Power Dowsing (2009)

Part 2 of a two-part series on dowsing, originally published in April 2009 issue 34 of Paranormal magazine.

ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT: This impressive location off the coast of Cornwall is key to the ‘Michael Line’, and important ley and energy line connecting ancient sites throughout southern England and beyond. ©Richard Creightmore

Having introduced us to the subject last month, GRAHAME GARDNER now explains dowsing’s place in esoteric theories regarding energy fields on Earth and in the universe beyond.

Since time immemorial, folk have been using dowsing to locate things, particularly water. We don’t know much about the early history of the art, but it seems to be indigenous to several different cultures. Quite possibly the earliest recorded reference to dowsing is in the Old Testament, where Moses is told to ‘follow his staff’ to find water by God, and strikes a rock with the staff, causing water to flow.
The first printed references to dowsing show up in the 16th century. Georgius Agricola’s 1556 book ‘De Re Metallica’ (On Metals) discusses the art of dowsing to locate underground metals and minerals, and contains many woodcut illustrations of dowsers at work. It became the standard reference text on mining for nearly 200 years.
In 1561, Queen Elizabeth I was having a crisis in the Treasury. She desperately needed funds to build more ships for the navy, engaged against the Spanish Armada. The existing silver coin of the realm was badly debased through the widespread practice of ‘clipping’ – shaving small slivers from the edges of coins and melting them down – and so she planned to issue new coins with the silver content reduced by mixing it with 15% copper, thus effectively skimming 15% of the value for her own coffers. But first she needed to find an abundant source of copper. She asked her advisor Sir William Cecil to engage the services of one Marcus Steinberger, a mining expert and dowser from Augsburg, to explore for copper around Coniston in the Lake District. The museum in Coniston has a small display about the copper mining, although sadly it doesn’t mention the dowsing connection.
Although dowsing as an aid to mining has largely been superseded by more scientific prospecting methods, dowsers are still sometimes employed to map-dowse for oil and gas deposits, and dowsing for buried treasure is still a popular activity with some.
But probably the largest growth area for dowsing in recent years has been the area of earth energies. Our understanding of the whole ‘earth mysteries’ scene has greatly matured since the early days of ‘New Age’ hyperbole, with its talk of ley lines, UFO flight paths, spirit roads, ‘earthlights’ and so on. Researchers like John Michell, Paul Devereux, Tom Graves and many others have all helped shape our conceptual model to the point where in more recent years it has become perfectly acceptable to talk about such topics in respectable circles.
Concepts like Watkin’s leys and the ‘dragon lines’ of Feng-Shui have been integrated with more modern scientific concepts like torsion field theory and spin theory, which look at the effect of solar system orbital mechanics on the Earth’s energy field, to give us a pretty comprehensive picture of the sort of energies that dowsers find. There are energy leys, global geomagnetic grids, planetary grids, toroids, vortices, sinuous dragon lines and numerous other energetic manifestations that can be dowsed.

The bigger picture

The concept of a global grid has been around since the early 1970’s, when a group of Russian scientists proposed a global energetic grid based on the geometric form known as an icoso-dodecahedron. The geometry of the grid was supposed to determine the etheric pattern of the planet, determining the placement of significant geographical features; and there did appear to be some correspondence with the edges of tectonic plates.

EARTH ENERGY: Prof. Hagens’ Google Earth placemark of the global grid of energy lines that may be accessed by dowsing.

In the 1980’s, US scientists Bethe Hagens, a Professor of Anthropology at Governor’s State University and William Becker, a Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago, developed the earlier theory to include the other Platonic solids – tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, and icosahedron; plus a couple of other regular geometric figures with even more exotic names – the rhombic dodecahedron and the triacontrahedron. They called the finished grid the ‘Unified Vector Geometry Earthstar 120 grid’ – usually abbreviated to ‘UVG grid’. Prof. Hagens has produced a Google Earth placemark of the grid, which you can see in the illustration [1].

