Any Dowsing Treasures Found By Anyone?

[Siegfried Schlagrule]

G'day Carl, Here is a research tip for you from my creaky memory. I seem to recall that one of the death sentence offenses during the spanish Inquisition was dowsing without being a priest. I'm sure a good book on the Inquisition would give accounts of the auto da fe and verify that if my memory is correct. I seem to recall that the exact approved uses of dowsing by priests were detailed and that one of them was finding minerals. exanimo, ss

 

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[gldhntr]

Dowsing
"Historical Roots"
by Hank Innerfeld
In 1949, in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, the French discovered cave paintings of ancient peoples. Scientists, using radiocarbon dated the paintings at 9,000 years old. One of these cave paintings showed a man using a dowsing rod. Similarly, a rock carving found in Peru, also dated 9,000 years old, depicts a man holding a forked dowsing stick.
The writings of Confucius (2500 B.C.) mention dowsing. A statue of Chinese Emperor Kwang Yu (2200 B.C.) portrays him holding a forked stick (commonly used for dowsing). Similarly, the oldest Egyptian stone drawings and carvings show men in exotic headdresses holding forked sticks or pendulums. The Romans, Celts, and Teutons also evidenced interest in dowsing. Various books produced in Germany from the 12th to 14th century examined the phenomenon of dowsing. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), English landowners brought dowsers from Saxon Germany who obliged them by locating the rich tin fields of Cornwall, which are still producing tin today.
German scientist Georg Agricola, a pioneer in scientific classification of minerals, authored De re Metallica published in 1556. This classic work examines dowsing and its applications. Dowsers played a vital role in the construction of the early castles on the Rhine. Before the castles could be built, water had to be located beneath the stone mountain tops which they were to occupy. Dowsing was used universally to locate these underground water sources.
Visitors to the early Spanish mines in the Southwestern United States can observe that each mine features only one hole instead of many. The reason for that is, that prior to drilling, the Spanish used a dowsing tool called "Spanish needles" to locate these rich ores with impressive accuracy. The early Sioux used feathered medicine sticks for dowsing. Sulu witch doctors used bones for dowsing to locate "evildoers" in their tribe. Dowsing was particularly popular among the New England colonists and an 1865 Pennsylvania newspaper, "Oil City Register," profiles one of them as "Doodle Bug" Smith.
The rod, the reed, and the staff--all symbols of dowsing--are mentioned many times in the scriptures. The ancient mystery schools, which pre-date the dawn of Christianity, taught and trained their followers in dowsing. The dowser was regarded as a highly intuitive or illuminated being, who achieved this level of awareness through dedicated study and practice of the mysteries.

 

[gldhntr]

Quote by Albert Einstein

"I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction this is, however, unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time."

DOWSING THE ANCIENT ART

The earliest reference to dowsing as it is practised to day came from the German speaking lands of northern Europe in the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century miners in several parts of Germany were using dowsing to locate veins of mineral ore. Georg Bauer also known as Geogius Agricola (1494 ? 1555) described how dowsers search for ore in his famous work De Re Metallca. He wrote: All alike grasp the forks of the twig with their hands, clenching their fists, it being necessary that their clenched fingers should be held towards the sky in order that the twig should be raised at that end where the two branches meet. Then they wander hither and thither at random through mountainous regions. It is said that the moment they place their feet on a vein the twig immediately turns and twists and so by its action discloses the vein; when they move their feet again and go away from that spot the twig becomes once more immobile.

As demand for ore increased mines opened up across Europe. Prospectors travelled far in the search for new deposits and metal ore, amongst these prospectors were dowers.

In England, Elizabeth I encouraged German prospectors and mining experts to develop the resources of her land. Together with their expertise in smelting and metal working they also brought their art of searching for metal ores with a forked twig.

