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The nights are starting to draw out, spring is hopefully just around the corner, and this has brought thoughts of this year’s weekend trip to Dorset to mind. We plan to send out a recce-ing [did someone say wrecking?] party within the next couple of weeks to inspect some campsites, hostelries and B&B’s., so should soon have details, along with some interesting sites to visit.
If you fancy an afternoon of drumming with Kate Fenn meet with her at the Sanctuary car park on the Ridgeway at 1:30 pm on 9th April. Cost for the afternoon entitled ‘Awaken the Land’ is £6.
Bradford on Avon.
Meeting place – Station Car Park (follow Station signs) at 10:45 on Sunday 27/2/2005.
Hello, we make our return to Bradford on Avon this month to sample a few more of its delights. Whilst taking part in Bradford’s ‘Singing Around the Town’ Festival in June 2004 we were introduced to some interesting, attractive and little known features, like a Holy Well emerging from beneath a cottage, a very large well which supplied quite a bit of the town’s water supply and more importantly to some (Grey Wolf?) the former local brewery. Another previously unvisited site awaits us further up the hill in the form of St. Mary’ Tor chapel, of Saxon origins, but with traditional Victorian restoration(!!), a hermit’s cell and good views of the town (good keep fit) plus en route a number of conduits and streams (good dowsing practice)
Our first destination will be a welcome return to the Saxon church of St. Lawrence. Then apart from taking lunch we do not have a schedule to follow, so there you have it. Warm, wet weather gear is recommended and we will try to avoid any muddy bits.
See on Sunday Shaun.
A large crowd turned out for the Jan. meeting, despite the bitter cold night, which was good as Paul gave an excellent talk detailing more of his continuing research into earth mysteries.
The slides that accompanied the talk were brand new – only back from the processors two days before – and they were mostly taken on a field-trip that he and Charla had made at the latter part of 2004. This trip had been to parts of Canada and the southern USA to do research into ancient rock art, linear markings on the ground and natural features [sometimes enhanced], with peculiarities which had a meaning for the people of those times.
Paul has been fascinated for many years by customs and phenomena associated with linear features and straight lines marked on the landscape, and some of the slides showed the huge “drawings” on the ground that he believes may have had some shamanic purpose. Most of us have seen pictures of the famous Nasca drawings, but those shown by Paul were mainly from other areas, although no less spectacular.
Rock carvings and cave paintings were also shown, the caves probably were used by shamans for rituals and divination sessions, possibly in a trance-state, which is when some of the paintings may have been created. Taking the photographs was not without personal risk – the sites were in remote places, but seemed popular with the local sharp shooters who saw them as good places to practise their art! It was not that they had any hostile intent towards Paul, they probably did not realise anyone was there, most of the danger came from bullets ricocheting off the rock face.
Whilst talking to one of his American contacts, who also has an interest in shamanic art, Paul found out about the location of rocks that had a strange high-pitched ringing note when struck, and he brought a recording of the sounds one of the rocks produced.
It was a privilege to see these “fresh from the press” slides – no doubt they will soon appear in one of Paul’s books. Thanks to Paul for yet another fascinating evening.
Sitting on the damp ground inside a circle of aromatherapy candles, Henmania Hill had pulled a big woollen poncho around her.
As a fashion item, the poncho was making a comeback, but I think Henmania's was probably from the first time round, and probably Mayan. Somewhere among its folds, her chick, Morgan, was nestling, fast asleep.
It was one in the morning. The woodland glade was scattered with their night-lights. Water cascaded from the spring higher up the hill, tumbled into the stone walls of the ancient well, overflowed, and came running down the hill towards us, making streams in the red soil.
One of the night-lights began to move down the hill towards us in a serpentine, hesitating progress. We could hear music coming from somewhere inside the hill, raucous distant music, as though there was a party going on.
Out of the deep enveloping darkness it came, until we could see that it wasn't a night-light, but a lantern attached to the scooping end of a toy shrimping net.
The net was being carried by a bearded man about three feet tall, not young, not old, dressed predominantly in green, wearing a pointed hat. He had an oxygen tank on his back. A snorkel mask was dangling from one of the fixing straps.
