DOWSING AND RADIESTHESIA

Text from: An Introduction to Medical Radiesthesia and Radionic,
by Vernon D. Wethered, B.sc. - The C.W. Daniel Company Limited, London, 1974.

Dowsing is one of the oldest sciences. lt is the reaction of a human being to forces within himself and outside himself, that is, to the radiations around him. When a man goes along with a rod looking for water or gold or silver, or for a submarine, as we did in the last war, or uses a pendulum to choose a medical substance, the reactions of the rod or pendulum are what we study physically.

The word "Radiesthesia" means "sensitivity to radiations". It has been known of for centuries in the guise of water divining. Only recently has the word Radiesthesia appeared in the English language; it is better known in France and other European countries by its French equivalent Radiesthesie.

The basis of radiesthesia is the carrying out of tests depending on sensitivity of human beings, which may be sensitivity to the presence of running water, of metals, or indeed of radiations coming from any object or person. The old English word "Dowsing" has been employed in the past to denote the practice of testing for the presence of water and other objects.

Some dowsers, or diviners, have been highly successful in searching for lost objects or persons by carrying with them in their search a sample or "witness" (after the French word te'moin) of the missing object or person, and not infrequently we read in our newspapers of diviners assisting the police in tracking down murderers or missing people. The instrument mostly used for practices of this kind is the divining rod, which may consist simply of a "V" shaped hazel twig cut from the tree, or two whalebone rods bound together at one end.

In the past radiesthetic work, consisting mostly of finding water supplies in arid districts, consisted of 'field work' carried on out of doors. It is only in comparatively recent years that human sensitivity has been employed on any scale for delicate work of a laboratory nature involving precise measurements. Work of this nature is widely practised in France and is being followed with great interest by radiesthetists in Belgium, Italy and other European countries. A number of radiesthetic periodicals are published on the Continent and societies have been formed there, in the United States and other countries, with the object of furthering the interests of radiesthesia.

Paracelsus' opinion of the physician was that he either cured miraculously or by using the forces of the earth and by the knowledge and use of his science. Now radiesthesia is on the borderline between the two.

My feeling is that dowsing being, like medicine, a science and philosophy, if you want to bring it down to the known level and interpret it in a scientific way, new sciences have to be invented. If you don't want to bring it down to that you must accept that human beings can function miraculously or they can function on a physical-ethereal body level.

(...) I am more than certain that radiesthesia can throw new light on the physiological processes which are factors in health and disease, and help us to understand better not only the causes of disease, but ways in which we can deal with it when it occurs. Moreover, the radiesthetic method will often detect incipient disease before it has reached the clinical state, where definitely pathological, and possibly irreversible, tissue changes may have taken place. When incipient, the condition can be successfully treated much more easily and expeditiously than where it is only discovered at a later stage.