The History of Dowsing: From German Mines to the Pendulum

Sixteenth-century German mines

The documented history of dowsing starts in the German-speaking mining regions of the 1500s, where some miners walked the ground holding a Y-shaped branch to look for veins of ore. In German the rod was called a Wünschelrute, roughly a "wishing rod."

The best-known written description is in De re metallica, the great mining treatise by Georgius Agricola, the Latin name of the German physician and scholar Georg Bauer. It was published in Basel in 1556, shortly after his death, with dozens of woodcuts; one of them shows men walking with rods while others dig.

What Agricola actually said about the rod

Agricola devoted a passage in Book II of De re metallica to the divining rod, and he handled it with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. He laid out the arguments of those who defended the rod and those who rejected it, and described how the fork was held and which woods were preferred.

His verdict was cautious: a serious miner should rely on the natural signs of the ground, such as exposed veins, spring water and the condition of plants, rather than an enchanted twig. That the first great written record of the rod is also a skeptical one is part of what makes this history so interesting.

The treatise reached English in 1912, translated by Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, years before he became president and she first lady.

Jacques Aymar and the Lyon murders

In the seventeenth century the rod left the mines and walked into a courtroom. In July 1692 a wine merchant and his wife were murdered in Lyon, and the authorities called in Jacques Aymar, a man from the Dauphiné known for working with a rod.

According to accounts from the time, Aymar followed a trail with his rod that led to the arrest of a suspect. The case caused a sensation, and the next year the abbé de Vallemont published La physique occulte, ou Traité de la baguette divinatoire (1693), which tried to explain it with the physics of the day.

The fame didn't last. When Aymar was tested before the Prince of Condé, he failed, and ever since the case has been cited both for and against the rod.

The nineteenth century: science looks at the pendulum

In the nineteenth century the pendulum moved to the center of the debate. The French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul published a letter to André-Marie Ampère in 1833 about experiments with a ring hanging from a thread: with his arm supported or his eyes covered, the pendulum barely moved.

In 1852 the English physiologist William B. Carpenter coined the term "ideo-motor" for such movements without will, and in 1853 Michael Faraday showed that séance tables turned because of unconscious pressure from the sitters' hands. That same year the French Academy of Sciences formed a commission to examine a paper on the divining rod, and Chevreul's report grew into his 1854 book on the rod, the pendulum and turning tables.

Out in the countryside the practice carried on. In 1883 the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor watched a water-finder at work in Somerset, England; two hazel rods from that dowser are now at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and Tylor concluded that the rod simply followed the state of mind of the person holding it.

The French priests and the word "radiesthesia"

In the early twentieth century the practice acquired a new name in France, and two Catholic priests did more than anyone to spread it. Abbé Alexis Bouly, born in 1865 near Boulogne-sur-Mer and a parish priest in the Hardelot area, proposed the word radiesthésie, built from the Latin root for "ray" and the Greek idea of "sensitivity," to give searching with rods and pendulums the air of a discipline.

Bouly founded the Association des Amis de la Radiesthésie in Lille in 1929. Abbé Alexis Mermet, born in France in 1866 and rector of a chapel in Jussy, near Geneva, became famous for using the pendulum to look for water and objects, even at a distance, by his own account. His book Comment j'opère, from the 1930s, was translated into English in 1959 as Principles and Practice of Radiesthesia.

With them the pendulum stopped playing second fiddle to the rod. French radiesthesia made it the main instrument, and many of the charts, pendulum shapes and terms still in use come from that school.

Twentieth-century dowsing societies

In the twentieth century dowsers began forming societies, and several are still active. The British Society of Dowsers was founded in 1933, organized by Colonel A. H. Bell, with an early focus on finding water.

In the United States, the American Society of Dowsers was formed in 1961 in Danville, Vermont, which had hosted a dowsers' convention a few years earlier. These societies are valuable sources on how dowsing is practiced, though naturally they describe it from the inside.

Tests, criticism and staying power

From the second half of the twentieth century on, dowsing was put through controlled experiments, and most found results no better than chance. Among the most cited are the Munich experiments of 1987 and 1988, whose results were argued over for years; we cover them in another Paths article.

Even so, the practice never disappeared. The Science Museum in London holds dowsing rods made in the 1990s, and its catalog notes that some British water companies were still using dowsing to find leaks in recent years. Today, though, most people who pick up a pendulum aren't looking for water. They're asking themselves questions.

Paths belongs to that last tradition: the pendulum as a moment to pause and listen, with the ideomotor effect explained plainly and no promise of fortune-telling.