each hand and walk around and then
these rods, you know, come together and cross one another
at a place where you're standing. Right. Apparently, the American
(18:45):
Society of Dowsers says, far and away the most frequent
tool these days to use for dowsing is the pendulum. Yeah,
which can be anything from a crystal on a piece
of hemp string to a paper clip on some leftover
thread or down flossy even who knows it doesn't matter
because again, remember this this is a tool that the
human is a conduit for. It's not like the tool
(19:07):
itself is super important. Yeah, it's just it just kind
of points out what the human can sense innately. And
with the pendulum, they basically say, if it's swinging forward
to backward, that's yes meaning okay, there's some water here,
or it swings from side to side for no. And
because you can get a yes or a no out
(19:29):
of this pendulum, you can use it for plenty of
other stuff. In fact, there's something called information dowsing, which
is essentially like fortune telling. You ask the dows the
dowsing rod or dowsing pendulum certain questions in the way
it responds will give you the answer you're looking for. Yeah,
it's interesting to think. It just kind of hit me
today that they said that this is usually man, and
(19:52):
this is sort of the one area there where that's true. Like,
have you ever heard of a of a man that's
a fortune teller or palm reader? It seems like that's
usually women, right, Yeah, there are plenty of women dowsers
these days. I think it was just in that fifties
survey though. Yeah, yeah, because I've seen interviews with multiple
(20:14):
women who are dowsers. All right, all right, so that
that clears that up. We talked about walking across the
field and stuff. That's sort of what everyone usually thinks
of when they think of dowsing or water witching is
something they call it here in the States, but there's
also map dowsing, which that pendulum comes in handy, or
you might just use like a pencil or something where
(20:36):
you go to like a map and do the same
thing to narrow down what field you should walk in
to find whatever you're looking for. The pencil one. I
think there's a writer named Robert Ader who wrote a
pamphlet that's on the American Society of Dowser website where
he talks about using that pencil to find whatever, and
(20:57):
you'll hold that pencil over a map, try and tune
in whatever that means to what you're trying to find
and feel for the location. And he's like, listen, I've
looked for water on the moon with my Moon maps.
I've looked for the grave side of Bigfoot, and I
didn't big dig a Bigfoot up, but I found a
spot on the map where there are definitely some large
(21:20):
humps of earth right full stop, so exactly so um.
Also in that pamphlet, Robert he basically says like how
you ask the question and how you word it is
really important. And he gave an anecdote about when he
was looking for water on the moon with the map
of the Moon. He asked the he asked the pencil, like,
(21:43):
show me where water on the moon is, and he
said the pencil started to float over in his hand over,
don't be ridiculous here over his shoulder and point toward
the moon behind him out the window, and he realized,
oh no, I had to ask it where on the map?
Show me on the map where there's water on the moon.
And then the pencil pointed it out. So I feel
(22:04):
like here we kind of reached like the point between
finding water on the moon and finding bigfoot graves where
most people are going to take their leave of dowsing
and be like this, this doesn't work. But if you
step back and kind of strip away all the add
ons and stuff that's been you know, put onto it
over the years, and just go back to searching for
oars or water using this stuff, um, you can kind
(22:28):
of not regain credibility. That's not the word I'm looking for.
The phrase. It's more it comes it's yes, sure, it's
at least less loony. How about that? Yeah? Did that
guy also in the pamphlet say I found the Tykondo
Rogan number two to be quite cheeky. Man, that's an
arcane pencil reference right there. Shout out to David Reese. Yeah,
(22:51):
he got that all, but he's slapping his knee right now.
So how does this um supposedly work? You know, it's
not like they're just like, hey, this is magic or whatever.
There have been people that have tried to explain like
how this might work, and some of the explanations, you know,
early on were obviously some kind of magnetism or magnetic
(23:13):
field or something that people can pick up on on
planet Earth. There was a a German alchemist name Johann
Tolde who wrote under the pen name Basilius Valentius, great name,
and put out this theory that the metals in the
earth basically breathe a breath that rises out from the
(23:35):
earth that attracts the rod, and that you know, the
trembling rod would would shake when it hits that breath. Yeah,
and this is back in the day, right, And the
German miners of his day were like, we think it's
just magnetism, right, that's a kind of a convoluted theory
you got there, Valentis. But um, yeah, So I feel
(23:58):
like there have been people over the years who've kind
added unnecessarily to the mystique. Because if you think about it,
you're like, Okay, this is just magnetism. Somehow we're picking
up magnetism. That makes sense, that that's logical. It doesn't.
