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DOWSING AND ARCHAEOLOGY

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Author Topic: DOWSING AND ARCHAEOLOGY  (Read 2935 times)
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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: May 24, 2009, 08:31:37 pm »









One of the popular contemporary systems for finding depth was Creyke's 'staking' method, which is important to our study because it challenges Underwood's assumption that all the patterns must have been fixed.

Underwood said that the water-line parallels were parallel lines which expanded and contracted in relation to the centre of the water-line by about ten per cent on a daily cycle; but Creyke's 'staking' system produced an unmoving circular 'parallel' around the point on the water-line which had been staked with a metal bar – a 'parallel' which vanished once the stake was removed.[25]
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Bianca
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« Reply #31 on: May 24, 2009, 08:32:47 pm »




             
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« Reply #32 on: May 24, 2009, 08:33:42 pm »









A lot of dowsers still use Creyke's method. The procedure is that you first have to find the exact centre of the water-line, and then, at a point exactly on that centre-line, hammer a large metal stake into the ground. Immediately, as far as the dowser is concerned, the waterline disappears, to be replaced by a circle around the point. According to the original system the radius of that circle is the depth of the stream at that point. There are variations: for some dowsers the radius of this circle is only a half or a third of the actual depth – which can cause embarrassment at times – and other dowsers don't actually stake the water-line, but rather place large lumps of metal or, in one case I know of, a small amethyst crystal, on the ground at the centre of the water-line.

Underwood's and Creyke's systems can be reconciled by saying that Creyke's system produces an artificial version of the Bishop's Rule, which leads us back to the relation between the 'parallels' and the Rule. But, more important, Creyke's system does imply that Underwood's apparently permanent patterns can be changed by inserting a 'needle' into the ground – and that, as we shall see, is a key point in a new understanding of sacred sites.
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« Reply #33 on: May 24, 2009, 08:34:54 pm »










Water-lines may not in themselves be real, but they do at least tally with something physical' underground. We can't so easily say the same of Underwood's track-lines and aquastats. In practical dowsing work, water-lines seem reassuringly solid, and have a definite 'feel' of depth to them; but the track-lines and aquastats seem only to be surface phenomena, and to be far more ephemeral. Underwood never actually defined what track-lines and aquastats were, and it seems he only assumed that they were 'lines of electromagnetic equipotential'.

We've seen that if we agree with his assumption, we get trapped by the conundrum of 'Which came first, the patterns or the structures?'. The way out of that trap is to look elsewhere for the 'cause' of at least some of those patterns: and one 'cause' which seems to make a great deal of sense, particularly in relation to tracks, boundaries and the like, is some kind of interaction between certain qualities of a place and aspects of the minds of people passing by. If this is so, then what Underwood observed as aquastats and tracklines could in some cases be memories – if you like – of the meeting of people and place: and Underwood's results do tally more closely with that interpretation than they do with his rigid theory of the 'pattern of the past'.

This idea of track-lines and aquastats as memories is not as strange as it may seem at first. Even a physical track is a memory, in a sense, of people and animals that have passed along it. Imagine a bare heath, with no tracks on it at all: to cross it you would have to push a pathway through the bracken and gorse. But next time you pass that way, would you make a new path? Probably not: it's much easier to follow an existing path than to make a new one. Each time you pass that way, you wear down the track still further, reinforcing it as a memory of your passing. You leave the district, and the path falls into disuse: but it is still there as a memory of you and your passing that way – a memory at first as a bare line across the heath, then later (as it silts up, and conserves moisture better than elsewhere) as a line of denser undergrowth. You retain memories of your walking that path: it retains memories of you.

It seems that it retains those memories in more than just the sense of a worn pathway. Underwood's critics, with their idea of the 'pattern of the present', suggested that some of the patterns were 'electrical phenomena consequent upon disturbance of the earth's surface by man', and this is probably true in many cases.[26] But we can go beyond this, to suggest that it retains memories outside of a purely physical sense: we can say that such a trackway retains a ghost of you, to be seen or felt by other people passing by.
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« Reply #34 on: May 24, 2009, 08:35:46 pm »









By 'ghost' I don't mean some 'spirit of the dead', since obviously you're still alive. Rather, I mean the specific sense of the term as developed by the late Tom Lethbridge in the series of delightful books that he wrote in the 1960s.[27] He suggested that most of the so-called 'ghosts' and 'ghouls' that people come across are better described as memories of emotions or images projected into and stored by certain characteristics of some places by people at those places – and these memories could be reconstructed, and thus perceived, by other people passing those places later or, as seems to occur in some cases, earlier.

This theory does work in practice, and seems to gave gained a wide acceptance in recent years. In Church writings, such ghosts and ghouls are referred to as 'place-memories', and a recent official report on exorcism (of which more later) suggested that they account for some nine-tenths of all reported hauntings. If a track or boundary can retain place-memories of passers-by, Underwood's track-lines and aquastats could be a side-effect of the storage of these place-memories as much as, or rather than, 'lines of electromagnetic equipotential'.

