Dowsing is as fake as a 3 dollar bill, but the science behind why it doesn’t work is super interesting! Same principles are at play with an Ouija board. TL;DR: “ideomotor effect”.
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Supposedly my second cousin (father’s side) was a dowser who found a spring on our property without previous knowledge years ago. My grandmother (mom’s side) also had a reputation for paranormal abilities (it was that Hungarian Gypsy gene, I suppose). I wish it had bred true and I could tap some of that reliably; I’d clean up in Vegas!
100% absolutely, unequivocally no. All dowsing is nonsense. Full stop.
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i had some relatives from way way back who were dowsers - never met 'em but i heard of them and some others - all i know is my knees ache when it’s gonna rain
I read an interview decades ago with a Texas dowser who, as it turned out, had a masters in geology and a BS in physics. He’d keep telling people where to drill wells using his knowledge, and they’d refuse to believe him, so he just faked dowsing to show them where to drill. He specifically mentioned looking up all the geological information and determining where water would be accessible, making sure to get ‘false positives’ on overhead power lines and septic systems, then telling them to go drill in the likeliest place. Can’t seem to find any solid reference to him now, though.
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That’s effectively how my uncle did it, but more on a basis of “has dug a lot of wells” rather than credentials.
Fact of the matter is it’s not all that hard to find water in a lot of places. The trick is knowing where to place a well so it’ll be easy to dig, and consistently full. You don’t really need magic sticks, or even degrees to figure that out.
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No, but magic sticks help sell those services to rubes.
Go back hundreds of years, when navigating a ship in unfamiliar waters was done by the ship’s navigator with an astrolabe. This was a guy who did nothing laborious aboard the ship. He ate the food, drank the water, and took his share of the pay, but he never pulled an oar, or swabbed a deck.
When it was necessary to find a port, he’d take out a chunk of metal carved with inscrutable runes, dangle it from a chain and peer into it, turn the dial, adjust some levers, peer into it some more, then point to the chart and say “captain, we’re here.” As far as the illiterate crew was concerned, that was perilously close to sorcery.
But if the crew knew how to read the symbols, what to look for, how to orient the rete, etc., they would have tossed him over the rail and split his rations. At the very least his easy job would have been over once knowledge of the task came out, and they realized there was no sorcery involved.
The navigator used his education to make an easier life for himself. He wasn’t going to give up the job by telling the truth about it.
People who still have that “crew mentality” look at dowsers the same way. “He holds those sticks, he’s got the magic, I’m going to find water!” They want to believe in magic. So why not dress up the geology degree in some theatrics and earn a living from people who want to pay for the show?
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Other than a sense of ethics, but if you’re already a republican, fuck that.
I mean I get what you’re saying but the navigator aboard ship was almost always a crew member with another job.
Typically a captain, senior mate, or often the quarter master or helmsman. And they’d have a hell of a lot of other duties. Most of the sailors would be more than capable of navigating themselves if less accurately or by less complex methods, and ships would not leave port with only one navigator.
Going back a very long way this was knowledge acquired through experience, rather than education. And that guy who was the dedicated navigator would usually be some one who’d worked his way up through lower stations. Even on military ships, where this wasn’t necessarily the duty of an officer. No one on that ship viewed it as magic. It was exactly the sort of skill sailors respected. ETA: And sought to learn themselves, it seems like pretty consistently across time. Being a good navigator was the best way to climb the ladder, if you couldn’t buy your way in.
Astrolabes are a hell of a lot older than hundreds of years, and weren’t neccisarily navigational devices. You’re thinking of Quadrants and Sextants, simple versions of which are ril old and can be made from improvised items.
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QFT, notwithstanding his flaws.
Unfortunately, after 10 months, that blight of an article is still paraded in “Featured Posts” on BB’s blog view…
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That un-corrected calumny still makes me angry. The subsequent comment thread, however, gave me faith in the BBS community.
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I knew someone who insisted his dad was an amazing water diviner. I gently pointed out that as he lived in the fucking Lake District, you could literally poke a stick into the ground anywhere and water would come out.
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