One part of England that benefited from German mining expertise was in the county of Somerset. By the mid seventeenth century miners in the local Mendip Hills where using the rod to help them find veins of lead and zinc ore and the practice came to the attention of Robert Boyle (1627 ? 1691), one of the founding fathers of modern science. Boyle was intrigued and reported: One Gentleman, who lives near the lead mines in Somersetshire, leading me over those parts of the mines where he know that Matalline Veins did run, made be take note of the stooping of the Wand when passed over a Vein of Oar, and protested that the motion of his hand did not at all contribute to the indications of the wand, but that sometimes when he held it very fast, it would bent so strongly as to break in his hand. And to convince me that he believed him self, he did upon the promises made by the stooping Wand put him self to the great charge of digging in untried places for Mine (but with what success he has not yet informed me). Among the miners themselves I found that some made use of the Wand and others laughed at it.

The term dowsing may have come from the miners in the Medip Hills. In 1692 John Locke (1632 ? 1704) the famed Somerset Philosopher, referred to the alleged ability of the ?deusing-rod to discover mines of gold and silver. Evidently the Philosopher had heard the local miners use their own word for the twig known to the Germans as the wishing rod or Wunschelrute

The German dowsers also introduced dowsing to another county in south west England, Cornwall where local miners developed dowsing into an advanced prospecting technique. William Pryce, of Redruth, the great authority on Cornish mining practice, included an account of contemporary mine dowsing in his 1778 work Mineraogia Cornubiensis. It was written by his friend William Cookworthy, of Plymouth, a pioneering industrialist. Cookworthy reported that local miners made their dowsing rods from a single forked twig of hazel or other wood between two and a half and three feet long. Alternatively, they used 'two separate shoots tied together, with some vegetable substance as packthread'. Then he went on to make one of the most penetrating observations on dowsing that has ever been written, , A man ought to hold the rod with the same indifference and inattention to, or reasoning about it or its effects, as he holds a fishing rod or a walking stick.' For, according to Cookworthy, the rod , constantly answers in the hands of peasants, women and children, who hold it simply without puzzling their minds with doubts or reasoning?s.

William Cookworthy advised young dowsers to gain experience over known lodes, such as those visible near the sea shore. Then he instructed the novice dowser:

Walk steadily and slowly on with it (the rod); and a person that hath been accustomed to carry it will meet a single repulsion and attraction, every three, four, or five yards, which must not be heeded, it being only from the water that is between every bed of Killas (slate), Grouan (soft granite) or other strata. When the holder approaches a Lode so near its semidiameter, the rod feels loose in the hands and is very sensibly repelled toward the face. If it is thrown back so far as to touch the hat, it must be brought forward to its usual elevation, when it will continue to be repelled till the foremost foot is over the edge of the Lode. But as soon as the foremost foot is beyond its limits, the attraction from the hindmost foot, which is still on the Lode, or else the repulsion on the other side, or both, throw the rod back toward the face. The distance from the point where the attraction begun, and where it ended, is the breadth of the Lode.

Cookworthy said that a good dowser could in this way discover all the features of concealed lodes: their changes in breadth, where they pinched out, and where they were displaced by crosscutting fractures. He noted that dowsing was particularly useful for tracing lodes that were, "alive to grass" in other words that contained workable ore right up to the surface. He also recommended the technique for finding what geologists would now call fracture zones - belts of rock shattered by past Earth movements. Although they were not necessarily mineralised, miners found it much easier to drive their tunnels through these zones than through solid rocks.

Clearly, Cornish dowsers had developed their art into quite an elaborate technique by the eighteenth century. But did it really work? William Pryce certainly thought so, for he quoted numerous dowsing successes in the county. For instance, after the Reverend Henry Hawkins Tremayne had found some stream tin in a pond at Heligan, miners speculated that a lode might be found nearby -. A dowser then located what he thought was a lode below ground, and the miners sank a shaft there. A lode was indeed found though unfortunately it did not contain enough tin to make mining profitable. In two other instances, Fryce reported, miners sank shafts on dowsing evidence, one at St. Germains, another between Penzance and Newlyn. In both cases, lodes containing mundick - an old mining term for iron sulphides - were found. Again, Pryce related, William Cookworthy managed to trace the course of a concealed lode near St. Austell. At one point Cookworthy declared that the lode had been squeezed to nothing; this was later confirmed to be correct by the local miners. On another occasion, Cookworthy traced a lode from point inland to the cliff at St. Austell Down. There he found by dowsing that the lode 'had a horse in it', in other words, it had been split in two. Miners subsequently confirmed that this was indeed the case.