He stopped some way above us on the slope and very slowly settled himself.
I wondered if he was mentioned on the Well's website. If not, we would have to post the little bugger on, when we got home, and make of him a cult figure.
Assuming we did get home.
He wasn't pleased to see us. It was difficult to say how I knew that, or why it should bother me, him being so small and gnarled and ancient; it was like being stared at by a tree. It was like a bad morning in a crop formation.
Say what you like about Cyril Longcake, scholar, tragedian, toff manqué, and a lot of people wouldn't give him house-room, but he's always brooding, and occasionally comes up with something that rescues the situation.
He turned towards the stumpy little figure, eager for communication.
Don't ask him if he's a fairy, I thought.
And don't say, Are you the goblin we were invoking half an hour ago?
Cyril didn't. He spoke as if he and this creature of the night had been talking in the pub and had got interrupted.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he said, "are you perchance Dark Matter?"
"What is Dark Matter?" said the keeper of the well.
"Well, scientists were observing the Universe recently through a long telescope and they noticed, in some sums they were doing, that generally speaking, in the average solar system, there isn't enough mass to exert enough gravitational pull, to keep the planets on the outer edges of the solar system in place. By rights, the outer planets should be flying off into space.
"But they aren't, so the scientists realised that there must be something else there in the universe, holding everything together: some heavy mass.
"As they can't see it, and they don't know what it is, they have named it Dark Matter. It accounts for about four-fifths of all the matter in the Universe, apparently."
"What is a scientist?" said the little man.
"Well, it's like an alchemist, only more of an observer and thinker, and less of a burner and doer."
"And what is the Universe?"
"The heavens. The night sky. When we finally see to the end of it, and we never will, it might actually be a multiverse, but we tend to concentrate on the idea of a universe because we have a tradition of believing in one God.”
"Me too," said the pool-attendant, then laughed a nasty laugh, until the little bell on the top of his hat jingled. "What's a telescope?"
"A glass for looking at things.”
"Let me ask you something," said the beard. "May I?"
"Fire away," said Cyril.
"Did you ever see a black dog?"
"Yes, we did," said Cyril. "We were out on the Ridgeway at Hackpen Hill once and we were quoting T.S. Eliot, or rather, improving some lines of T.S. Eliot to make them more cheerful, and a black dog came running past us."
"Hackpen Hill! You've been on Hackpen Hill!" said the gnome in a hoarse whisper.
"Oh yes."
"There's a fairy lodge on Hackpen Hill, in a long barrow. Did you see it? Did you hear the music?"
“No" said Cyril.
"Good.”
"It was blowing a gale, mind," said Cyril.
`Typical dowsing trip, '' said Ernlintrude.
"Well, I don't know what you had to grumble about," said Dave. "You stayed in the car."
"Yes, " said Cyril, rounding on her, "stayed in the car and ate all the sandwiches."
"They were mine to eat," said Ermintrude, "not yours. I offered you some but you were gibbering and raving like football supporters."
I could see the game that our diminutive friend was playing, I'm no fool. I made a strategic intervention.
"So, good sir," I said, "your thesis would run thus: black dogs - Dark Matter. As below, so above. The ghostly matter of the heavens made manifest in a Labrador that runs along the Ridgeway without making a sound or denting the wet grass with its paws."
"Were you on the Dragon's Head that day?" said he. "Did you see the lodge?"
"No," said I, "but Aubrey mentions it. Something about a lost shepherd and a fairy hill. Shepherds aren't supposed to get lost, are they?"
"John Aubrey!" cried the elf. "The nicest, kindest mortal as ever lived. Did you know him?"
"He spent some of his childhood in our county, and always wished he could be buried there, in a tumulus," I said. "But I never met him. How could I? He died three hundred years ago."
"That would be a few days to me," said the strange grim diver, "just a few short days.
"Noble lords and ladies, if you ventured into the hill with me now, and danced away what remains of this most auspicious night, you would emerge in the morning and find that fifty or a hundred years had gone by."