Enter the dragon

If you’re familiar with the work of John Michell or Hamish Miller you will know about the Michael line, but you may not know that this corresponds to one of the lines on the UVG grid. The Michael line is a ‘geomantic corridor’ of sacred sites across southern England, running just north of St. Michael’s Mount and through places including the Cheesewring, Brent Tor, Burrow Mump, Glastonbury Tor, Avebury and Bury St. Edmunds, many of which have an association with St. Michael. The line is aligned on the direction of the Beltane sunrise, and the fact that there are so many significant natural landscape features along it suggests that the world grid determines the geographic placement of such features.
Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst spent some time dowsing along this alignment, documenting their findings in The Sun & the Serpent. The pair later dowsed another long distance alignment, the Apollo line, across Europe, and wrote up their findings in The Dance of the Dragon. This line also connects several significant landscape features such as Skellig Michael off the south-west coast of Ireland, St. Michael’s Mount, Mont St. Michel in France, Monte Gargano in Italy, Corfu, and the Greek oracle sites of Delphi and Delos.
Hamish found that these lines had serpentine yin and yang components to them, which wound back and forth across the nominal straight alignment, rather in the manner of snakes coiled about a caduceus. Often they crossed at a sacred site such as a church or well, where they formed a node point. He found that the masculine, or yang lines tended to go through places of patriarchal power like churches or high points in the landscape, whereas the feminine, or yin lines had a tendency to favour more goddess-oriented sites – churches dedicated to female saints, holy wells and low points in the landscape. He named the two serpentine currents Michael and Mary in the UK example, and Apollo and Athena in the European example. These are the lung-mei, or ‘dragon’s breath’, familiar to Chinese geomancers.
There is another long-distance alignment in the UK that was postulated by Guy Ragland Philips in his book Brigantia: a Mysteriography, and subsequently researched by Gary Biltcliffe. Running from Inverhope in Scotland down through St. Catherine’s Hill in Winchester, this is known as the Belinus line and its two component serpent lines are named Bel and Elen.

ACROSS THE UK: A map showing the long leys that traverse the British Isles. They include the Michael Line, from SW to NE

When we look at these three leys in Google Earth in conjunction with the UVG grid, we immediately see that there is some correspondence, although each ley is displaced from the corresponding UVG line by around 10 degrees clockwise. Perhaps the UVG grid isn’t entirely accurate, or maybe it’s more of a Platonic ideal of a grid and things have moved somewhat over the years through tectonic plate movement or other causes – but leaving this discrepancy aside, the fact that there is any correspondence with the UVG is possibly the best confirmation I’ve seen that there is some validity to the world grid theory. Our planet really does seem to have a beautiful crystalline energy body that dictates the placement of sites along significant energy flows.

Grids and Geopathic Stress

ENERGY MAPS: Patterns or grids of lines of energy have been plotted by various researchers. This illustration includes two of the most important, the Hartmann and Curry grids © BSD

In the 1950’s and 60’s German researchers began to discover other global grids. The two best-known are called the Hartmann and Curry grids, although over two dozen distinct grids have since been found. It is thought that it they are connected with telluric currents and therefore have an electromagnetic component to them, although they seem very difficult to detect using conventional scientific instrumentation. They do seem to vary in strength around the solstices, equinoxes and eclipses, and dowser-physicist Jim Lyons thinks that they may result from wave interference patterns generated by the complex interaction of the Sun and planets [2].

Water lines, energy leys and grids can become stressed or traumatised, either by influence of underground cavities or mineral deposits, or from contamination by human activity such as quarries, mines and other industrial processes, giving rise to geopathic stress. Spending long periods of time in such areas, for example sleeping over a stressed line, depletes the immune system and can lead to chronic illness and disease. The Curry grid seems more affected by stress in the Earth, and is often found to be a contributory factor in water-related geopathic stress situations; whereas the Hartmann seems more influenced by human emotional trauma and geomantically-placed structures like temples, churches and stone circles.
Unlike water lines, energy leys and grids have a much higher informational capacity; thus we find that they can carry human emotion, intent and cognitive thought patterns. Much more research needs to be done in this area, but there is some evidence to show that moments of intense emotional trauma such as murders, fires, road accidents, magical rituals and the like can be ‘imprinted’ onto a site, making further incidents of a similar nature more likely to happen in the same place. Energetic repercussions of such can be transmitted along energy leys, inducing a similar resonance at other points on the ley. There is an excellent little book by Robin Heath (Powerpoints –Secret Rulers and Hidden Forces in the Landscape) that investigates this area in more depth.