Pryce reported another dowsing feat. A certain Captain Riheira had deserted the King of Spain's service in the reign of Queen Anne and had been rewarded with the post of Captain Commandant of the Plymouth garrison. Ribeira was a keen dowser and had by this means discovered a deposit of copper ore near Okehampton, in Devon. Later, a mine w as started there, which operated for some years.

Pryce and Cookworthy's detailed description of Cornish mine dowsing in the eighteenth century shows how highly the leading English mineralogists of the day regarded the technique. This respect was echoed throughout Europe. In the German mines, for instance, dowsers this time enjoyed a standing that has never since been equalled. Officially their status was higher than that of surveyors, and mine dowsers were expected to possess a professional diploma in dowsing.

Mineral lode dowsing was equally valued in other parts of the world where Europeans had settled. In the fabulously rich silver mines of the High Andes in South America, for instance, the Spanish mining authorities were using the technique to help locate the abundant lodes of silver ore that had made the region around Potosi the largest source of silver in the Western world. Alonzo Barha, the Potosi priest and mining expert, described a peculiar T-shaped rod of his own design which dowser then used in the Potosi mines.

How had mine dowsers achieved this surprising status? One reason, clearly, was a record of success good enough to impress hardnosed mine owners as well as technical experts like William Pryce. But success alone would not have been enough in an age when scientific thought was developing rapidly and causes were being sought for all phenomena. It seems'likely that an equally important reason for dowsing's high standing was that it could he explained in terms of contemporary scientific ideas. Thus, before quoting Cookworthv's description of practical dowsing, Pryce gave a lengthy exposition of dowsing theory.

In fact, from the sixteenth century onwards, the bending of a forked twig over a hidden mineral vein had spawned theories in the same way as any other natural phenomenon. From the start, some sceptics had maintained that the dowsers moved the rod themselves and that this had nothing to do with the presence mineral veins. Nevertheless, this would hardly explain the successes the technique.

 

[gldhntr]

Dowsing success has been recorded since the time of Moses, for the story of Aaron producing water from the rock (Exodus chapter 17, verse 6) is often quoted as the first written evidence. Even if we dismiss the Biblical claim, dowsers appear engraved on ancient Egyptian stonework and on the statue of a Chinese emperor dating circa 2200 BC. Little else of dowsing is recorded until Agricola, in 1556, wrote De Re Metallica, a composition on mining, which included an illustration of a German dowser at work.

Almost a hundred years after Agricola, Martine de Bertereau, Baroness de Beausoleil traveled Europe, with her husband, locating mineral deposits by dowsing. They discovered over 150 ore deposits of iron, gold and silver in France alone, before being imprisoned for practising the ?black arts?.

Later, in the same century, a particularly interesting book was written by Jean Nicholas de Grenoble published in Lyon in 1691 under the title of La Verge de Jacob or L?arte de Trouver les Tr?sors, Les Sources, les Limites, les M?taux, les Mines, les Min?raux et autres choses cach?s par L?usage du Baton fourch?. (The Rod of Jacob or the art of finding treasure, springs, boundaries, metals, mines, minerals and other hidden things, by the use of the forked twig).

