Dowsing On May 30, 2004 6:56 PM, Craig wrote: Our interest in divination generally and dowsing specifically is in how practitioners of these practices used them to access the wisdom systems of their day and to use what we learn from this to design a practice for the internet which can access and make use of contemporary, globalized wisdom. The only way to make any practical sense of this in the twenty first century is to cut through the superstitions, which are generally the only aspects of divination practices to be perpetuate by contemporary industrialized society. Dowsing offers a good example of how this might be done. Clearly dowsing works. The evidence of this can be seen in millions of wells all over the world. Anyone who has ever decided where to dig a well, was a dowser. First of all, I would express my skepticism of any mystical outcomes of dowsing. You can read a fairly exhaustive debunking of the mystical properties of dowsing at Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments by J. T. Enright, so I won't go into any scientific explanation of why dowsing from a mystical standpoint is nonsense. Will and I had a discussion about this as we were waiting for our plane from Gainesville after the 2004 FRE retreat. Using a classic Y shaped dowsing rod as an example, it is possible to imagin how the dowser would mask his or her skill in magic in order to control the demand for their craft. If everyone knew where to dig, no one would need a dowser. The trick to successful dowsing is to trace the topography of the landscape in order to locate the underground stream. Like its aboveground counter parts, underground streams will always take the path of least resistance. If you stand on a hillside with a Y shaped stick and point it downhill you will determine the fall line. By stepping out the fall line the dowser will always arrive in the troff between inclines. A Y shaped stick is the most practical, available and handy tool for making these sorts of sightings. This type of topographical sighting is one component of a complex wisdom system a skilled dowser would employ. The ability to read the landscape would also include assessing types of vegetation, soil etc. Inevitably the dowser would want to protect this wisdom. Furthermore, this activity would appear to an uninitiated observer as ritualized perfomance. It is not a leap to imagine dowsers would exaggerate their body motions and add mysterious looking gestures in order to further mystify this activity. The more magical dowsing appeared, the less likely it would be that the farmers would try it for themselves. An accomplished dowser was undoubtedly also a skilled magician. This tactic of mystifying specialized wisdom is still practiced today throughout academia. Dowsing has been used as a relay in several FRE projects. Will's Soft Wishing Y Memorial project made extensive use of the Y as a hyper-icon and in the Imaging Place project the camera is treated as a kind of dowsing rod used to locate the vortexes in the choral zone. 
On May 31, 2004 10:12 AM, Greg wrote: Hi Craig The one key point for me is that the clarification that we are not taking any of the divination procedures literally. It really doesn't matter within the context of choragraphy whether or not dowsing etc "works" to find water or whether alchemy is a way to produce gold, since what we are looking for is cultural water or moral gold: divination is an interface metaphor, and is useful to the extent that divination is intuitively understood by the general public. best greg On May 31, 2004 10:01, Will wrote: From the British Society of Dowsers: ",,,To dowse is to search, with the aid of simple hand held tools or instruments, for that which is otherwise hidden from view or knowledge. It can be applied to searches for a great number of artefacts and entities. It is most commonly known by most people in association with searching for underground water; not surprising considering the absolute need for water by man and his animals and cultivated plants which sustain him..." "What is less readily known is that dowsing can be also used for searching for other underground features such as archaeological remains, cavities and tunnels, oil, veins of mineral ore, underground building services, missing items and occasionally missing persons..." ...The origin of the verb is uncertain but was mentioned by in the seventeenth century essay by John Locke Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest in relation to dowsing for mines of gold or silver. He spelled the word deusing whilst most modern dictionaries spell it dowsing or dousing. Pronunciation varies from the common to rhyme with browse to the rarer to rhyme with house. In either case dowsers will readily recognise the term. Not infrequently water dowsing is referred to as water divining (in North America water witching). As the French for dowser is sourcier and that for witch sorcier, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to understand the confusion in some quarters about the erroneous idea that the art of dowsing is aligned to some devilish activity..." "The word dowsing as spelled today first appeared in 1831 in The Quarterly Mining Review and it is possible that the word was taken from the Cornish as was suggested by Frederick Jago in his 1887 English-Cornish Dictionary. Alternatively it could be borrowed from the German deuten, to' indicate' or 'point out', or the Middle English word duschen to 'strike', echoing the action of a dowsing rod as it 'strikes' downward to indicate the presence of water..." From the Society of American Dowsers: "Note that in the act of map dowsing, the dowser has transcended the limitations of space. The map can represent a property in a neighboring country or in a country halfway around the globe." Mary (my wife) relates an early formative story in which her high school chemestry teacher brought in dowsing sticks to a skeptical science class. Most were a cerain type of smooth wood and one was metal. They were instructed to pair off and dowse the school football field for water pipes. One person would hold the stick and the other would count off steps. Mary entered the exercise skeptically, but found the stick, held in two hands with the third pointer foward, unmistakenly pulled downwards at different points. The student pairs were then asked to draw maps of the perceived water lines on the field as that night's homework. The next day the teacher revealed an architecural map of the water system that closely matched Mary and her partner's diagram. Other stundent's projects were not so succesful. The teacher explained it was a matter of sensitivity.  Dowsing is connected to an alternative approach to mapping. A mapping based on psychic attraction analogous to flanerie and the Situationists. Criag's description of the inverted Y maps the topography, the existing or aquired cutural wisdom. The other way around senses the psychic underground. In this case was matter-of-factly (and confusingly) conducted within a high school science class which is an important cultural vehicle for passing on the logical deductive reasoning of the scientific (and literary) method. It has always been interesting to me, via my "Glassblowing for Boys" manual reconstructions, that science also presents itself as magic. In this sense magic marks a power relationship between those that know and those that don't, useful in transfering ideology and securing hierarchy. However, I think it nevertheless it can continue to sketch an important territory at the limits of accepted cultural wisdom. A relationship between becoming and being. The surrealists saw the machine/automatic as magical interlocutor between a deadly sense of control and the liberation of the subconscious. So I think both ways of holding the dowsing rod are important and to be emphasized equally. Will On June 1, 2004 9:18 PM, Craig wrote: Deuten/Duschen/Dachshund? This reminds me of the dream, which Barbara Jo recorded in her Miami River journals, about the two thirsty dachshunds in the rag picker's warehouse immersing their heads in the water bowl. Also relevant is the story of Nikola Tesla from Imaging Niagara. Temperamental genius and megalomaniac huckster, his invention of polyphase electric power alone earned him worldwide fame and fortune. He would often appear on stage lighting up neon lights with his bare hands and demonstrating his now famous, if not useless, Tesla Coil, as an act of magic.  Tesla's motor signaled the end of the Age of Steam and the dawn of a new Age of Electricity. Tesla claims that the solution to this problem appeared during a breakdown and in a literal flash of insight. At his zenith he was an intimate of poets and scientists, industrialists and financiers. Yet Tesla died destitute, having squandered both his fortune and scientific reputation. In 1893 Westinghouse and Tesla received a contract from the Niagara Power Commission to build the first two AC generators at the Edward Dean Adams power station on the northeastern shore of the American Falls; the first large-scale implementation of Tesla's polyphase system. By 1901 a high voltage line was in operation to Buffalo, N.Y., over 26 miles away, where on Sept. 6, Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley as he greeted citizens in the Temple of Music, a pavilion of the Buffalo, New York, Pan-American Exposition, which was lit with Tesla power. The success of the polyphase electric motor not only fueled growth of existing industry but also created entirely new ones such as carborundum manufacturing (Union Carbide) and aluminum smelting (Alcoa) the legacy of which is Love Canal. Back to Divination Relays. 
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