We don't have any way to explain it. But it's
a lot better than breath coming up. But if you
stop and think about it, you know, maybe this guy
(24:18):
was just basically using a different word or a different term,
or embellishing on the idea of magnetism or something like that.
And if you kind of read into the explanations over
the years buy dowsers for what dowsing is or how
it works, you kind of get the same premise that
somehow the person is picking up on something that's invisible
(24:40):
to us, but that person can still sense. Yeah. I
watched this school YouTube. There was this guy. It had
one hundred and eighty five thousand music. I don't know
if he even said his name, but he's a YouTube
dowser guy who came on to kind of talk about it,
and he just he had a very nice demeanor. He
had this big beard and he was just sort of like, listen,
this coat hanger isn't magic. I'm not magic, he said.
(25:04):
I just believe that there are certain people who can
sense voids in the earth under their feet, and some
people are better at this than others. Other people have
pointed to like certain animals that could do this. I
know that, of course he's are all anecdotal, but like
mister ed, like, hey, put peanut butter in that guy's
(25:25):
teeth and he'll say anything you want. Or but like
you know, animals like mules plowing fields would there are
anecdotal stories of them like stopping at places and like
refusing to sort of walk over an area that later
turns out there was something buried underground that would have
like harmed the plow or something like that. To say,
but this YouTuber was he was a good guy and
(25:46):
he was just like, listen, you believe it or not.
I'm not saying you should go do this stuff or
you should believe it, but this is just what I
feel like people, there are certain people who can sense
avoid in the earth. I was waiting for you initially
to say where he was saying, like the rod's not magic.
I'm not magic, my beard, that's magic. No. He turned
(26:09):
out to be fairly sensible, And this is something I
remember from childhood though from church, is that Christians have
long sort of had this. You know, it's kind of
the dark arts in a way, and so anytime it's
something in that realm, Christians are going to be very
much like, no, no, no, I don't remember specifically what
it was, but I have some vague recollection from my
(26:30):
childhood of hearing about water witching and someone saying I
don't know who it was, but someone in my life
could have been someone at church and in my family
even saying like no, no, no, that's like, that's like,
you know, black magic basically, right, exactly, call it folk magic,
call it whatever it's. It's still not it's still not
(26:51):
God performing a miracle. It's you exactly yet, and therefore
it's blasphemous and demonic and the devils somehow involved. We
just know it. I'm sure it's you, just priest's fault
to some degree. That's that same impulse, So we don't
understand it, so it must be demonic. The irony here
is that what they're afraid of and don't understand probably
doesn't even exist. It's not even necessarily real. So they're
(27:14):
afraid of chance happenings, of people just randomly getting something
right once in a while. Yeah, Martin Luther apparently was
not a big fan of dowsing. That doesn't surprise me.
And there was a guy named Johann Gottfried Ziedler. He
wrote a book that was basically like, Hey, these people
are tapping into something called the world spirit, and if
(27:36):
you tap into that, man, you can find out anything
you want, like whether somebody who died went to heaven
or hell. You're not supposed to know that, you're not God.
He's keep away from dowsing. Essentially, what Zidler's message was, Yeah,
I'm sure there was a lot of Christian pushback on
that guy. So as as science kind of progressed people,
(27:57):
there's a really long tradition of people trying to apply
science to explaining dowsing UM. And I say we take
our second break and come back and get into some
of those because there, this is where it gets super
fascinating to me. Let's do it all right. So we
(28:25):
were going to talk a little bit about the beginnings
of UM, sort of the modern take on things, and uh, well,
I guess this is less modern because this is the
seven late seventeen hundreds. But in sixteen ninety three there
was a French priest and a doctor of divinity named
Ley Lorraine de Valmont. Great book, great name, but not
(28:45):
a good hotel name at all. He really attract attention
to you. I think it's a great book, great name.