 

[gldhntr]

Herodotus, the 5th century B.C. Greek historian wrote of the use of willow divining rods by the Scythians, a nomadic Iranian people who travelled the prairies of what is today southern Russia. Another reference to the use of the willow divining rods appears 800 years later in a Roman history written by Ammianus Marcellinus. Various types of tree branches were used - hazel, as well as other nut and fruit trees - always trees that were indigenous to the area. Mention is made of using divination by the Germanic tribes when the Roman Empire was in its glory. Variations in instructions on how to cut (dowsing) rods appear in the archives of nearly every European country. Instructions on the use of rods were left by Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk and alchemist in the 1300 hundreds in Saxony.

On the other side of the world ancient Chinese statements speak of "gifted diviners using rod like instruments" able to detect subterranean water and even start it from the ground. The Emperor Ta Yu, born 2,205 years before Christ, is represented in a bas-relief holding a double branched instrument which some believe represents the earliest example of a forked dowsing rod.

There is a famous woodcut from Agricola's 'De Re Metallica' (1530 A.D.) illustrating a dowsing rod being cut from a tree, and two rods used to locate places where miners were to dig for ore.

Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England was proturbed to find that the rest of Europe was ahead of England in technical advances. She and her advisors decided to get and use the expertise of German mining experts to help find copper and zinc which were vital in the production of brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. The Germans were reluctant to part with their knowledge. Eventually after long negotiations, with various mining experts from the continent, calamine deposits (a zinc ore) were found in Someretshire. So, the dowsing expertise for minerals had finally, after many years, been successfully exported to England !

 

[Carl-NC]

DOWSING THE ANCIENT ART
.....
Mineral lode dowsing was equally valued in other parts of the world where Europeans had settled. In the fabulously rich silver mines of the High Andes in South America, for instance, the Spanish mining authorities were using the technique to help locate the abundant lodes of silver ore that had made the region around Potosi the largest source of silver in the Western world. Alonzo Barha, the Potosi priest and mining expert, described a peculiar T-shaped rod of his own design which dowser then used in the Potosi mines.

Excellent! This looks like something well worth some research. Is that the title of the book? Who is the author?

- Carl

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

HI: ?As I once mentioned, I have found the long lost Jesuit mines of Tayopa. ? Subsequent field, aerial, & satellite investigations showed the existence and location of many of the mines, mineralization and cache sites. ?At the moment it is a slow ongoing ?process to profit by this.

Shortly after finding Tayopa, a friend ? suggested that i send some maps, aerial & satellite photos to a friend of his in Alaska to see what he could find by dowsing, I did so without much enthusiasm or expectations. ?In due time the materiel was returned, ?to my surprise he had located perhaps 80% of what we had found by the conventional means?? ?To date this man has never been to the state of Chihuahua, let alone to the Tayopa site?? ?This was solely by map/photo dowsing.

Later I sent other photos and maps to ?the same man to ?test on little known isolated mineral sites that I had found in other states, he not only located most, but accurately outlined the zones of many??

This ?was fascinating and I ?intended to push it on other things that I had "in the fire", but his family refused to pass on any more of my data to him. ?They said that he had had a nervous breakdown ?and was also trying to communicate with his dead wife?

K gentlemen, I challenge any one, including Mr Black and my respected friend Carl, to explain this. ?One ?big edge that I am going to give you is that at the present I will "NOT" ?publish the maps/photos for obvious reasons, including ?the fact that I am not home but at my son's home in Tucson, the data is in Mexico.

Please do not point out the obvious, I realize that this could be stated as anecdotal only, but I can assure you that it is not. ? I ?am not trying to prove dowsing as such, it rests/sinks ?upon it's own Laural's. ? I am convinced by physical proof that it ?exists, but am trying to understand it.

Incidentally a physical/verbal attack upon any person posting in this room rather than the subject, is in my opinion, a ?clear indication of a weak base and a form of the last resort of little children, not intelligent participants.