The apparent conditions under which images and emotions can be stored in and retrieved from a place as place-memories are complex, and I'll have to leave a detailed discussion of them for later; but one of the conditions is known to be that state of mind of both 'transmitter' and 'receiver', and this gives us a clue as to what the difference between aquastats and track-lines, as place-memories, might be. Underwood said that both track-lines and aquastats coincided with roads and tracks, but aquastats seemed to be the 'holier' of the two types of line. So if we take the lines to be interactive place-memories, this would suggest that the aquastats are projected into the place by a 'holier' state of mind than that required for track-lines. This does explain a number of loose ends in Underwood's theories: it suggests, for example, that track-lines give way to the continuous aquastats because the 'holier' state of mind is a more powerful one, giving an effect like a strong radio signal swamping out a weaker one; it also suggests, as another example, that the coincidence between aquastats and boundaries that Underwood describes may be connected and caused by semi-religious ceremonies like 'beating the bounds'.

This also suggests that to look for track-lines and aquastats and the like may be to miss the point, for they may only be side-effects of something more important. To study them alone may put us in the same position as the hi-fi fanatic who studies the technical quality of each recording so closely that he forgets to listen to the music. Important though studies of Underwood's patterns may be, we must remember to keep them in context with a wider view of the sacred sites, and of nature as a whole.
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« Reply #35 on: May 24, 2009, 08:36:45 pm »









Notes



[1] See Leslie Alcock, By South Cadbury is that Camelot (the 'popular' report on the Cadbury-Camelot dig), particularly pp.72 and 78.

[2] See Francis Hitching, Pendulum.

[3] See Francis Hitching, Pendulum, particularly pp.159-88.

[4] James Plummer, Dowsing for Roman Roads, in JBSD XXV, No.174, Dec 76, pp.205-14.

[5] Captain F.L.M. Boothby, The Salted Track, in JBSD IV, No.26, Dec 39, pp.46-9.

[6] Helmuth Hesserl, The Earth Rays and their Importance, in JBSD IV, No.26, Dec 39, pp.52-60.

[7] Louis Merle, Radiesthesie et Prehistoire, 1933; Charles Diot, Les Sourciers et les Monuments Megalithiques, 1935; publishers not known.

[8] Captain F.L.M. Boothby, The Religion of The Stone Age, in JBSD II, No.10, Dec 35, pp.115-16.

[9] Reginald A. Smith, Archaeological Dowsing, in JBSD III, No.24, Jun 39, pp.348-56.

[10] Underwood's articles on these patterns are: Archaeology and Dowsing (Part I), in JBSD VII, No.56, Jun 47, pp.192-205; Archaeology and Dowsing (Part II), in JBSD VII, No.58, Dec 47, pp.296-306; Archaeology and Dowsing (Pad III), in JBSD VII, No.59, Mar 48, pp.354-60; Track Lines, in JBSD VIII, No.60, Jun 48, pp.22-8; Spirals, in JBSD VIII, No.62, Dec 48, pp.162-77; Aquastats, in JBSD IX, No.71, Mar 51, pp.279-86; and Further Notes on Dowsing Aquastats and Prehistoric Sites, in JBSD X, No.73, Sept 51, pp.40-6.

[11] It's important to realise that Underwood's work was nearly twenty years out of date when it was finally published: he had it published posthumously because of worries about bitter sarcasm from professional archaeologists.

[12] W.H. Lamb, Old Churches Over Streams, in JBSD XIX, No.129, Sept 65, p.85.

[13] Muriel Langdon, More About Old Churches Over Streams, in JBSD XIX No.130, Dec 65, p.150.

[14] See JBSD IX, No.71, Mar 51, p.286 and JBSD X, No.73, Sept 51, p.46. Colonel Bell was the Society at that time: as well as being editor of the Journal, he was the Society's president, secretary, treasurer and librarian!

[15] First mentioned in his article Track Lines, in JBSD VIII, No.60, Jun 48, pp.22-8.

[16] This is well illustrated in Underwood's diagrams in The Pattern Of The Past.

[17] See Pattern Of The Past, pp.46-7 and 58-9.

[18] See Pattern Of The Past, pp.34-59.

[19] The clearest example he gives is on his Fig.45 on p.131 of Pattern Of The Past, showing patterns on and round the Slaughter Stone at Stonehenge.

[20] This is his main theme in Chs.8-17 of Pattern Of The Past.

[21] For a practising scientist's view of what science and scientific research is and does, see W.I.B. Beveridge's excellent The Art of Scientific Investigation.

[22] The journals of the British Society of Dowsers are the most reliable British source on this: 'official' research in the past has had too much of a vested interest in the classical view of science to allow them to design experiments based on dowsing practice rather than pseudo-scientific theory.

[23] See my book Dowsing: Techniques and Applications [later republished as The Diviner's Handbook] for practical details.

[23a] The 'other book' which discusses these concepts is my Inventing Reality: Towards a Magical Technology, Gateway Books, 1986.

[24] See Maby and Franklin, The Physics of the Divining Rod, or Tromp, Psychical Physics.

[25] Underwood did recognise Creyke's system of depthing: he mentions and describes it briefly on p.51 of Pattern Of The Past, and refers to an article of Creyke's in JBSD II, No.9, Sept 35, p.86. See also Trinder, Dowsing, p.27.

[26] Particularly, for example, the detailed patterns at Stonehenge which Underwood shows in Figs. 32-5, 39, 40, 43 and 44 in Pattern Of The Past, which cannot match the archaeological facts if they are interpreted in terms of his theory of the 'patterns of the past'.

[27] See, in particular, T.C. Lethbridge, Ghost and Ghoul, and Ghost and Divining Rod.



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