I wrote a book about um Amar. Remember Amar who
found the I think the murderer Jacques Amar the probably
the most famous dowser of all time. I think, Well,
did he have a one hundred and eighty five thousand
views on YouTube? Would? He would? He was quite a showman.
(29:08):
So he wrote a book when he basically wrote about
Amar success where he claimed that certain particles um arose
from water underground, from treasure, from a dead body, let's say,
and they would enter the body through the pores and
that some people, like this YouTube dowser said, were just
particularly sensitive and that seems to be the sort of
(29:30):
the refrain that, like he said earlier, some people just
claimed to be more sensitive to this either magnetic field
or these this energy coming out from the ground or
these voids in the earth, right um. And this is
about where science starts to kind of try to be
applied to explaining dowsing. And that Dave Almont termed these
(29:55):
particles lays at tombs because Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry,
had already identified that they're probably something called adams in
the world and that they are just out and about.
And so what low Lorraine de Almont was saying was
that we're some people are sensitive to those last homes,
(30:16):
and that kind of kicked off that tradition of like, oh,
there's this new science. Let's figure out how it applies
to dowsing, right, or hey, let's I believe In the
nineteen hundreds there were French priests that practice what they
called radiaesthesia, which was let's use dousing to detect a
radiation a various kind. Let's find it to diagnosed disease.
(30:38):
And this, you know this again is when it veers
away from like water and iron ore or something right
to a little more of the hokey pokey. But again,
radiation had just been discovered, and in no time, three
French priests are applying it, saying like, that's really detecting.
That explains it. Some other people have said, oh, it's electricity.
(30:58):
Some people say yeah, it actually is radiation, or it
is magnetism or something like that, and then you've got
the other camp that's like, no, it's esp or these
people are conduits for God or something like that. Um,
what was the thing you found that I in reply
sent you a picture of Professor Frank. I don't remember
where I saw that, but it was a really neat
explanation of it. Um. So it was basically saying that
(31:22):
we have, like our cells are capable of accepting electricity
or some sort of charge or whatever, and that that
ores in water emanate things that can charge those cells,
and that that's kind of how we pick it up. Okay,
it's I mean, it's just another way of putting it.
It's just again, we know about cells. We know that
(31:44):
cells currency is electricity or that they can transmit electricity.
So therefore maybe those that were on a cellular level,
some people are picking it up. And that's what dowsing is.
It's it's that same tradition. Now we understand something a
little more about the universe's figure out how it applies
to dowsing. Right, perhaps it is the when in terms
of human bodies, it is the soul. Perhaps you know,
(32:08):
maybe that's dowsing is the is the window to the soul.
I thought the eyes were Nope, that's wrong. It's dowsing
as far as modern science goes. And this is something
that you reminded me that we talked about in our
Wigia Boards episode, is that people were doing this with
their hands with something that's called idiomotor movements, which is
(32:33):
your muscles are twitching because of some kind of subconscious
mental activity that's going on. Yes, and that ties into
that last explanation I was mentioning about the cells and
the electricity. They were basically saying like, yeah, that's totally correct.
The ideomotor movements are triggered by the emanations from the
ground that enter your cells and trigger your muscle movement
(32:56):
unconscious to you. Yeah, someone may be good at finding
water because they've spent a lot of time in a
particular area finding water, and there they have this subconscious
thing to where they're picking up on the vegetation or
the way the ground is and they don't realize it.
So then they'll stop at a place that their body
is saying, here is water, and it's translating to that
(33:20):
idiomotor movement making the rod dip. Right. That's one explanation, right,
that they have some sort of what's called non conscious intelligence. Okay, Um.
The other explanation I was saying. Is like they were saying, No,
the water or the ore itself is putting something up
from the ground that's triggering your muscles to engage in
(33:43):
the idiomotor movement. So they're both saying, yes, there's idiomotor movement.
The dows or the people the person holding the dowsing
rod is causing these movements without being aware of it.
