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The Angel at Purton, where the W.D.S. monthly meetings are held, has had a recent change of landlord, who has revamped the bar, and the menu. Reports from members who have sampled the food have been very favourable – the landlady plans to concentrate on non-frozen foods cooked on the premises, at a sensible price.
We have some new books in stock. Unfortunately we can only give a small discount on them as we have had to buy them in direct from the publishers, but any saving is worth having.
This is the annual long-weekend, this time to Dorset. Full details from Shaun. If you can’t come for the whole weekend that’s OK, just liaise with Shaun, who has worked out a plan of where we will be and when, so day-trippers will be able to find us. We hope!
Now that I had heard of Dark Matter, I wasn't going to take any shit from anybody.
Here it was, this invisible material or substance, passing merrily through every molecule of the Universe at every moment.
It gave out no light and was apparent only through mathematical computation or a belief in astrology.
Marvellous, really.
Dave the Farting Dowsing Dude keeps in his waxed field jacket a small retractable telescope for closer inspection of those obscure crumbling moments of church architecture he is so fond of.
A handy thing, this gargoyle viewer, and strangely nautical when you see him clap it to his eye in a graveyard, but honestly, you could scan the night sky and the spire of Salisbury Cathedral with it for hours at a stretch, and never catch a glimpse of Dark Matter.
Yet there it was all the time; all around; in everything.
As Richard Jefferies once memorably said, at Barbury Castle:
"It is eternity now.
I am in the midst of it.
It is about me in the sunshine."
These visionaries and mystics, they're pretty clued up, you know. Ahead of the game.
Elsewhere, Dark Matter had gone undetected for many eons; yet it was binding whole solar systems together, according to the latest scientific theory as reported by my old friend Cyril Longcake, himself a reject from the Darwinian scheme of things.
Dark Matter was exerting a force not unlike gravity, to keep the planets in their place, working their appointed orbits.
It was massive and omnipresent, but not quite there. It kept everything at its proper distance, holding everything within the dance.
How could the planet Venus, distant by many a country mile, be exerting an influence on those born on Earth under the sign of Taurus? Dark Matter, squire.
Yes, I was beginning to think we had an explanation here, for many phenomena of a spiritual nature, and perhaps for absent-mindedness.
Dark Matter was very fluid yet very stable; very correct yet utterly responsive. We didn't really know what it was, but it kept things from falling in a heap and imploding. It kept everything from happening at once.
I thought, it was perhaps another way of saying Time.
And, armed with this rather commanding piece of knowledge about the universal system, I felt that I might now rise above sordid things, like my milkman and his supposedly unrequited bill.
Why was I bothering with him anyway? I should have sent out to the supermarket for milk, like everyone else. I was only keeping him on out of the goodness of my heart, to give him a start in life.
We all knew he was angling for a catering franchise at some sporting arena, like the forthcoming Wembley Stadium, whilst relying heavily on his father-in-law for the grub-stake.
Any more ugly scenes on the doorstep, like the one we'd had the week before, and I would pick up the inflatable Dalek which I keep in the hall, wave it at him and say:
‘I think you'll find, it's all a question of Dark Matter, mate.’
He would be silenced. I would retreat indoors.
I love nothing better than to sit by the fire crinkling up my toes. Actually, I love to sit anywhere, crinkling and uncrinkling my tootsies. I live for pleasure.
Who knows, some form of rudimentary reflexology may be going on here; an inadvertent tweaking of the meridians, an aid to circulation in the lower reaches; a tonic for the sockless.
Oh, to feel those tendons twanging, and the dry skin wrinkling and unwrinkling on the underside of the foot. To be elephantine. To feel like Uluru, bathing in the sun.
You have to raise the feet slightly off the floor, then you stare down at them, which makes them appear as though they belonged to someone else, not quite a stranger. A small miracle of Nature.
As I crinkle, memories of other occasions of toe-crinkling are brought to mind, compounding the glory of the moment.
Have you noticed, no-one but your mother ever turns your hands over and washes the upturned palms with a flannel or sponge, as you sit there, very small and confounded by her care, staring stupidly at the soap bubbles.
No-one but your dear old Dad ever considers your big toe might be a piggy going to market, or says your middle toe is a pig eating roast beef. With a knife and fork, presumably, and wearing a waistcoat with a Prince of Wales check.
