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Water Witchery

#1
scheherazade Offline
Water witching, or dowsing, is something that I have actually witnessed and experienced in person in the location of our own well. My former father-in-law from Ontario was a dowser and he had a very high rate of accuracy in both locating and determining the depth of the water. His employers relied on him to site the water location for the many remote camps they set up. He used a forked willow branch which he selected on site and even had me take a tour with the branch as he thought that I might also be able to detect water given my affinity for nature.

So here is the interesting part. He placed the branch in my hand and demonstrated how to hold with it and to walk slowly with the branch extended. I walked in a different direction from the house so as not to be influenced by where he had sited the well for there are underground water streams throughout this property and region.

Not once but in two locations, that branch twisted down with a force that almost tore my skin for I had a death grip on that thing. I actually had bits of bark in both palms and you could see striations on the branch.

It was quite unnerving to me twenty years ago and I have not dabbled with dowsing since but it surely made me wonder for I am quite cynical of many things and there was no way that there was any intervention in what I experienced. Hence I found the following article of interest.

Quote:Maybe science can't prove dowsing's validity, but farmers in California find Mondavi and others like him to be accurate enough to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars to drill where they suggest.

http://www.mnn.com/food/beverages/blogs/...or-science
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#2
C C Offline
(Nov 1, 2016 06:11 PM)scheherazade Wrote: Water witching, or dowsing, is something that I have actually witnessed and experienced in person in the location of our own well. My former father-in-law from Ontario was a dowser and he had a very high rate of accuracy in both locating and determining the depth of the water. His employers relied on him to site the water location for the many remote camps they set up. He used a forked willow branch which he selected on site and even had me take a tour with the branch as he thought that I might also be able to detect water given my affinity for nature.

So here is the interesting part. He placed the branch in my hand and demonstrated how to hold with it and to walk slowly with the branch extended. I walked in a different direction from the house so as not to be influenced by where he had sited the well for there are underground water streams throughout this property and region.

Not once but in two locations, that branch twisted down with a force that almost tore my skin for I had a death grip on that thing. I actually had bits of bark in both palms and you could see striations on the branch.


I had an uncle who once recounted to us a similar experience, which followed his initially skeptical attitude and introduction to the "skill" by an "expert". He was so impressed that he continued to dowse for years after that.

On the flip side, I've known a couple of other people who related how the active effect of such a forked stick, held in the same spot, immediately ceased for them once their hands replaced those of the water witch. They walked away feeling that the latter were simply deluding themselves with their own seemingly unwilled movements.

There have also been lab-condition tests conducted by scientists which produced unimpressive results for divining rod practitioners, compared to their celebrated feats in the wild.

Quote:It was quite unnerving to me twenty years ago and I have not dabbled with dowsing since but it surely made me wonder for I am quite cynical of many things and there was no way that there was any intervention in what I experienced. Hence I found the following article of interest.

"If a witcher didn't have a consistently good record, no one would hire him. Mondavi's record is constantly good. Not only can he locate where water is, he can determine how deep it is and the volume of flow. Many people hire him to find water, and it works. The water is often within several feet of the depth he predicted and close to the flow he predicted, according to Mutineer Magazine."

Teela Brown was a fictional character in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels whose ancestors had been specifically chosen and mated to eventually produce an individual with extraordinary luck (i.e., herself). While it's very unlikely that genetic patterns or any other mechanism could ever be responsible for certain people being so rare and statistically blessed, doubtless there do randomly emerge those who have prolonged sequences of good fortune. (The Earth itself could be considered a planet that has enjoyed an incredible string of beneficially converging circumstances for billions of years, made possible by trillions of worlds which lacked such.)

Of course, in the context of those who believe in transcendent intervention, any "cryptic causation" behind a dowser's luck or accomplishments would by definition be converted / assimilated into how natural processes work, and thereby be expected to have ordinary or probabilistic explanations available as an alternative, anyway. For them, the latter wouldn't negate the former. But in their worldview they should at least formulate a standard for what warrants conceiving something as an extraordinary reason / cause that was encrypted into an ordinary appearance of natural consequences.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
The ideomotor phenomenon. From Wiki:

The ideomotor response (or"ideomotor reflex"), often abbreviatedto IMR, is a concept in hypnosis andpsychological research.[1] It is derivedfrom the terms "ideo" (idea, or mental representation) and "motor" (muscular action). The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the processwhereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often ofminuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alonewithout the person consciously decidingto take action. The effects of automatic writingdowsingfacilitated communication, and Ouija boards have been attributed to thephenomenon
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