Dowsing
Most people associate dowsing or divination with finding water however that practice is by no means restricted to water and comes in very useful for many things not least ghost hunting. Dowsing is simply searching for something that otherwise is not known or cannot be seen. To divine means to foretell, or discover a secret by magical means. As well as being used for finding water, it has also been used in determining sources of oil and minerals such as gold. Holistic healers can use dowsing tools to identify health problems as well as the most appropriate remedy.
I’m not going to bore you with a full history but it is safe to say that the practice of dowsing goes back as far as you can imagine. Although it has proved effective over thousands of years, there really is no scientific evidence to explain why.
Common tools for dowsing are metal pendulums, crystals or rods which can be made of twigs or brass. Do any of these instruments hold magical powers? Well, we’ve had great results from a humble welding rod so who knows whether they were magical welding rods or whether the reaction we got from them was down to other phenomena. Some possible explanations are that, whatever the instrument is, it is responding to variations in electro-magnetic fields (EMF). Other people think that the person conducting the dowsing really hold the power and the instrument is simply connecting to their own inner wisdom.
Once upon a time dowsing was considered to be evil. This may have been partly due to the word being lost in translation between countries. The French word for dowsing is “sourcier” which unfortunately is very close to the word “sorcier” that means witch. My own personal view is that inanimate objects are never evil – it is the intentions behind the use of those objects that are either good or bad. During ghost hunts we use dowsing tools such as crystals and our trusty welding rods. For those who are more gadget-orientated we will get the batteries out and fire up the modern day dowsing tool known as the EMF reader!