WATER-DIVINING
Water-divining, or dowsing, is accepted in many parts of the world and
used as a practical method of locating underground water. Official
bodies as well as private individuals employ practitioners of the art,
and among people generally there is a strong belief in its genuineness.
It is carried out by means of a forked twig, hazel by traditional
preference, which is grasped in the dowser's two hands and is said to be
twisted upwards by an unknown force when there is water underground. As
an addition it is sometimes claimed that the twig will indicate the
presence of metals by being twisted downwards.
Believers in the twisting of the twig are generally ignorant that it was
formerly used in the pursuit and detection of criminals and the finding
of buried treasure[7] and that it was being used in the year 1918 to
locate a seam of coal. Going farther afield, we learn that the
witch-findings practised by African savages are sometimes carried out by
means of a stick which points at the victim.
[Footnote 7: See Janet, op. cit., p. 368, where he also says: 'Il est
probable que, dans quelques campagnes, subsiste encore la croyance aux
revelations de la baguette divinatoire.']
Such varied uses demand a new and complicated system of physics if the
results are due to any forces external to the diviner, but my own
observations satisfy me that we need not overturn our ordinary
conceptions of cause and effect to explain the different properties of
the divining-rod.
When a friend told me of the presence of a dowser in the neighbourhood
and gave me a would-be convincing account of how he had seen him at
work, how the twig was twisted upwards with such force that my informant
was unable to depress it, and how the man was employed by engineers to
tell them where to sink wells, I became interested and asked to see the
marvel. The resulting experiment, though conducted haphazard, was
instructive as regards both water-divining and credulity.
The man broke a forked twig from a bush, and, holding it in the way
described later, was directed down a path leading to a tennis-court.
Along this path no water was known to exist, but the twig rose twice.
Beneath the tennis-court ran a water-pipe which had burst during the
previous winter, and of which the position was known to six at least of
those present. This pipe was located by the man, and he demonstrated it
again and again by walking across it, the twig rising each time. It rose
again when he was directed past a cook-house. Next he was sent along a
path leading from the cook-house to the main building, and the twig rose
several times. He said, 'There is water all along here', and was told
that there was a pipe running along the path. Here I intervened and
asked him to try across one edge of the path, which was about six feet
wide. The twig rose, and, just as on the tennis-court, he walked again
and again across the indicated line, the twig rising every time, though
as a fact the pipe lay on the other side of the path. He explained to us
that God gave 'the gift' to Moses, and that now only one man in ten
thousand received the gift.
When he left I took a twig and showed that I had the gift, or, at least,
that the twig performed in my hands exactly as it had done in his.
'But', said my friends, 'he found the pipe on the tennis-court.' It
mattered nothing that he had found water twice within a few yards where
none was known, or that at least six of the bystanders knew of the
existence of the water-pipe and were ready to show their anticipation as
he approached it and their delight when he located it, nor that he
located the other pipe on the wrong side of the path. The movements of
the twig might be a fraud, his other finds might be failures or guesses,
but his one success was enough for them. Even the Padre, when I said
that the man had the face typical of a mystic, was moved to ask, 'But
may not a mystic have powers of which we know nothing?'
In short, the rising of the twig was produced by the man himself, and
his findings were guesses, aided by ordinary knowledge as to where
water-pipes are to be expected, and more especially aided by the
attitude and expression of the bystanders.
Yet by his manner he showed that he plainly believed in his own powers:
otherwise his reference to the gift of God was simple blasphemy, and he
seemed an earnest man.
[Illustration]
How can we explain this belief on the one hand and the trickery on the
other? First let us examine the mechanism involved in the upward
twisting of the twig. Suppose you take a tough and springy forked twig,
each arm of the fork being about nine or ten inches long, hold it with
the apex away from you, and, with your palms facing together and your
finger-tips pointing upward, place the thumb and little finger of each
hand inside the fork at the places marked T and F. Now close each hand,
and you have each arm of the fork firmly gripped; next, keeping your
elbows well in, bend the arms of the fork outward as in Fig. 2, with
your palms now looking upward. You will then find that a sort of trigger
action tends to occur, and by a slight pressure of your ring-fingers
against the twig you can make it rise. Still gripping firmly and
pressing your hands a little together you will find it continues to
rise, and by bending your hands downwards at the wrists and pressing
your elbows to your side you can easily persuade an observer, and
perhaps yourself, that you are trying to hold the twig down. You may
even find that it leaves a pressure mark on your little finger, which
you can show as evidence of how you tried to restrain it. If one arm of
the fork is weaker than the other it may break, and that of course will
be conclusive proof of the working of a mysterious power. So we see
there is nothing very strange in the man believing that his muscular
action was not responsible for the moving of the twig; but his two-sided
make-up--piety on one side and trickery on the other--can best be
explained by a dissociation, with repression of the knowledge of
trickery as far as the main personality is concerned. We might split up
his consciousness like this:--
Piety, and belief in Knowledge of the means
water-divining employed. Hypersensitive
as the gift of God. mechanism for carrying it on.
