News

Dowsing and divination: An ancient art adapts to the New Age

By GLYNIS HART
[email protected]
DANVILLE, Vt. – The American Society of Dowsers (ASD), headquartered in Danville, Vt., will hold its 59th annual convention June 26-30 at Plymouth State University in Plymouth.

The ancient art of dowsing, which has been found in cave paintings from 8,000 B.C. and may be at the root of the story of Moses’ flowering staff, is commonly thought of as a method for finding water. You may be picturing a person in 18th century clothing holding a Y-shaped stick in both hands, walking hesitantly across a grassy field as if it were a giant Ouija board.

However, the modern take on dowsing is somewhat different.

“There’s very little water dowsing these days,” said Lee Ann Potter, current president of ASD. “There are dowsers out there that use dowsing tools to find water, gold, lost items. It depends on who you talk to. Some use it for energy work and some for accessing information.”

Dowsers, also called diviners, use a variety of tools, such as pendulums and L-shaped rods, to find objects in the material world and create access to what some call the unconscious mind, others call energy fields and still others the mind of God.

In this they’re not really in disagreement with rationalists who dismiss dowsing by saying it’s all in the subconscious of the person holding the forked stick. It’s not about the stick — it’s about the person holding it.

“There are people who don’t use tools but have physical sensations they listen to,” said Potter. “I know a couple people who use their car keys — you always have them on you. My guess is you’re tying into physical principles and using a person’s sensitivities to tie into energy.”

The ASD has chapters all over the world, but membership has stayed flat over the last three years, and they’d like to get more young people interested.

During the June convention there will be a lineup of speakers on healing modalities, cemetery restorations, and other topics. Keynote speaker Eben Alexander, a neurologist who had a near-death experience, will be talking “about consciousness and what is on the other side,” said Potter.

Dowsers are used by oil companies to find resources, and some are called for police work. A famous dowser in France, Jacques Aymar, solved murders with his skills. Even then the French authorities were skeptical, so before they engaged him they tested his abilities by burying the murder weapon and other tools. After Aymar found the weapon, and selected it from other possible evidence, he was hired to track down three murderers.

ASD gets calls, even now, from people who want ghosts removed from their houses. They would say a ghost is a pattern of energy left behind — an algorithm of sorts, that has a lingering effect on the objects and energy patterns of a particular place.

“There are some dowsers I know who work in old cemeteries. Ground penetrating radar doesn’t always work — for instance if the ground is very wet, or there are a lot of rocks. If you’re looking for babies there might not be enough of a signal for radar to pick it up, but a dowser would.”

Potter, an engineer, settled in Lancaster with her wife after the two of them retired from the Army. They always wanted to live in the mountains, she said, and Colorado was too far.

Her main interest is in healing. “I’m a medical intuitive,” she said. “I’ve always had it. Even at a relatively young age I could look at people and see they were sick.”

Medical intuitives use their talents to help people diagnose and treat medical issues by reading a person’s energy. The practice of Reiki, in which a worker will pass their hands over a person’s body without touching the skin, works on the same principle, as does acupuncture. The basis of acupuncture is the idea that life force moves through the body along specific channels, and placement of acupuncture needles can help to adjust the flow of this life force.

In this view, water flowing underground has an energetic presence that a person tapping into their subconscious mind may be able to sense. Animals sometimes demonstrate a sense for what cannot be seen, whether through ultra-sharp hearing and smell, or senses humans struggle to quantify because we lack them ourselves.

“Dogs and cats see different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum than we do,” said Potter. “They may also be more sensitive; a horse in the desert will find water when nobody else can.”

Humans, in learning to tap into this instinctive knowledge, use the same calming and focusing techniques for dowsing as for meditation, yoga and prayer: Slow down, breathe, try to clear your mind of chatter.

“To me, it’s a deeply spiritual thing,” she said. “You’re tying into the source of unlimited information. People who believe in this believe they’re tapping into a source of all knowledge and wisdom; some people call it God.”

Can anyone do it?

“We can teach pretty much anybody how to do the basics of dowsing,” said Potter. “Anybody can learn this with the proper training.”

Avatar photo

As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.