GEOPATHIC STRESS: A drawing based on an original illustration by Dr. J. Kopp of the kinds of ‘trauma’ that can affect energy grids. © BSD

Human discarnates and other spirit energies can also propagate along energy leys, and incidents of haunting and poltergeist activity on leys are well known. So if you are suffering from ghosts, ghoulies and unexplained things going bump in the night, consult a dowser who will be able to rectify the situation for you.

A Conscious Universe

Why so many grids? Can they really all exist side by side, overlapping and intermingling? Sometimes it seems as though a dowser only has to think about a grid to be able to find one. Is it all in the mind? Are we dowsing different frequencies or wavelengths of the same energies that we know as energy leys, or something else entirely – possibly the warp and weft of the geomagnetic field, telluric radiation, perturbations in the ether, bubbles in the quantum substructure of the universe, or even eddies in the space-time continuum?
Or could it be that we are dealing with phenomena at the very limits of human comprehension, a quantum world where language and conventional understanding fail us and our consciousness somehow imposes a grid structure upon our findings in order that we can make any sense of it at all? American researcher William Buehler seems to think so: “A grid is any system that organizes consciousness and energy patterns that support the consciousness and its intention.”[3]
This is where we have to leave the rational scientific world behind, and enter into something like Tielhard de Chardin’s nöosphere – a magical Universe more familiar to shamans, witches and magicians, where thoughts have power, otherworldly intelligences and entities exist, information about far-off places or events can be found remotely, and consciously directed intent can produce tangible changes in the physical world. Dowsing lets us safely engage with these realms by enabling us to interrogate our subconscious whilst keeping one metaphorical foot in the real world. The pendulum acts as both filter and protective boundary, and is an ideal tool to have along with you as you explore your particular spiritual path, whatever that may be. I think this is where we are going to see exciting developments in dowsing in years to come.
Our dowsing started out as a tool for finding water and minerals, and now here we are using it to ask questions about the very nature of reality. These questions also occupy the minds of our top scientific thinkers today, and yet as scientist and dowser Jeffrey Keen says in the preface to his excellent book Consciousness, Intent, and the Structure of the Universe: “Conventional science cannot explain many phenomena in nature that seem to involve concepts such as non-locality or coherence, all of which imply instantaneous communication across vast distances in space-time.”
Conventional science can’t explain these things – but perhaps dowsing can? Jeffrey continues; “Dowsing… is a very powerful tool in unlocking the mysteries of non-locality, consciousness, and the nature of the Universe.”
Dowsing has that effect – used responsibly, it really does ‘open doors in your mind’. All you have to do is step through, follow the path, and embrace the adventure. Your world will never be the same again.

BREAKING THROUGH: The power of dowsing may help mankind to penetrate into realms of higher consciousness, a dream of magicians and philosophers since ancient times. © Adam MacLean

© Paranormal magazine Aprill 2009


[1] The UVG grid Google Earth placemark can be found here.
[2] BSD Earth Energies Group newsletter ‘Earth Energy Matters’ Issue 35 September 2004: Lyons, Jim – ‘Dowsing Earth Gridlines’
[3] BSD Earth Energies Group newsletter ‘Earth Energy Matters’ Issue 34 June 2004: Queally, Jackie – ‘Grail Lines in Scotland’

Grahame Gardner
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4 thoughts on “Power Dowsing (2009)

  1. http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/UVG%20Worldgrid%20%20Inca%20simulation.htm

    is a simulation today possible of the UVG grid on the pyramidal temple Somapura in India

    catching Orion Google Sky and major pyramids in minimal gran circles

    other valid UVG simulations exist completing the standard one

    please send me Your e-mail , i send you the overlay KML Google Earth to test Yourself

    interactive online http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/UVG%20Worldgrid%20%20Inca%20simulation.htm

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