UK Edition
Water-detecting magic, or all in the mind? A lesson in the dubious art of dowsing
You can’t look this much like Paddington Bear, I thought, and be a quack. You just can’t. It’s impossible.
“I want you to extend your consciousness,” says Guy Hudson. Guy is a dowser, which means he practises the art of detecting underground water with the help of divining rods. The Paddington effect is lent by his kindly smile, thick woolly hat, sturdy coat, and lanyarded compass that hangs from his neck as if to say, Please look after this barely-believable...
Guy continues. “I want your mind to go down into that water, and I want you to taste it, feel it, cold, wet, and all of that.”
On a damp, grey day on the fringes of the South Downs, Guy is teaching me how to dowse. He begins by sending me across a low wooden bridge with a visible stream beneath it, with one of his two L-shaped divining rods in each hand. As instructed, I’m cradling the short ends in my loosely knitted fists. The long ends are pointing out ahead of me like antennae.
In Guy’s hands, the long ends swing in towards each other when they’re above the stream, like doors closing. In mine, as I move from the bridge’s ramp to its deck, the ends duly twitch. “Yeah, I can see they’re pointing a bit…” I say.
Guy advises me to hold the rods less tightly and try again. On my second traversal of the bridge, I tilt my wrists to let them move more freely, and – lo! – they swing towards each other. “You’re a natural!” Guy calls from the bank.
I continue my trudge to the other side. I’ve moved beyond the part of the bridge that spans the slow-moving water, but the rods are still swung across my chest. “They’re not coming apart!” I shout over my shoulder, “Guy, what do I do?” Then I reach the downward slope at the end of the bridge and the rods swing back to the front.
My first attempt complete, I come back over the bridge and hand the rods back to Guy. He crosses the bridge as I did, but this time they swing obediently. In fact, they swing as if by magic, which is why there was so much eye-rolling last month when 10 of Britain’s 12 water companies said their engineers used dowsing rods.
Although dowsing has been practised in Britain and abroad for centuries, it has never been vindicated by double-blind testing. An American sceptic foundation offered a million dollars in the Nineties to whoever could prove that dowsing works, but the prize was never won.
It’s not hard to find anecdotal evidence of dowsers finding water, but scientists explain these successes by pointing out that: a) if you dig at any given point on the surface of habitable land, you have a pretty good chance of finding water; b) clues like surface vegetation might give subconscious prompts; c) the twitching of the metal rods held by the dowser, a motion claimed by the dowsers to signify the presence of water, is simply a result of the “ideomotor effect”. The term refers to slight, unconscious muscle movements made as a result of pre-existing expectations or psychological suggestibility. In other words, our brains can make our muscles move without us knowing it.
I ask Guy about this. “Certainly the quackbusters will tell you: ‘Ooh, it’s the ideomotor effect,’” he says. And they’re not wrong, he explains, because “what you’re doing is you’re setting up a question in your mind, consciously, and that sets off your unconscious mind to go and look for stuff, to intuit what you want to find out. And then you need a signal to tell your conscious mind, ‘Oh, we found it,’ and that’s where the ideomotor effect comes in. So you really do use the ideomotor effect.”
By now, Guy has shown me more of the elements of dowsing. We’ve walked 100 yards or so across the damp grassland, not only looking for underground water but also trying to divine how much there is and which way it’s flowing.
I feel a tug here and there. At one point, a rod swings backwards as if to impale me, but Guy is encouraging and forgiving. He shows me how he works out the depth of underground water: by mentally asking how deep it is to the metre, taking metre-long strides with the rods pointing outwards, then noting on which stride the rods move.
“Ooh-ah! Yeah!” he says cheerfully. “Something like 12 metres!”
This part, he says, is more speculative, but relies on the same principle: that when humans dowse successfully it is because we are accessing information held outside our individual minds.
“The best explanation I’ve heard,” he says, is one of ‘cosmic consciousness’, that it’s not only us that’s intelligent, but nature is, and the information is out there to get in the same way that telepathy works, however you want to call it.”
This ability, Guy argues, would have been vital to prehistoric humans living on arid land. In general, he says, there are Chinese walls around our consciousnesses, “but in certain times, where it helps our survival, we can break through that”.
Indeed, dowsing is still employed in the service of human survival. Guy is a trustee of Village Water, a charity that helps Africans build wells and maintain good sanitation. It was set up by a former president of the British Society of Dowsers, and draws on the practice when deciding where to dig.
Dowsing also encompasses substances other than water, and it has often been used to search for minerals. “What if you wanted to find something different, like metal?” I ask.
“Oh, diamonds, yeah,” Guy says. “I was on a TV programme with–”
“Why aren’t you mining diamonds?!” I interrupt, joshingly. “Why are you here?!”
“Well, I don’t have the contacts,” he says, and changes the subject.