Pendulum dowsing

Pendulum dowsing is the use of a small weight hung from the hand on a thread to seek answers to questions or to find something hidden. For centuries people have asked questions of hand-held pendulums and taken their swings as answers from the unconscious mind or from the divine.^[1] The pendulum, hung on a nylon or silk thread, is one of the tools of dowsing, alongside the forked stick and the Y-shaped metal rod. Dowsers use them to try to detect hidden things such as water, minerals, treasure, archaeological remains and even dead bodies.^[2]

Description

Key terms

Dowsing is the search for hidden things, such as water or minerals, with a hand-held instrument: a forked stick, a metal rod or a pendulum.^[2]
The ideomotor effect is the way that simply thinking of a movement produces tiny muscle movements the person is not aware of making. It is the main scientific explanation for why a pendulum swings.^[1]^[3]

Using a pendulum

In one common method, particular swings of the pendulum are taken to mean "yes" or "no", and the user silently "asks" the pendulum a question.^[1] Some dowsers say they can find things without visiting the site, by passing their instrument over a map of the area.^[2]^[4]

The US Geological Survey lists many things that different dowsers have said they can find, from water and minerals to lost animals and property boundaries; a few dowsers also claim to analyse character, or to diagnose disease.^[4] In homeopathy, dowsing with a pendulum or similar device has been used as an aid to prescribing.^[5]

Dowsers themselves dislike the term "divining rod", because they don't regard their work as divination.^[2]

How the movement is explained

Britannica describes the dowser as appearing to receive signals from the hidden object, which cause involuntary muscle contractions that move the instrument.^[2] Researchers explain the movement of the pendulum by the ideomotor effect: thinking of a movement causes small muscle movements, which make the pendulum swing.^[1] Chevreul and Carpenter pioneered the scientific understanding of these movements in the mid-1800s. Ideomotor movements are too small to see with the naked eye, but the pendulum magnifies them. The same signals have been used in clinical hypnosis, as a way for a person in trance to answer "yes", "no" or "I don't want to answer" without speaking.^[3]

What the evidence says

Controlled studies have not found pendulum dowsing to be more accurate than chance or than ordinary guessing:

In a 2017 study of 80 people, accuracy on a visual task was low whether people answered aloud (57%) or with a pendulum (53%). Answers given with the pendulum were less biased, but not more accurate.^[1]
In a 2002 double-blind trial, six homeopaths who used dowsing tried to tell a homeopathic medicine from a placebo. They chose correctly in 48.1% of pairs, a result the authors described as wholly negative.^[5]
After reviewing scientifically controlled experiments on water dowsing, the US Geological Survey concluded that further tests were not worth the cost. It explains dowsers' apparent successes by the fact that, in many areas, some groundwater exists almost everywhere.^[4]

Scope

What it includes

Asking questions of a hand-held pendulum and reading its swings as "yes" or "no"^[1]
Searching for hidden things, on site or over a map^[2]^[4]

What it is not

Pendulum dowsing is not a way of diagnosing illness or choosing medicines. In a controlled trial, homeopaths using dowsing could not tell a medicine from a placebo.^[5]
It is not shown to be a channel for outside messages. Researchers explain a pendulum's swing by the ideomotor effect, that is, by the user's own small muscle movements (see How the movement is explained above).^[1]^[3]

Traditions and lineage

Dowsing seems to have become popular in Europe in the Middle Ages.^[2] The first detailed description of the divining rod is in Agricola's De Re Metallica (1556), an account of German mining. The rod reached England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), where it was used to find minerals, and was soon used across Europe to find water. It was controversial from the start: in the 17th century some explained it by "attraction and repulsion", some condemned it as superstition, some thought the rod moved by satanic influence, and others believed the dowser's power came from God. Settlers from England and Germany took the practice to North America.^[4]

Movements of the hand-held pendulum and of the Ouija board planchette were once attributed to outside spirits, before the scientific study of ideomotor movements in the 19th century.^[3] That history matters for anyone in a Spiritualist setting: a movement that once seemed to come from spirit is now understood to come, at least in large part, from the person's own muscles.

Context

Within Spiritualism

The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology describes the pendulum as a divination device whose clockwise or anticlockwise swing gives answers to questions, and likens this to the raps of Spiritualist séances.^[6] This is a comparison of method only. Spiritfold has found no source describing pendulum dowsing as a Spiritualist religious practice. The comparison is also a reason for care, because the ideomotor research described above shows that a pendulum's answers can come from the user's own expectations.^[1]

In Australian Spiritualism

The New Age Spiritual Mission in Unley, South Australia, lists dowsing among the past workshops it has run, alongside trance, psychometry, mediumship, tarot and spiritual healing.^[7]

A Spiritualist perspective

The pendulum sits near the edges of Spiritualist life rather than within it. As the sources above show, one encyclopedia compares its swings to the raps of the séance room, and at least one Australian Spiritualist church has run a dowsing workshop, but neither makes it a Spiritualist practice. A Spiritualist teacher would treat it as a separate tool and would be careful not to present a pendulum's answer as a message from the spirit world.

The research summarised above, including the ideomotor explanation, is worth taking seriously, and an honest dowser will tell people about it. A medium in training learns to ask of every impression, "Is this mine, or is it from spirit?", and the pendulum is a good lesson in how easily our own wishes move things. Good practice follows from that. A pendulum should never be used to diagnose illness, to choose medicines, or to make decisions that belong to a doctor. Used privately, as a way of noticing what we already sense, it can do little harm. Offered to others, it calls for honesty, modesty and care.