But the different explanations of why is that either the
person is noticing some vegetation that they're out of where
they have linked to water unconsciously, right, or the other
(34:04):
one is that the water itself is emanating something that's
triggering that idea motor movement in the person. It's a
little more than potato potato that there's a pretty big
difference between those two, even though they share the majority
of the explanation in common. No, I agree, they're quite different.
I mean, if you're out there screaming at your phone, guys,
(34:26):
there's water under the ground all over the place, So
anyone can take a couple of coat hangers and dig
down twelve feet and find water. Probably the YouTuber acknowledges
this and says, yeah, there's water all over the place.
He said, but some places are better to get water
than others because you don't just go dig a well
anywhere on your property. You try and home in on
(34:48):
a place that has got you know, better water, more
readily available to pool and where you can get it easier.
That's why people bring in geologists. That's why people bring
in dowsers. They have done experiments where I think BBC
Science Focus reported on them, where they did like randomized
experiments with water pipes underground, they found that dowsers had
(35:12):
no success at finding the water. There have been other
experiments under control conditions where they find that dowsers don't
do any better at finding water than chance would. Our
old buddy James Randy offered a million dollars to anyone
that could prove it. That has not gone claimed to
my knowledge, No, and not just proved that, but proved
(35:36):
like any real paranormal ability. Proving dowsing would have probably
won that prize for sure. Yeah. The thing is is
um if you're a if you're a dowser, if you're
a geologist, you poop poo dowsing. If you're a dowser,
you probably poopoo geology. And if you're involved in excavating
um wells, you probably poop poo both um. There was
(35:59):
a there was a guy interviewed in an Aon article
that Olivia turned up written by Lois Parshley, to where
the guy this guy whose job it was was to
excavate wells in California. As part of his job it
was to hire either a geologist or a dowser or both,
(36:19):
and he was saying, neither one's particularly good at at
reliably finding a good water source. They're both used different techniques,
but neither one's you know, dead on. So it's not
like in this guy's mind, geology is just supplanted dowsing
in rural water thirsty areas because the geologists you pay
(36:42):
a lot more for a geologist and then they may
or may not turn up water, whereas the dowser you
pay I think I saw about a tenth of what
you pay a geologist for a day, and they may
or may not turn up water. So it just kind
of makes sense in that rural area, like, hey, if
neither one's going to reliably turn up water, but there's
(37:02):
a chance either one will, I'm gonna go with the
person who charges away. There was also the case of
this science blogger from the UK, Sally Lapage, who was
having a water pipe installed, and I believe the UK company,
the water company sent out at dowser and Sally was like,
(37:26):
wait a minute, what is going on here? Like what
century are we living in? And the UK water company
kind of shrugged and Lapage did a little investigating and
found that ten out of twelve water companies in the
UK use water dowsing, and one of them, I believe,
the one that did her parents' house said in a
(37:46):
tweet a we found that some of the older methods
are just as effective as the new ones. We also
use drones and satellites. But you know, a little bit
of money spent toward dowsing is no big deal, whereas
a lot of other people were like, you shouldn't be
spending any of our money on this. Yeah, because again
it's pseudoscience, right, So yeah, you can understand how people
(38:11):
would be upset about that, and then at the same
time it really kind of undermines a lot of geologists work.
If water companies are using dowsers still too, I have
a question. I'm naive. I don't know a lot about machinery.
Isn't there some kind of machine that can look into
the earth and find good water pretty easily. I would
(38:34):
guess that there is as well, but I don't necessarily
think so, because if I wouldn't geologists just be employing that,
And if so, why would they have a reputation for
not being able to find water very reliably? I mean,
the answer is there can't be otherwise of course they'd
be using that, But like, I don't know, it seems
like some kind of seis mcgrab and someone a lot
(38:55):
smarter than me is going to explain why, which I
that's what I love doing about the show. Someone's going
to explain to me and we'll read it on the air.
I would guess, though, Chuck at this point, So that
really cool tool where you put a shotgun shell in
and it stamps the earth and then it gets an
image back on radar or something. Yeah, that's what I'm
talking about, right. Those things are awesome, but I think
they only go so deep, and you're probably looking for
(39:17):
water much deeper than that. That would be my guess.
