Dowsing, sometimes associated with the word, radioesthesia, is the use of a special instrument to identify or find an object or condition in physical matter. Dowsing is generally associated with finding oil, water or precious metals, but sometimes an object that is missing. To this end, various Dowsing instruments are used - on either a map, a picture or an actual physical location. Dowsing is probably a very ancient practice. There is evidence that Dowsing goes back as far as ancient Egypt and ancient China. Dowsing was reportedly used to find coal during the Middle Ages.
The most popular tools for Dowsing are the “wishing rods,” which are often made out of metal these days but sometimes out of wood, as was common in the past- and the pendulum.
Dowsing, in the fast, generally used, wood. Popular woods that were used for Dowsing were hazel branches, generally forked, along with beech, alder and apple. Nowadays, as before, the Dowsing rods, when used, are held in an L-shape with discovery being made when the rods cross each other. Pendulums used for Dowsing are simply generally string weighted with some type of crystal or other type of weight.
Sir William Barrett, a physics professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin at the end of the century, was extremely skeptical of Dowsing until he became familiar with a dowser named John Mullins, who was hired by the Waterford Bacon Factory to locate underground streams of water. The small forked stick he used for Dowsing almost immediately bore more fruit than the work of various professional geologists who had failed to identify the water source. Later on, Barrett would be one of the main founders of the British Society for Psychical Research and publish the results of his research on Dowsing in the Society’s Proceedings...READ MORE...