Review: Dowsing Magic – Book Two by Grahame Gardner

Review by Ian Pegler

A rich, informative dowsing book.

As its title implies, this is the second book in the series on Dowsing Magic by Grahame Gardner and I expect there may well be more in the future. These are books written by a dowser for an audience of dowsers. The author is a life-long dowser, a former president of the British Society of Dowsers, has won the Society’s highest award and has also been granted an honorary life membership by the Society. He is also a prolific writer – as well as the two Dowsing Magic books he has written books on Technopathic Stress and Dowsing with Sigils.

With this second book the preliminaries of dowsing practice are dispensed with since they were covered in Book One of the series. Now we cut straight to the business in hand. The main topic of this second book is what dowsers refer to as “house healing” or sometimes “house clearing”. The central premise is that it is possible to make a home or other living space healthier by dealing with energies present in the home that might otherwise be detrimental to health. This topic tends to be lumped with New Ageism but even a modest amount of research will show that it is older than the swinging sixties. Anyone who has gone on dowsing field trips or courses will eventually appreciate the experiential reality of the energies of spiritual places or spooky castles. That these detrimental energies may be passing through one’s home should give pause for thought. That is where a book like this comes in. However, it seems from the outset that there is room for subjectivity and idiosyncrasy, as the author states:

“This book will not teach you how to heal your home. … What this book will teach you is how I might go about healing your home. How you would do it is likely to be a different matter entirely, as you have your own values and belief system that are in all probability significantly different from mine”.

That does not mean that the subject is entirely subjective and there is much useful information in this tome, should you decide to pursue this type of dowsing seriously. With house healing you are moving beyond dowsing as a purely passive, receptive skill. The author asserts that change in the real world can be effected through consciousness – an act of magick (with a k) if you prefer. So here we are moving beyond traditional “twig ‘n’ wellies” dowsing into a realm of elementals such as sylphs, undines and gnomes. Of these the author writes:

“Whether these beings I am describing have any objective reality or not is a matter for debate … Yet these ideas lie at the heart of Western magical tradition and are archetypal concepts to those of us brought up in western societies … Just as you don’t need to know how the cake tastes to follow a recipe, so you don’t need to believe in the physical reality of these beings in order to work with them”.

Although he is sometimes dealing with concepts that may seem fantastical to some, Mr. Gardner has a lucid and easy style and covers a great deal of scientific ground as well. It is a rich book blending many ingredients and bound to be popular with its intended audience.

5/5

Ian Pegler

Dowsing Magic – Book Two: from grumpy gnomes to healthy homes (2020)

Available here!