Grey Wolf
Find your date of birth and read about your attributes. No guarantees of accuracy.
February 04 to February 08 - Poplar Tree (the Uncertainty) - looks very decorative, talented, not very self-confident, extremely courageous if necessary, needs goodwill and pleasant surroundings, very choosy, often lonely, great animosity, great artistic nature, good organizer, tends to lean toward philosophy, reliable in any situation, takes partnership seriously.
February 09 to February 18 - Cedar Tree (the Confidence) - of rare strength, knows how to adapt, likes unexpected presents, of good health, not in the least shy, tends to look down on others, self-confident, a great speaker, determined, often impatient, likes to impress others, has many talents, industrious, healthy optimism, waits for the one true love, able to make quick decisions.
February 19 to February 28 - Pine Tree (the Peacemaker) - loves agreeable company, craves peace and harmony, loves to help others, active imagination, likes to write poetry, not fashion conscious, great compassion, friendly to all, falls strongly in love but will leave if betrayed or lied to, emotionally soft, low self esteem, needs affection and reassurance.
This brings the year to an end. I hope you found this interesting. Many thanks to Wishhound for the contribution.
Thankfully most of the day could be spent under cover, as it was a bright but bitterly cold day for the trip to Oxford. Some of the members got up early enough for a morning visit to the University of Oxford Botanical Gardens, the oldest botanical garden in the country. We quickly dowsed that the warmest place to be was the series of glasshouses! The garden grows plants for teaching aids for the schools of medicine, local and elsewhere, for research scientists, also for conservation projects.
I had originally planned to dowse some of the plants used for medicinal purposes, but got sidetracked by some decorative plants and a beautiful spiral made up of slate in one of the glasshouse floors!
One plant remains from the original plantings in 1621, this is an English Yew, [taxus bacata], whose leaves contain a substance used to make a treatment for breast cancer.
After lunch, the group was joined by several more members, for the visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum. This wonderful place is the complete antithesis of what is considered to be a good modern museum, but for sheer interest and magic it can’t be beaten. Among the fascinating things on display were several cases of divination related objects, including many Shaman tools, instruments and garments. Our own wise-women and men were featured, with witch bottles, slugs impaled on thorns [wart cures], wax dolls with imbedded pins, and other assorted gruesome items, including a silvery lined glass bottle that apparently contains a witch. This item was donated by a Miss M.A. Murray who collected it in Hove in 1915. She was told by the old lady from whom she got it “-there be a witch in it and if you let ‘un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble!”
A new extension to the museum is almost completed and the upper galleries should be open again soon – this bit was closed off for safety reasons connected with the building work, when we were there. S.C.
The Museum is a teaching museum specialising in anthropology and archaeology, and has an internationally renowned collection of weird and wonderful objects from around the world, crammed into every available inch of space. Drawers under some of the cabinets contain exhibits which can be got out and examined. A large number of the items on shoe are so fragile that normal lighting would damage them, so torches are on free loan from the reception desk, along with magnifying glasses to enable the labels to be read more easily. Many of the labels are the originals, and written in the tiny print favoured by archaeologists for marking finds.
The founder, General Pitt Rivers was born into the Lane Fox family in 1827 and changed his name when he succeeded to the Cranbourne Estate. He started his collection in the 1850’s with weaponry, and soon branched out into other areas. He stated that there was an urgent need to collect as “in a few years all the most barbarous races will have disappeared from the earth or will have ceased to preserve their native crafts.”
When Pitt Rivers inherited the Cranbourne Estate, he excavated many of its ancient sites, producing scale models which can still be seen in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. He became known as the father of modern scientific archaeology, due to his insistence in changing the Victorian priority of “treasure hunting” to the primary purpose of collating as much information about a site as possible. To him, pottery sherds and bits of animal bone were just as important as “treasure” for learning about the lives of our ancestors. His work force largely consisted of his agricultural work-force, so he wasn’t short of labour, and he was one of the first people to experiment with flint knapping, antler tools etc., in order to learn more about them. Once the season’s digs were finished and the harvest was in, Pitt Rivers provided free education and entertainment for his workers.
