Originally posted by Allen
The first recorded use of dowsing is thought to be a cave painting at Tassili nAjjer in the Sahara, dated to approximately 6000 B.C. This seems to show an eager crowd watching a dowsers search for water. Use of the technique is recorded by the Egyptians (c. 3000 B.C.), and after their escape from the Egyptians the Hebrews are thought to have used it (c. 2000 B.C.). The activities of their leader Moses are recorded in the Bible:
Thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink (Exodus 17:5 6)
Take the rod...and speak ye unto the rock...and it shall give forth water (Numbers 20:9 11)
and some readers have taken these references to indicate that Moses was dowsing using his staff. During Roman times the author Cicero (50 B.C.) recorded use of the VIRGVLA DIVINATORIVM, the dowsing rod. Martin Luther denounced dowsing in 1528 A.D. as being the work of the Devil, and dowsers of breaking the First Commandment. A well-known publication by Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (1556) has illustrations and comments on the common use of the technique by miners for the finding of metallic ores. Kaspar Schott, a Jesuit priest and mathematician, was the first to suggest, in the seventeenth century, that the movement of the dowsing rod was due to unconscious muscular action. However, despite these well-documented activities for eight millennia, dowsing has remained a folk method, and scientific study of the technique only began in 1890. At first, although there were positive indications of correlations between scientific observations and dowsing results, the designs of the experiments were insufficiently rigorous to convince the sceptical scientific community. Some so-called studies of dowsing which appeared in the scientific press (e.g. Ellis 1917; Hyman and Vogt 1958; Vogt and Hyman 1959) were more concerned with the reputation of the authors, and carefully ignored all references giving favourable reports of dowsing. Ford (1961) was similarly careful to state that dowsing in 1961 was unproven by any test yet devised, but concluded that a few dowsers may react to electromagnetic influences. A further wait until 1971 was necessary before the first properly-conducted double-blind study was carried out by a sceptic (Chadwick and Jensen 1971), with control experiments and statistically valid results. The design of rigorous experiments continues, for example the Greensites Project (1990) and The Dowsing Welly Experiment (1993, reported by Wilcock (1994)).
http://www-sop.inria.fr/agos-sophia/sis ... sdean.html
Allen
The first recorded use of dowsing is thought to be a cave painting at Tassili nAjjer in the Sahara, dated to approximately 6000 B.C. This seems to show an eager crowd watching a dowsers search for water. Use of the technique is recorded by the Egyptians (c. 3000 B.C.), and after their escape from the Egyptians the Hebrews are thought to have used it (c. 2000 B.C.). The activities of their leader Moses are recorded in the Bible:
Thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink (Exodus 17:5 6)
Take the rod...and speak ye unto the rock...and it shall give forth water (Numbers 20:9 11)
and some readers have taken these references to indicate that Moses was dowsing using his staff. During Roman times the author Cicero (50 B.C.) recorded use of the VIRGVLA DIVINATORIVM, the dowsing rod. Martin Luther denounced dowsing in 1528 A.D. as being the work of the Devil, and dowsers of breaking the First Commandment. A well-known publication by Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (1556) has illustrations and comments on the common use of the technique by miners for the finding of metallic ores. Kaspar Schott, a Jesuit priest and mathematician, was the first to suggest, in the seventeenth century, that the movement of the dowsing rod was due to unconscious muscular action. However, despite these well-documented activities for eight millennia, dowsing has remained a folk method, and scientific study of the technique only began in 1890. At first, although there were positive indications of correlations between scientific observations and dowsing results, the designs of the experiments were insufficiently rigorous to convince the sceptical scientific community. Some so-called studies of dowsing which appeared in the scientific press (e.g. Ellis 1917; Hyman and Vogt 1958; Vogt and Hyman 1959) were more concerned with the reputation of the authors, and carefully ignored all references giving favourable reports of dowsing. Ford (1961) was similarly careful to state that dowsing in 1961 was unproven by any test yet devised, but concluded that a few dowsers may react to electromagnetic influences. A further wait until 1971 was necessary before the first properly-conducted double-blind study was carried out by a sceptic (Chadwick and Jensen 1971), with control experiments and statistically valid results. The design of rigorous experiments continues, for example the Greensites Project (1990) and The Dowsing Welly Experiment (1993, reported by Wilcock (1994)).
http://www-sop.inria.fr/agos-sophia/sis ... sdean.html
Allen