Like if I was watching a movie and it was
about one part of it had a family trying to
dig a well and they called up some guy, well,
wells are us came out and like just planted some
funky machine down on the earth and and he said,
this thing's gonna it's on wheels, and it's gonna drive
(39:38):
around this acre of property and tell you exactly where
the water is. I would totally believe that's a thing.
Sure I would too. And in the exact same way
people who hire dowsers and watch somebody walk around their
property with the stick believe what they see too. Probably
wouldn't be a very good movie, but that is a huge,
huge area for improvement from what I can tell researching this.
(39:59):
Unless somehow dousing community has managed to completely science silence
the geological community as far as like water finding goes,
I don't. It just seems like the geologists aren't like,
of course we can find water, and here's how. I
just haven't really seen it that where there's like this
(40:19):
reliable way to find water. Yeah, I just don't understand it.
So if you're a geologist who finds water, we would
love to hear how you do what you do and
how reliable it is. Yeah, one more thing, chuck, before
we go. In that AEON article, there was mention of
(40:40):
a study that was done at the University of British
Columbia by a psychologist named Helene Gaucho and she is
the one who seems to have turned up that idea
of non conscious intelligence where people using a Wuiji board
we're actually better at ants in questions. They got more
(41:01):
questions right when they were using a Wuigi board than
when they weren't using a Wuiji board, which is really
really weird. And so Gaucheou explained it by saying, like,
we might have some type of intelligence or intellect or
memory that we can't access consciously, but if we kind
of put the power of answering off onto something else,
(41:25):
like a Wuiji board, were able to access it because
I guess we get our conscious mind out of the
way a little bit. And that kind of was applied
to this idea of dowsers that these people, like you said,
could recognize vegetation in the wild. There's certain kinds of
rocks that suggested there's water somewhere, and they didn't realize
(41:45):
that they've done this, that they've made that connection, but
it's still there. It's non conscious intelligence, and when they're
holding those dowsing rods, they're able to kind of put
the power of explaining into the dowsing rod and access
that nonconscious intel diligence, and that that's how they'd turn
up water when they managed to turn up water. Interesting.
I thought that was pretty interesting too. Well, I certainly
(42:08):
don't have everything figured out, so who knows? Who knows? Well,
if you're a member of the geological community, let us
know how you find water and how reliable it is.
We'd love to hear that. And since I spoke to
the geological community directly, that means, of course it's time
for listener mail. I'm going to call this overdue read.
This came in at the end of last year, and
(42:31):
this is from Emily Kenyon and the UK okay specifically
in England specifically, and I know I'll always get these
shires mispronounced, but Leicestershire. This is apparently we have gotten
Emily going on a lot of fun things because of
our show. I want to say thanks for all the
excellent work. Let you know that your podcast has I'm
(42:53):
sure we'll continue to make subtle and positive impacts on
my life. And Emily listened to some highlights and now
have an active post up here composting episode. Very nice
we now regularly have breakfast for tea as I wanted
every breakfast you discussed in that episode, but as we
don't breakfast together as a family to solve the problem. Okay, okay.
(43:15):
I asked for the book Radium Girls by Kate Moore
for Christmas from the Dial Painters episode and I've just
finished it. It was stunning, rage inducing, and inspiring all
at once, and I just ordered a copy for a friend.
Very nice. I'm planning on making the water Shed fried
Chicken recipe this week off the back of the Fried
Chicken episode. Nice. That's gonna knock your socks off. And
(43:38):
my house has never been cleaner and my garden more
well kept since I found you guys during Lockdown. You
made pottering around a joy, learning and chuckling at the
same time, although I'm with Chuck on the economic stuff,
which is to say, I guess no. Thank you, thanks
again for all these positive impacts on my life, and
Happy New Year to you guys and the team from
(43:59):
Emily Emily Kenyon. Thanks a lot, Emily. That's fantastic. I'm
glad we could have some positive effects on your life.
That was very nice. Chuck, good good selection. It's good.
If you want to be like Emily and let us
know how we've impacted your life, hopefully for the better,
you can send us an email. It's stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(44:22):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
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