The gift of his collection to the University of Oxford was not without hitches, as he insisted on a lecturer being appointed to teach anthropology, and lecture on the collection, and a new building had to be built [behind the Natural History Museum], to house the collection, which started with 20,000 objects turning up before the building was completed. These were soon joined by prehistoric material from the Ashmolean and other Oxford museums, like Topsy, it just grew. S.C.
Whilst at the Pitt-Rivers Museum on Sunday 23rd January 2005 we saw some Chinese soap stone carvings of the eight immortals and someone wanted to know more about them. They are legendary figures of the Taoist sect and renowned for their magical powers. They are superior human; beings who have obtained immortality by their studies of Nature's secrets. All of them could walk on water, and were able to turn things they touched into gold.
CHUNG-LI CH’UAN is the chief of the Eight Immortals. He carries a fan and has obtained the secrets of the elixir of life, and the power- of transmutation.
CHANG KUO-LAO was a recluse who could make himself invisible. He had a white mule that he often rode backwards, which carried him immense distances, and when not required was folded up and put in his wallet. His emblem is a bamboo tube used as a drum with two rods as beaters.
LU TUNG-PIN was a scholar and recluse who is the patron of barbers and the sick. His emblem is a sword slung across his back and he carries a Taoist fly whisk in his right hand. He was exposed to ten temptations and having over come them was given his sword with which he slew dragons and destroyed various forms of evil through out the world
TS'.AO KUO-CHIE was a brother of the empress and military commander. He carries a pair of castanets and is honoured by the theatrical professions.
LI T'IEH-KUAI is depicted as a beggar leaning on an iron crutch and a pilgrim’s gourd full of magic medicines. He is reputed to have walked into a fiery furnace with out suffering any harm.
HAN HSIANG-TZU did not know the value of money and if he was given any would scatter it on the ground. He was a famous scholar. His emblem is the flute and he is the patron of musicians. He became immortal when he fell from a supernatural peach tree. He is credited with the power of making flowers grow and blossom instantly.
LAN TS'AI-HO is a beggar who carries a basket of flowers which is her emblem. She is patron of the florists. She is dressed in a blue gown with one foot shod and one bare, and may carry a wand.
HO HSIEN-KU is the daughter of a shop keeper who having eaten of the supernatural peach became a fairy. Her emblem is the lotus which she carries in her hand. She assists in house management.
Nora Morris
One of several white flowers which were thought to be unlucky if brought into the home (also now illegal if wild) as they are said to bring sickness and death. These fears were taken very seriously, earning snowdrops the title of ‘Corpses in Shrouds’. The belief also spread to other white flowers.
In contrast snowdrops were said to have a strong connection with chickens, the number of flowers brought into the house in the spring determining the number of chicks that would hatch, thirteen was deemed a good number.
And finally in many parts on seeing your first snowdrop of the year you would be granted a wish.
SO
Taken from ‘The Penguin Guide to Superstitions of Great Britain and Ireland’
Bob Trubshaw is the proprietor of Heart of Albion Press who are publishers of books and booklets on folklore, mythology, local history and much more. Their catalogue is well worth a look.
Bob Trubshaw
'the mind that holds an idea becomes held by it.' S. Radhakrishnan ‘East and West in Religion’ (Allen and Unwin 1933).
Like so many other people, my first 'active' involvement in the various issues that make up 'Earth mysteries' was through dowsing 'Earth energies'. My armchair reading activities had brought to my attention the British Society of Dowsers and, one Eastertime, I set off for Hawkwood College near Stroud for the BSD's beginner's course. After a most enjoyable weekend I returned home feeling able, with some qualifications, to dowse for water, 'energy lines' and what have you. Subsequent holidays saw me waving my 'coat hangers' around various standing stones and prehistoric sites around England and Scotland. When I moved to Leicestershire I quickly made contact with the East Midlands Dowsing Group (EMDG) and learned much from the various lectures and field trips which they arranged.
