The Art Of Dowsing 🌊📘
Well today, I watched something great
https://x.com/blowingfactz/status/1710412988534915299?s=20
Due to X's new website and shit, we can't directly watch the twitter video from hive so I went to YouTube to find the original and...
Seems incredible doesn't it?
I went and did some research and it turns out that what the girl was doing is called water dowsing or water divining.
Water dowsing or Water divining is the art of identifying and predicting the flow or availability of water from deep underground without any use of scientific apparatus.
A Y shaped rod or Twig is the most popular apparatus used although other diviners may use other equipment or no equipment at all.
This Y shaped twig works using the ideomotor phenomenon, which is a psychological response where a subject makes motions unconsciously.
This skill has apparently been around since the early 1500's and it has quite a colorful history 😀.
Apparently it was banned by the Early Catholic Church because it was treated as a form of divination.
It's ban was further continued by the reformer Martin Luther No relations to Martin Luther king (for those wondering 😂) in the year 1518. His reason for banning says that the art of divination for metals as an act breaks the First Commandment.
Although it's nice to note that in this time there was no account of any divination for water yet.
The earliest account of water dowsing was in the year 1568 when Sir William F. Barret wrote an entry in his 1911 book Physical Research that..
...in a recent admirable Life of St. Teresa of Spain, the following incident is narrated: Teresa in 1568 was offered the site for a convent to which there was only one objection, there was no water supply; happily, a Friar Antonio came up with a twig in his hand, stopped at a certain spot and appeared to be making the sign of the cross; but Teresa says, "Really I cannot be sure if it were the sign he made, at any rate he made some movement with the twig and then he said, ' Dig just here '; they dug, and lo ! a plentiful fount of water gushed forth, excellent for 'drinking, copious for washing, and it never ran dry.' " As the writer of this Life remarks: "Teresa, not having heard of dowsing, has no explanation for this event", and regarded it as a miracle. This, I believe, is the first historical reference to dowsing for water.
In the year 1622, dowsing was again declared satanic and demonic by the Jesuit, Gasper Schott, he later claimed that he wasn't sure if the devil was always responsible for the movement of the rod.
Afterwards, this odd skill was put to a more societal use😂
In southern France, in the 17th century, policemen used the dowsing art to track criminals and heretics.
Sadly the practice didn't last long and it's use for a tool of employment of justice was abolished in the year 1701.
Modern Dowsing
From the 16th to the late 19th and early 20th century, the dowsing technique was mostly used to search for minerals.
Namely tin, silver, iron and lead in the English Colonies.
The German's had a specific name for the dowsing rods Shlag-Ruthe (Striking Rod ).
Dowsing techniques has also been used by the military in wars.
In the First World War Gallipoli Campaign, sapper Kelly was well known for finding water for the British Troops while using the dowsing technique. In the late 1960's during the Vietnam war, some US Marines used the dowsing the technique to locate weapons and tunnel.
Even in the year 1981, when a NATO drill anchor expedition went wrong due to an avalanche in Vassdalen, Norway. The Norwegian soldiers attempted to watch for the buried soldiers in the snow using the dowsing art as a search method.
From the early 20th , it's mostly used to search for water wells. As it was used to help farmers and homesteaders to locate wells on their property in Dakota.
Till now, dowsing is still used by some farmers and water engineers in Britain, however many parts of the United Kingdom water utilities have long since been trying to distance themselves from the practice.
Dowsing in itself has been proven scientifically to be incredibly inaccurate (except for some incredibly rare cases).
It's been proven to be no more as accurate as random chance and thus it's regarded as a pseudoscience 😀.
For further reading...
🌊 https://archive.org/details/TheDiviningRod
🌊 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica
🌊 https://www.britannica.com/topic/dowsing
🌊 https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/water-dowsing
Posted with STEMGeeks