PWhile France is experiencing a record drought, with 93 departments affected by water restrictions, one profession is benefiting from the crisis: that of dowsing. In recent days, media reports have multiplied to paint the portrait, often complacent, of these unscrupulous “water diggers”. Solicited by both companies and individuals wishing to drill a borehole to pump the precious resource, dowsers claim to be endowed with a kind of gift allowing them to feel the slightest trickle of water under their feet, up to several tens of meters deep! However, as Richard Monvoisin, teacher and researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, specialist in the analysis of controversial theories, explains in this caustic interview, this practice is pseudoscience.
Point : How do dowsers claim to find water?
Richard Monvoisin: Because of a tradition that is five centuries old, the methods are variable. In general, the dowser – or rhabdomancer – uses a wand, made from hazel, the old name for hazel. But he can use a simple pendulum, like the famous Professor Tournesol in Tintin, or a “line” or so-called “Lecher” antenna. He circulates in the investigation zone or more rarely is content to search on the map of the said zone. Once a location is indicated, a well is dug. But, in addition to water, dowsers are sometimes called in to search for oil, metals, lost objects, missing persons, evil or harmful areas, when it is not the dowsers themselves who come to offer their services directly.
If you have a little knowledge of geology, botany, and few scruples, you can embark on the career.
Does this practice have a scientific basis?
You should know that there are almost as many “theories” as there are practitioners. Some read it as a simple gift transmitted, others see it as an unexpressed innate ability that we would all have. There are some who claim to be “magnetizers”, in the tradition of Franz-Anton Mesmer who, in the 1780s in Paris, abused his alleged magnetic fluid and the suggestibility of the sick to treat them. Others presume an affiliation with migratory birds and other cetaceans which actually use (among other things) sensory organs of magnetic localization to locate themselves. If you want to keep believing, don’t read on. But, if you want to know, then I’ll go straight.
Is sourcery related to something known?
The answer is no. And that’s a bad sign, especially for such an old and widespread use. But there is more serious: in reality, there is no reason to elaborate theories on the question. Indeed, when you look closely, there is not really…a question. There is no need to “be a dowser” to be a dowser.
So why do they often find water?
The main reasons have been well known for decades.
The first is that the dowsers do indeed find water, and even a little better than the ignorant person, which is not very difficult since few people dare to say dig here or there. But, when we set up test protocols, we realize that, without even knowing it, dowsers take something other than what their rod “tells” them: visual elements of the environment, plants with high humidity, hollow , etc., which may indicate the presence of groundwater. Hide these elements, for example by blocking the view, and the water finds become random.
The second reason is that in many cases there is quite a lot of water underground and it is not finding any that would be miraculous. So not all places are “equal”.
We know all this since the end of the XVIIIe century and, since then, many experiments have been carried out on the subject, in various countries, with national calls for dowsers to participate and co-develop the protocols. Without success.
In summary, if you have a little knowledge of geology, botany, and few scruples, you can embark on the career.
That being said, it’s not impossible that someone, somewhere has an ability like this. In which case she should contact me: it is in my attributions to try to put my finger on a phenomenon of this kind. And I will have no problem acknowledging the existence of such a capacity.
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So why do we still believe it?
It’s a bit of a mystery, because all the analytical work has already been provided by Michel-Eugène Chevreul in 1854 in his book From the divinatory wand, the so-called explorer pendulum and turntables, from the point of view of the history of criticism and the experimental method.
Let’s say that the general ignorance of the principles of science and experimentation makes us take bladders for lanterns. Many of our contemporaries think that to appeal – once – to a dowser who indicates to him approximately a real source location, it is a proof. However, a proof in this field would consist in having a dowser search several times, double-blind, for a random flow of water. This would eliminate all possible biases. And when we do, it doesn’t work.
It is the same problem as the movement of the rods or the pendulum, which convinces a public who does not know what ideomotor movements are, these very well documented unconscious muscular movements, and which give the illusion that an object moves moved by his own will. Whereas it is we who involuntarily make it move towards what we have involuntarily chosen. In itself, the movement of dowsing rods is no different from that of revolving pedestal tables or ouija tables which, with their letters of the alphabet, would promise to communicate with spirits.
So, knowledge collides with the plethora of personal experiences out of protocol and wands that move without control, told here and there. And you have to realize that, because of the great-uncle or the grandpa who practices, everyone wants to believe it, me first. Many dowsers fail, of course, and visibly sometimes. But, in the face of failure, we don’t say to ourselves “hey, it doesn’t work well”: we simply conclude that we should have just chosen another more talented dowser. For the same reasons, we quickly validate the claims we like to see true. An example: a dowser tells you to dig 15 meters and you, by doing so, find water only 3 meters away. Considering the price of the linear meter of drilling, you are delighted and you will certainly take the dowser in your arms… The dowser who, however, has made a mistake in his prediction. As they sometimes say, the eyes of the heart have bad sight.
What relationships do dowsers have with drilling companies or certain institutions?
My small experience of the mining environment tells me that they prefer geological maps to dowsers, and by far. Among the oil companies too, perhaps “thanks” to the appalling affair of the oil “sniffer planes” in 1979. But you know, it’s a bit the same thing with the gendarmes and the search for missing persons: apart from a few cases, often unfortunate, where the constabulary has indulged in this practice, the search and forensic methods are much more effective. On the other hand, the number of people who say they “inform” the gendarmes is immense.
In the field of water management companies in France, I cannot say, but 5 years ago an English biologist showed that out of 12 companies, 10 still used dowsers, which made people cringe. ‘OFWAT, the water regulator in Great Britain.
I don’t know of any lawsuit incriminating a dowser employed by a company who, having failed, would be taken to court. But delaying the discovery of a source or making a useless hole does not seem to me a drama. On the other hand, if the winter research of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s is disturbed by hazardous predictions from dowsers and death from the cold ensues, it may not be the same thing.