This autobiographical introduction is not simply self-indulgent; rather I want to demonstrate that I've 'been there, done that'. On most Mercian Mysteries field trips there are folk fairly new to Earth mysteries who are taught to dowse. It is easy for me to recognise the initial enthusiasm which follows the realisation that 'Hey, I can dowse!'
But, like many others who found they could dowse, and subsequently found 'energy lines' here, there and near-enough everywhere, the next step is, frankly, one of confusion. In an attempt to find out more about a given place 'energy lines' open up so many possibilities that the abundance of responses becomes self-defeating. The answer, clearly, is to impose one's own set of 'rules' to reduce, describe and perhaps quantify the phenomena. There are enough published accounts of such systems - from the pioneering work of Lethbridge or Underwood, through Tom Graves or Havelock Fiddler, plus the wealth of articles in the Journal of the British Society of Dowsers - for it to be clear that there are as many such sets of 'rules' as there are dowsers.
What also emerges from reading any quantity of this literature is that these personal systems rarely have any close correlation with each other. Furthermore, when different dowsers accurately describe what they find at a given site (an all-too-rare occurrence, it might be noted) they rarely have more than a superficial resemblance to any other dowser's work. EMDG field trips have proven this at various 'minor' sites, such as medieval churches, as well as a well-recorded session at the Rollright Stones. Apart from a general tendency to find spirals or concentric circles (and this may well be because of familiarity with Tom Graves' published ideas about this stone circle) none of about ten dowsers who were at Rollright agreed on the number of 'energy' rings, their spacing, or other fundamental factors.
The common trend is for each individual dowser to build up a belief system that 'works' and then use this foundation for further conjecture. For whatever reasons, knowledge that no two dowsers pick up the same energy patterns does not cause the practitioners to subject their observations to the slightest overview or self-criticism. As any one who has tried dowsing will recognise, if you expect to find something, the dowsing instrument will quickly confirm your assumptions. It is quite a different matter to dowse with an open mind and to subject every observation with rigorous checks and evaluations.
In the end, anyone coming to energy dowsing from the 'outside' must be forgiven for thinking that the whole subject has devolved into an unselfcritical mess. The purpose of this article is not to untangle this mess but to merely try to identify what can be salvaged.
Allow me to stop here to clarify this. I'm talking specifically about dowsing for 'Earth energies'. Similar EMDG field trips have shown quite conclusively that different individual's attempts at 'physical dowsing' - by which I mean seeking underground water, buried remains and such like - do correlate extremely well (at least for reasonably experienced dowsers). The best example must be an outing organised by Norman Fahy to Arbor Low where we split up into twos and each pair independently dowsed and mapped the underground water in one 'quadrant' radiating from the circle. When the results for the separate 'slices of pie' were brought together the match-up was excellent. Similarly first-rate results were obtained nearby when the ploughed-out remains of a ditched barrow were dowsed and the results compared to the plans of archaeological excavations. In this instance the dowsers responsible were not particularly experienced at such a task - not least because I was one of the small number involved! 'Physical dowsing' is somehow a different entity from 'energy dowsing' and other aspects which I will refer to later as 'psychic dowsing'. My own working hypothesis runs rather as follows: Physical dowsing is a way of being conscious of sensory inputs which are not directly connected to the more cerebral brain functions. Take as an example man's sensitivity to magnetism [1]. The organ most likely to be responsible is the pineal gland (at puberty the outer layer hardens and becomes magnetically-sensitive) [2]. Yet, although contained within the skull, the pineal lies outside the brain and has no more direct contact with the brain than your big toe; in fact less, as there are no direct nerve connections. So the pineal must communicate with the lower brain, which means the sensations rise up not as 'rational thoughts' but as subconscious 'urges', 'moods' or whatever other word one wants to use to describe such diffuse impressions. In the case of dowsing, clearly the subconscious brain is, in some way, able to alter muscle tension in the shoulders and arms, giving the characteristic 'flick' to a 'V' rod, the crossing of angle rods, or the change in rotation of pendulum.