Perhaps it is unfair to talk of trickery; he may have deceived himself
from the start and never known that he was deceiving any one.
At first I pictured him as learning the trick from some one else, trying
it on with his friends--maybe across a bridge over a stream--and being
taken seriously, and then, when he could not escape from his reputation
without owning up to the fraud, being compelled for his peace of mind to
repress the deceit complex and carry on as a Dissociate. The man himself
would be the last person to gain information from, for his repression,
however it began, is now complete.
The discussion that followed the experiment was instructive: most of the
bystanders appeared to believe in the existence of some unknown force of
nature operating through a specially-gifted person, the mechanism of the
twig being unnoticed and the greatest emphasis placed upon the one
success. I have no doubt that in a short time the memory of that one
success would be the only part of the performance not forgotten.
Moreover, if any one of the bystanders had told me the story, describing
fully and fairly everything he had observed, I should have been unable
to criticise the facts thus presented and denial of the miraculous
would have been ineffectual; yet these bystanders were all educated and
intelligent men.
With the information gained from this experiment I was able to
understand the next example. The subject was mentioned in a provincial
newspaper, and incidentally a story was told of how a dowser who also
had the power of locating metals was able by means of the twig to
indicate the position of two sovereigns concealed under a carpet,
showing the relationship of water-divining to some forms of 'thought
reading.' In the next number of the paper appeared 'some corroborative
testimony' from a well-known local gentleman, who was also a dowser, and
some of his testimony I will quote:--
'I have had twigs as thick as my little finger twist off and break
after scoring my hand until it was red. The muscles of the arm
become contracted when the bodily magnetism is affected by the
presence of water, and a strong spring will make my arms ache
badly. It is quite true that only running water affects me, and on
one occasion I had a curious example of this. It was on a Saturday
evening, and I quite accidentally found the presence of water close
to a house where my sister was living. The following day I told her
about the spring and tried the spot, when no effect was observable.
On enquiry she told me that there was a pipe underneath connected
with a ram which was always put out of action on Sunday.'
Further on, referring to another incident, he says:--
'I had dowsed the ground, and in addition had noted, with the help
of an eminent geologist, the geological strata. The dowsing
satisfied me that the ground was full of water: the geological
survey suggested the best place to collect it. I suppose the power
must have something to do with the composition of the blood and
nerve cells, but I have never yet come across a scientific
explanation of the power, which is certainly possessed by many
people.'
Here we have a country gentleman of indisputable honesty and
intelligence attributing to unknown forces such movements and sensations
as any one can produce who follows the preceding instructions, water or
no water being present. The 'bodily magnetism' is a pure rationalisation
and beyond discussion, but the story of the pipe and the ram is
different: a ram is a pump worked by a stream of water and the noise of
it is carried a long way, especially along any pipe connected with it,
and if I told this gentleman that he had heard the noise of the ram he
would strenuously deny the possibility, and might challenge me to test
whether I could hear the noise; but I have no dissociated water-divining
personality unhampered by my conscious efforts and trained to pick up
such indications. It would seem incredible to him that he heard the
noise of the ram on the Saturday, failed to hear it on the Sunday,
deduced that the water was no longer running, and then showed this
deduction by refraining from tilting up the twig; but with our knowledge
of dissociation and repression, and of the working of the unconscious,
we can understand all this taking place without his main stream of
consciousness being aware of it.
The reference to geology is also instructive; he evidently has a
knowledge of that subject, and he might perhaps admit that the
indications of the twig coincided with the geological indications,
though he is unaware of and cannot admit any dependence of the former on
the knowledge of the latter.
Thus in both these cases the likelihood of the presence of water is only
a matter of observation--skilled and minute no doubt--and the movement
of the twig is in no way caused by any physical forces except those
exercised by the muscles of the dowser. That the second personality of
the dowser is able to deceive him is now explained, and his obvious
honesty so influences non-critical observers that their credulity is no
cause for wonder.
An example of water-divining without dissociation was given me by Dr. W.
H. Bryce, of Fifeshire, whose words are as follows:--
'There was an old Scot who was reputed to be very skilful in
finding water and who was so employed throughout his neighbourhood.
He was not above using the twigs, but told me they were no use, but
he judged entirely by the lie of the land. In his own language he
always looked for the "rise of the metals" in looking for water. A
diviner came to the neighbourhood and located water in two places.
In the one place the old countryman said, "How can he get water
there? Now at the top of the den where the metals rise each way he
might get it." Bores were sunk at both places that the diviner
indicated, but no water was got.'
This man would probably have refused such a test as locating a
water-pipe, for his conclusions were based upon conscious reasoning and
he would be incapable of making guesses or picking up indications from
the behaviour of bystanders; therefore in the eyes of the credulous he
would be inferior to the wonder-working dowser.
One repeatedly hears stories of how the dowser has found water when
geologists have failed, but the man who is sufficiently uncritical to
accept the working of the twig as due to some strange 'gift' is likely
to be as credulous in observation and beliefs concerning the rest of the
phenomena.