 

[rusty nails]

 

[gldhntr]

carl, i found this info in an article while googling '' ancient spanish mineral dowsing history ''.....not sure exactly about the author , , but i'm sure it was listed in the site with the article......i looked at very many of the sites, and if i run back across it i will post the name for you,,, it was about 2:30 am my time when posting this info, and i evidently missed the name while copying the article...........gldhntr

 

[rusty nails]

lbp

 

[aarthrj3811]

Hey All.....Spend the weekend locating a cave entrance. This had been dowsed by 4 map dowsers with the information and maps provided by me. All 4 were within a 1/4 mile. I used an AimShot to find the entrance. I don't know if it's the cave I'm looking for or how much more I will be able to do this year. The Weather Men are predicting snow up there next weekend?

I have tried map dowsing and have not been right yet. I will keep trying as I know people who can do it. ....Art

 

[gldhntr]

art, after you located cave with aimshot did you by chance see what kind if reaction you got from your rods ? just curious...........gldhntr

 

[aarthrj3811]

Hey Gldhntr.......With the map dowsers x's the AimShot it was fairly easy to find but I think I there was some luck to. I tried the rods from a distance and in front of the tunnel with no reaction. I was not suprised by this as I don't think about anything when using the rods. When I start to follow the tunnel in search of the other end I know the rods will work. I think the other end is about 2 !/2 miles east on the fault from when the Sierras where up-lifted...Thanks for all the information you have posted as I have a lot of reading to do....Art

 

[gldhntr]

when i walk by the front of a closed tunnel, both rods will point directly at the entrance.......gldhntr

 

[gldhntr]

i started with my son a year ago....he is 6 now,,,,,,,i have been going out within about 100 yards of my house while my son is at school, and planting small caches of coins.....the area of ground is in a spot i yearly plant goodies for the deer and wild turkey that abound in my area, so it is not like he can see where the grass has been dug because it all looks dug.......i have made at least 20 of these caches, and he has located every one, by himself....one of these had been in the ground for several weeks..during this time it rained several times......when i finally told him it was time to go dowsing he walked out the front door, and went directly to the cache, it being at least 80-90 yards away.....he is very adept at it, and doesn't use a detector.......i think the longer the metal is in the ground, the better the signal from it will be due to leaching into the soil...............if you have kids i suggest trying the above game, as you will never see a bigger smile on your childs face as when he finds his'' buried treasure''..........................................gldhntr

 

[aarthrj3811]

Hey Gldhntr....Some people will never get it or if they do they will no except the facts. They can not except the fact there is no clear cut rules for Dowsers. The only rules I have are what works for me. All my rules are subject to change as I learn. I taught my son to dowse over the telephone and with e-mails. When he came home to visit last winter his rods reacted so much different than mind it amazed me. The only thing I helped him with was changes to his rods to improve his accuracy. I may have just moved his rods inside of his aura but I won't know for sure until he comes home again..........Art

 

[gldhntr]

art, the response from my rods varies alot from what my sons responses are. they also seem to differ from anyone i know that dowses. the important thing i have learned though is that every one of these people gets a response of some kind that lets them know they are around or over their desired target.. many people can not dowse tunnels/caves but some like myself can... others get signals off electrical lines or water filled hoses but not me... signals for some such as yourself are located around the 4 cardinal points while for me i can pick them up anywhere and follow them all around ......... also the rods composition will have an effect on items you pick up while dowsing. i tried stainless steel ones a few times and will pick up every little thing on top of and below ground. no matter what i am dowsing for with these i will dig 22 caliber shell casings, 12 gauge casings, minute peices of scrap metal, and pick up on everything metal on top of ground, cars, 4wheelers,bikes,metal ends of the water hose, everything..............it is a constant learning experience.................gldhntr

 

[aarthrj3811]

..............it is a constant learning experience.................

Your right about that. I post about how it works for me. I hope I am helping someone. When I started Dowsing I searched the internet for information and found very little that was helpful except for what I could find reading between the lines. This part of T-net that was started in June has been the best information exchange on the internet that I have found. My Dad told me " There is more than one way to skin a cat".. Now I know wnat he was telling me.......Art