Yet the same, or similar, channels must also be used by other 'subconscious' stimuli for them to be 'felt'. Among these may well be a variety of 'psychic' perceptions, through to full-blown ESP. Anyone who has become used to using dowsing tools may find that the same techniques work well for 'psychic' explorations, such as dating artifacts, map dowsing, and such like. But, although the manner of bringing the raw impulse through to conscious perception may be the same, this does not mean that the origins are the same. Physical dowsing may, for instance, be linked to the magnetic sensitivity of the pineal, whereas 'psychic' sensations have emanate from quite different organs.
There is a widespread tendency for us to perceive the novel and 'unknown' in terms of our own cultural contexts. Dan Wilson was perhaps the first to explore in print the idea that our psychic capacities tune in to highly specific forms. To act as a 'handle' for his ideas Wilson adopted the term 'Display Theory' (DT) which he described as '. . . the idea that psychic (or 'second-seen') phenomena such as energy lines and auras are not things in their own right but explanatory constructs within the mind of the perceiver . . . ' [3]. If this sounds dry and dusty, elsewhere Wilson writes: 'It is sometimes said that energy lines are the acupuncture meridians of the planet. As we shall see, in DT this is like saying cotton wool is candy floss for the eyes: not a very valuable statement.' [4]
Putting it another way, medieval Europeans saw visions of the Virgin Mary; the Japanese or Chinese equivalent was to see demons from their own pantheon; in our profane era we just encounter aliens [5]. To quote an academic article in Anthropology of consciousness 'Contemporary interpretations of UFOs serve the unconscious resurrection of the power and function of omnipotent beings during a secular age.' [6] The article later goes on to cite the authority of three independent researchers before making the following claim: 'spontaneous altered states of consciousness are endemic in any "normal" population and cultural beliefs exert primary influence upon the content.'
Starhawk has approached the same subject with greater insight: 'Sensory forms and symbolic interpretations are subjective, the cloak of objective energies and entities. Whether those entities are internal forces or external beings depends on how one defines the self. It is more romantic and exciting (and probably truer) to see them as at least partly external; it is psychologically healthier and probably wiser to see them as internal. A thing can be internal and still be objective, still be real. A neurosis or conflict, for example, may be verified as real by others even before it is perceived by the self.' [7]
Forgive me if I continue with another lengthy quote, this time from a very different author: 'To understand the problem we have with energy dowsing consider the fact that, within the "neural network" of the brain, there is only information: input and output. At this level we have almost no way of linking information with the original source of that information. Ideas and images and metaphors - meta-levels of information - are, at this level, indistinguishable from sensory information: they are all equally "real" . . . . any kind of pattern can easily become a "preferred pathway", a pseudo-cause of the dowsing effect. (I suspect, very strongly, that this is usually, rather than occasionally, the case with most so-called "energy dowsing" that happens today.)' (author's emphasis) [8]. So wrote Tom Graves in his attempt to put right the many misunderstandings that he sees making up 'energy dowsing' in recent years. Indeed, the whole article makes essential reading for anyone who has followed so far my own attempts to cover very similar ground.
What is not necessarily in dispute is that there is 'something there' - whatever this so-called 'Earth energy' may be. Maybe it is something 'subtle' and intangible in any other way (a 'consciousness field', if you like). For my money it could just as easily be the Earth's natural electromagnetic field being distorted by each and every object - and person - on the planet. Any attempt to make sense of such a complex and ever-varying phenomena would be, to borrow a taoist metaphor, like trying to catch a moving stream in a bucket.
If fish - from the humble dog fish to the sharks - are sensitive enough to subtle variations in electric field to be able to 'dowse' out their prey in dark water (or even under sand) then I do not find it impossible to believe that we have some residual sensitivity of this kind. In a somewhat overlooked book, The black goddess and the sixth sense, Peter Redgrove [9] evaluates the 'Extra Sensuous Perceptions' of the animal - and human - world. He cites various scientists, such as Becker and Marino [10], who state that not all information gathered by the usual senses is 'processed at the conscious level, and there is no physiological principle that would preclude the subliminal detection of EMFs [electromagnetic fields] by the nervous system.'