I was drifting into the borders of sleep, stood in the mud in my loafers, there at the Well at 3 a.m.
Suddenly we remembered our purpose in coming - to use the plunge-pool to test for dowsing responses under water.
We know that sharks, for example, and sting-rays, perform a kind of hyper¬sensitive dowsing through water, using tiny traces of scent, and electrical impulses, mainly to locate their prey.
Then, of course, there is that most egregious mammal, the dolphin, who swims around the bay like a playboy, conning young girls and their deluded parents into thinking that he might have healing and psychic properties. He is just a shark, really. But funny things happen in water.
So, what if a dowser got underwater with the rods? How would that be?
We all gathered round the plunge pool, ranging the remaining candles along the stone edge, and gazed at the swiftly swirling cold cold water.
I should have gone in myself. I had the blubber. Cyril volunteered, but I wouldn't let him. He'd have got pneumonia, and it wouldn't have done his employment prospects any good at the garage.
One of the engineering fraternity suddenly ranged up in my field of vision and made himself known.
"My name is Jeremy. I feel I was born for this moment," he said.
I'm not sure it's still in print, I'll have to check, but a number of years ago the Injured Dowsers Benevolent Fund produced a handbook which seeks to guide the unwary dowser through potentially difficult and dangerous situations.
How to tell a cow from a bull. Are there hornets north of Derbyshire? How to deal with people who have become convinced of something through too long an exposure to their own thoughts. Whether or not to offer your services to the local rozzers after a murder, bearing in mind that we are not in France. That kind of thing.
I well remember the section on potentially extreme dowsing. I may even have drafted it myself.
The broad hints were: never make a decision when your socks are wet, as you're bound to regret it by the time they're dry. Never attempt to dowse from the end of a bungee rope. Never listen to people in a group, as collective insanity is very easily achieved.
And lastly, of course, remember that lack of sleep may impair what little judgement you possess.
"Right, Jeremy," I said, "in you go then."
Grey Wolf
Those of you who browse through the sales table at the monthly meetings may have noticed that the dowsing charts for Bach Flower remedies have been re-designed. Apart from the more attractive appearance, the new ones are much easier to use and are particularly suited to pendulum dowsing.
While looking them over the other day, it occurred to me that while we often use these remedies for illness, shock, depression or just feeling below par, several of the remedies are very useful in psychic protection or in recovering from problems caused by failing to use psychic protection, a subject that keeps re-occurring among the members.
The following are especially suited to this purpose:-
Centaury – awakens inner strength against outside pressures.
Rose – helps connection to the angelic realm, allows only good spirits to influence and helps spiritual inspiration.
Pine – eases fears, helps self-confidence and cleanses the aura.
Olive – renews vitality and helps banish exhaustion, both mental and physical.
Walnut – strengthens aura, helps balance psychic energies during transitional times of life and awakens objectivity and clear perspectives. Also used for calming poltergeist activity.
White Chestnut – clears fears and worries and can be used for suspected manipulation. Helps clarity of mind.
There are other flower elixirs in addition to the Bach Remedies and several are also useful, in particular, Pennyroyal – one of the most beneficial in cases of psychic attack. Pennyroyal can also be used as a spray for “sealing” a room, to cleanse, balance or protect. Sage “smudge sticks” are another useful tool for purification and cleansing, while grounding and protecting the physical body and surroundings. Lavender can sooth nerves after unpleasant psychic experiences and is useful for protection. Yarrow is also very good for protection, cleanses the aura and eases stress.
If unsure which would be the best for you, try dowsing for the appropriate remedy! Sources for the above included “Psychic Protection” by Ted Andrews, published by Dragonhawk Publishing. S.C.
by Sir Geofroy Tory
Until you have experienced it, you will find map dowsing, dowsing off a chart, utterly unbelievable, as I did at first. But there must be hundreds of dowsers doing it all the time. Those who dowse professionally for water usually do their initial search on the ordnance map before confirming their findings on the ground in the customary way. This saves them a lot of foot¬work. It can even be done off a reasonably accurate sketch map.
