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Where does pendulum dowsing come from?
Pendulum dowsing is a practice in which a weighted object on a string indicates hidden materials. Its recorded roots lie in the ancient world and in sixteenth-century German mining, where the rod was used. Later pendulum forms were adopted in the early modern period, and map dowsing followed.
Facts checked on against 9 sources, 7 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| 5th century BC | Herodotus wrote about dowsing, and Chinese texts are said to describe water witching much earlier.1 |
|---|---|
| 1518 | Martin Luther spoke against the divining rod, and this is recorded as the earliest Christian opposition to dowsing.23 |
| 1556 | Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica is attributed as the first printed description of dowsing rods used to find underground minerals.4 |
| 1659 | Gaspard Schott denounced the divining rod as an instrument controlled by the devil.5 |
| 1838 | A French experiment showed a pendulum swinging over buried material without direct contact with the dowser.4 |
| 1850 | John Rutter developed a magnetoscope in which a pendulum swung in a glass tube.4 |
| 1854 | Chevreul's Academy of Science committee examined the divining rod and magic pendulum.5 |
| 1938 | The British Society of Dowsers was founded, largely through the work of Colonel A. H. Bell.6 |
Mining and the rod
Miners in the Harz Mountains of Germany used dowsing in the fifteenth century while looking for ore. Harz miners took the practice to Cornwall, where local miners adopted it during the reign of Elizabeth I.785
Contemporary dowsing is traced by Sarah M. Pike to sixteenth-century German mining communities. In the early modern period, the word 'dowse' first appears in print in English, attributed to John Locke in 1691.34
The pendulum's rise
At the start of the eighteenth century the magic pendulum was used, like the divining rod, in attempts to locate well sites. Pendulum dowsing is described as a method in which a heavy, evenly weighted object on a string is used, more often for map or question-based work than for fieldwork.54
Raymond's 1883 essay grouped the magic pendulum with planchette among the toys of children. Map dowsing, using a pendulum over a scale map, is most often used to look for missing persons or concealed archaeological objects such as submerged wrecks.54
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Wethered describes the pendulum as the radiesthetic instrument used for precision testing, made of materials such as whalebone, ivory, plastic, or wood. Dr. W. Guyon Richards is credited in that account with pioneering medical radiesthesia in England.6
Radionics, as described by the Buckland Museum's exhibition text, uses pendulum dowsing, also called radiesthesia, as one of its means of detection. The pendulum is placed at the center of radionics practice and used to answer questions.9
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Hans-Dieter Betz, a geophysicist at the University of Munich, led 1980s field experiments on whether dowsing could improve the accuracy of drilling for water. Researchers who ran the 1987 and 1988 German Barn experiments claimed they had proved dowsing real, but later analysis by other scientists argued the results could be attributed to chance.43
Stage magician James Randi described a test in which four applicants for his cash reward attempted to dowse for running water over buried pipes, and none succeeded.4
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- The pendulum entered dowsing later than the forked rod. Its roots are recorded in the early modern period and in nineteenth-century experiments, while the rod's older mining history is better documented.745
- Accounts disagree on the cause of the movement. Some authors attribute it to unconscious muscular action, while others, such as Ritter, locate it in the user's desire.52
Not yet confirmed
- Which early pendulum practices fed directly into the map and question-based forms of the modern pendulum?
- How did the pendulum move from the nineteenth-century experiments into radionics?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- engines.egr.uh.edu: Water Witching | The Engines of Our Ingenuity. Read on · University
- archive.org: Full text of "Ben G Hester Dowsing". Read on · Primary text
- encyclopedia.com: Dowsing | Encyclopedia.com. Read on · Reference
- psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk: Dowsing – Psi Encyclopedia. Read on · University
- Internet Archive: The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching, with a Bibliography. Read on · Primary text
- Internet Archive: An Introduction To Medical Radiesthesia & Radionics-Vernon Wethered. Read on · Primary text
- icysedgwick.com: The Folklore of Dowsing, aka Water Witching - Icy Sedgwick. Read on · Library
- encyclopedia.com: Divining Rod. Read on · Reference
- bucklandmuseum.org: The Power of Will: Radionics By David Hollander - Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick. Read on · Museum