It is a funny thing with dowsing. Any attempt to divine something materially useful such as the Derby Winner or the next week’s lottery numbers just does not work. Even when dowsing with the intention of making benevolent use of the riches so gained seems to be fruitless. Like many dowsers I take the view that dowsing in that way would be an abuse of the gift that we have.
However, dowsing can be used in situations where something urgent needs to be sorted. A few years ago, the Waverley Dowsers Committee were discussing arrangements for the AGM, when we learned that our guest speaker was indisposed. Quelling the urge to panic, we decided that we could put on a session looking at the work of a couple of notable dowsers from the past and the task fell to me to prepare a one hour presentation followed by practical exercises.
This was a tall order as there was barely ten days to go, and this had to be fitted round my 9-5 job. Michael, our Chair, provided me with a dozen or so books from his extensive library and left me to it. There was no way that I could read and digest all these books in the time available, so I laid them all out in a row and dowsed for the ones that would be most useful. The pendulum came up with five. Of these, I then dowsed the contents pages of these five books for the chapters that would be most relevant, and hey presto – there was the material from which to develop my talk. I bet Google could not match that!