I recently located accurately the well of a friend, off such a rough map, drawn in pencil on a scrap of paper at our dinner table and told him the exact depth. I said he should have sunk his well in a different place, which I marked on the rough sketch, and which I said was probably about 100 feet deep. He told me later that his neighbour had already sunk a well at the spot I had suggested, and that it was 110 feet deep. I also later located, from an ordnance map, the best pools in his two mile stretch of salmon river, marking the places in pencil on a piece of tracing paper. Thinking to test me, he gave me a fresh piece of tracing paper to see if my results would correspond with the original ones. They coincided exactly.
One cannot begin to explain how this works. It takes one into the world of metaphysics; there cannot be a scientific explanation. Dowsers know that communication between them and their distant targets is instantaneous, and that nothing can stop it, no Faraday cage or any other electronic shield. The effect is as if the dowser has instant access to some central computer containing the knowledge which he seeks. With a rough sketch of a homestead in New South Wales a dowser in England should be able to trace, say, the source of water entering the house and the point where it enters. I myself have located, to my satisfaction, targets hundreds of miles away. The snag is that dowsers have never been able to give satisfactory demonstrations of this power, with a view to convincing the incredulous. It is written in one of the classic works on dowsing that the power will not come unless it is really needed. In other words, you are not allowed to show off with it. Unbelievers not unnaturally say that this is a "cop-out" .
Shortly after my initiation into dowsing, my wife and I started to spend the more unpleasant months of the year in Malta, where our daughter Anne lived with her Maltese husband and their two children. One year an Irish friend, whose hobby was skin-diving, asked me to try to locate a World War II wreck in the approaches to Kinsale harbour, about twelve miles West of our house. He and his skin-diving friends had a contact in Lloyds who gave them the approximate coordinates of ships sunk by German submarines, and they used to dive over these, looking for interesting deck cargoes. While I was in Malta I happened to be calling on the British High Commissioner when the Admiral walked in. I asked him if he could lend me the Admiralty chart for Kinsale. He looked rather surprised, but was too polite to ask my reason for wanting it, and his Flag Lieutenant duly delivered the chart to me. I was to look for copper, so, with a bit of copper wire in my left hand, to act as sample, I started dowsing, using a sheet of tracing paper for my plots. I quickly found reactions to copper in five places. Feeling a bit foolish, I must confess, I sent the tracing back to my friend. On our return to Ireland two months later I asked him whether my plots made any sense. He said four of my plots were over wrecks which they already knew about. The fifth was probably the one they were interested in, but it was in an awkward place for diving.
Malta, like Bermuda, is chronically short of water. The Maltese collect rain water in tanks but rely mainly on water, originally rain, pumped up from deep shafts and galleries in the porous lime stone rock of which Malta is made. They also sink many wells. Malta has been likened to a gigantic sponge, which soaks up rain water. If there is enough of this, the sea water is kept out, but when there is too great a demand on the supply of fresh water, then the sea encroaches and tap water becomes brackish. With very few exceptions, at the best of times, tap water ruins tea and whisky.
I dowsed for water on the ordnance map of Malta in Ireland, and Hazel and I used to plan our walks in Malta with a view to checking on the ground the spots I had recorded. I found a number of places where water seemed to be coming up to a point near the surface, and then to separate into a number of ‘streams’ radiating out in all directions. Some of these places were associated with rocky outcrops standing up from the surrounding flat land, as if the water had pushed up the rocks, just failing to break surface. A former member of the British Society of Dowsers, called Cameron I seem to remember, had a theory about such features, which he called ‘domes’. This has been discredited, but it seemed to me that domes described very well what I was finding.
At one time I had been British High Commissioner in Malta. I remembered that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN had once commissioned a team of Israelis to locate and seal off the numerous leaks in the ancient network of water pipes in Malta. This team had also provided the RAF in Malta with special photographic equipment which would distinguish fresh water coming up into the sea round the coastline, so that wells might be sunk with the intention of tapping this ‘escaping’ water so as to increase the total supply of water instead of reducing it, as sinking more wells on the land would do. Questioned by me, the RAF in Malta at the time I was dowsing said they had no record of the use of such special equipment. So I started to dowse on the ordnance map for fresh water off¬shore. I found a lot of it, all round the coastline, and traced the water lines back to places inland where I got particularly strong reactions. Some of these were the ‘domes’ I was speaking of.
Greatly daring, I waited on the chief Government water geologist with my tracings. He was very polite, but totally incredulous, saying that, although one of my plots happened to coincide with one of the Government wells, located incidentally within a hundred or so yards of the sea, the others were no use because the water escaping to sea would certainly be brackish. I said I had the feeling that the water from my domes was going out under pressure, but he said this would certainly not be so. I could hardly blame him for not believing. I often find myself wondering whether it is all nonsense. This is probably why I am not a very good dowser.