Indeed, anyone who is more than superficially interested in this article would do well to read Redgrove's book, as he covers a range of related topics, such as people whose moods swing with the weather, those who are overly-sensitive to high voltage fields such as from pylons, and a whole world of subtle sensitivities in 'abnormal' humans (or is it just that these faculties have atrophied from not being used in the majority of the population?). He develops such ideas both in the context of claimed 'extra-sensory perception' and for dowsing. He summarises this section with the statement: 'The dowsing or water-diving reflex - the twitch of the arm muscles that indicates a field-change - is only one of the human responses behind which lies this 'webwork of forces' of which animals and plants are, as it were, initiated and active presences. It is like a great collective mind, which we call Unconscious, for the reason that we are for the main part unconscious of it. We are capable of more, far more.'
As mentioned in my rant in the last Mercian Mysteries, 'News from the frontline', there is something about some people that makes it necessary for them to impose order on complex phenomena. Perhaps we would be better to accept the raw phenomena as beyond neat and tidy categorisation and instead adopt a greater humility to the sense of place - somewhere along the lines of what Nigel Pennick is describing in Anima Loci (Nideck 1993) and Paul Devereux's notion of 'being and seeing' [11].
It seems to me 'Earth energy' dowsers have three options:
Stick with the 'mumbo jumbo' (but don't expect other folk to take you seriously).
Get to the bottom of what you're claiming - and provide repeatable evidence, which can lead to double-blind testing and/or predictive theories.
Give things up as a bad job and move on to something more interesting.
No prizes for guessing that the present author falls into the latter camp - but anyone following the second option is very welcome to use the pages of Mercian Mysteries to air their ideas. Option one enthusiasts will no doubt want to subscribe to other magazines in future!
[The information concerning East Midlands Dowsing Group activities is purely personal and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members.]
References
1: As demonstrated by Dr Robin R. Baker of the University of Manchester; cf. 'A sense of magnetism', R.R. Baker, New Scientist, 18th Sept 1980.
Also 'Magnetism and its influence on humans', Paul Tinman, Magonia No.26, 1987.
2: Where science and magic meet, Element, 1991 and 'Earth, science and magic - the pineal connection', The ley hunter, No.114, 1991.
3: 'DT2: more about display tradition', Dan Wilson, The Fountain No.16, 1987.
4: 'Totally new: the display tradition (but I hate traditions!)', Dan Wilson, The Fountain No.15, 1987
5: 'Imaginary reality', Patrick Harpur, Magonia, No.32, 1988; see also 'Off limits - ufology and the deconstruction of reality', Peter Rogerson, Magonia No.30, 1988.
6: 'The quest for transcendence: an ethnography of UFOs in America', R.E. Bartholomew, The anthropology of consciousness Vol.2, No.'s 1-2 p1-12.
Although not pertinent to the topic of this article I cannot resist including another quote from this source: 'If an anthropologist: were to place the same standards of legitimacy on Western religion that Western social scientists have placed on UFO realities, Christianity would be ignored as "exotic", pseudoscientific nonsense.'
7: The spiral dance, Starhawk, Harper and Row, 1979. Another good piece in the same vein is 'Belief - a key to magick' by Phil Hine, in The wild places No.3.
8: 'Energy dowsing - muddling with the meta-pattern', Tom Graves, The ley hunter, No.113, 1990.
9: The black goddess and the sixth sense, Peter Redgrove, Bloomsbury 1987 (paperback Paladin 1989).
10: Electromagnetism and life, Robert O. Becker and Andrew A. Marino, State University of New York Press, 1982
11: As described in Earth Memory, Quantum, 1991. Originally published in Mercian Mysteries No.15 May 1993.
See also:
Dowsing: a review of experimental research by George P. Hansen Slawek Wojtowicz's 'how to dowse' site
Copyright 1993, 1996, 2001. No unauthorised copying or reproduction except if all following conditions apply:
a: Copy is complete (including this copyright statement).
b: No changes are made.
c: No charge is made.
At the Edge / Bob Trubshaw / bobtrubs@indigogroup.co.uk Created April 1996; updated August 2001