Then I tried oil, which Malta badly needs to find. I had tried to locate oil at the time of the North Sea finds, sending traces and plots to Shell. They also answered politely, perhaps because I was a share-holder! In Malta there was a resident UN geologist advising the Government on oil exploration. I met him at a cocktail party and told him of my ‘hobby’. I asked him if he would show me his map of promising areas, but he said one short glimpse of it would cost me a lot of money. When I called on him at his invitation for a drink, he laughingly drew in thick red pencil a very crude outline of the North African coastline from Tunis to Alexandria on a piece of paper maybe two feet by eighteen inches in size, with the Maltese islands a mere couple of dots and the tip of Sicily just appearing at the top. He said "See what you can find on this."
The next week we met again for drinks at his house. He looked at the plots I had made, circles from one to two inches in diameter in several areas of North Africa and in the sea area round Malta. After a long silence he said accusingly: "You have had access to some official records". I denied this. "Well," he said, "This is right, and that, but this and this are wrong" and so on. "About sixty percent right". "What percentage do the oil companies expect from their detecting instruments?" I asked. "Oh, about 12 percent." "Then why don't we go into business?" His predictable response was "Look here! I am a scientist. You really can't expect me to believe that you can get worthwhile results with a child's marble on a piece of string! But it is an amusing hobby."
The following year he told me some more good prospects had been found and asked me round to have a look. Two of the new places were the same as two which he had struck out of my map the last time we had met. "That surely now gives me 80 percent", I said. But he remained totally unimpressed. Dowsers know that dowsing works, but until they can prove this in clinical conditions which will satisfy the most sceptical scientist, they will not he taken seriously.
More next month
The speaker for May was Geoff Stray, who was recommended to us by March’s speaker, Andy Thomas. Geoff’s subject was one he has studied for many years – the interpretation of the Mayan Calendar.
This complex subject is not the easiest thing to explore in a talk of an hour or so, but Geoff managed to cover an amazing amount of fascinating facts and theories in the time available, and succeeded in making the complicated bits fairly easy to understand.
He has done an enormous amount of research on the various theories that have been published, and has upset one or two of the “experts” by checking their mathematical calculations only to find that things just didn’t add up. How to make friends and influence people!
One well known Mayan stone carving shows a circular, mandala-like calendar layout which looks very cluttered and over-complex, until Geoff realised that the carving might have been based on an earlier model that had moving parts. He has created a computer generated copy of such a calendar and has animated it so that we could see how it would have worked in practice. This worked extremely well, and having watched this, the whole thing became clear.
So, what will happen in 2012? The general consensus is that the world is not actually going to come to an end, but major changes will occur, mainly for good, but with some nasty side effects as well. Interesting times! S.C.
The day started with a visit to the church at Hardington Bampfylde, a small settlement near Bath, which became even smaller after the Black Death of 1348. St. Mary’s church is no longer used for regular services and is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. The building is on the edge of what is now a farm but was originally part of the Bampfylde Manor grounds. Parts of the church are Norman, including the chancel arch, which along with the font, is the earliest part of the building. The manor was staunchly Royalist and it was reported that King Charles came here. The royal arms of Charles 1st. are over the chancel arch, and the manor was given special protection by the Royalist Army.
Well worth a visit if you are in the area and couldn’t make the field trip.
After the dowsing session at the church we lunched at the pub at nearby Falkland, building up strength for the trek up to the long-barrow at Stony Littleton. This barrow is in an excellent state of preservation and has been sensitively restored. The situation is stunning, being at the top of a hill with great views and its isolation makes it much less attractive to the average tourist – an advantage from the dowsers point of view.
Stony Littleton Long Barrow
I had not been there for some time and had forgotten just how long the central passage is. It really gives the impression of going down into the otherworld, particularly since the entrance is so low that you have to bend double to walk down the passage Next time a crash helmet will be on my list of essential kit! One of the rocks at the doorway contains the impressed outlines of a large ammonite, which was obviously removed many years ago. Plenty to dowse here, especially around the perimeter of the barrow, as long as you can keep the dowsing rod steady in the wind! S.C.