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40-50,000 years ago - cro-magnum era - Cave drawings were found in Spain dating showing dowsinghttp://www.tamar-dowsers.co.uk/articles/history.htm "A cave drawing at Tassili, Algeria may be the oldest record of a dowser, although there are some who have seen it who feel that it takes a lively imagination to see a man dowsing in the depiction" |
| 8,000 years ago - cave drawings were also found in Iraq depicting dowsing |
| 2500 B.C. - The writings of Confucius mention dowsing. |
| circa 2200 BC. - dowsers appear engraved on ancient Egyptian stonework http://www.americaninsurancedepot.com/help/dowsing.htm "Similarly, the oldest Egyptian stone drawings and carvings show men in exotic headdresses holding forked sticks or pendulums." |
| 3300 years ago - In King Tuts pyramid dowsing tools were found. http://www.tamar-dowsers.co.uk/articles/history.htm "Artefacts from the time of the Egyptian Pharoahs suggest that dowsing in its modernly recognisable form originates from the use of split reeds" |
| 2205 BC - "What is, perhaps, the oldest record of dowsing in written history happens to be about water witching.... It is referred to as 'divination' and was done by the expert dowser, Emperor Ta Yu, the founder of the Hsia dynasty in China... This is recorded in an inscription to be found on a Bas Relief in the Shantung province of China" |
| ~722 BC - The prophet Hosea of biblical times condemned it. His people had adopted the ways of their pagan captors, including the art of divination. He stated, "They consult their piece of wood and their wand makes pronouncements to them." |
| ~450 BC - Herodotus (484--432 BC) writes of its use by the Persians, Scythians, and Medes. |
| ~1271 - "Marco Polo brought back detailed information on it from the Orient." |
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1300 - "...a Benedictine monk, Valentine, wrote about dowsing in a manner that indicated someone was experimenting with it seriously. He wrote of six kinds of rods used for locating different metals underground." |
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1362 - "...a Papal Bull against the "use of a ring to obtain answers in the manner of the Devil" (pendulum dowsing) was issued by Pope John XXII." |
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1518 - "Martin Luther had taken a positive stand against dowsing, declaring that its use broke the first commandment." |
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1556 - Agricola wrote De Re Metallica, a composition on mining, which included an illustration of a German dowser at work. http://www.americaninsurancedepot.com/help/dowsing.htm "...a German physician and mining buff, Georgius Agricola, whose unlatinized name was Georg Bauer, wrote his first essay on mineralogy and mining lore, which by 1556 had become the greatest treatise on mining ever written. Because mining and dowsing were inseparable (at least in Germany), there was much in his work on the art of finding metals." |
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~1560 - "Queen Elizabeth the 1st, of England, had German miners come to England to teach dowsing to their miners, to enable them to find mines and ore deposits they needed." |
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1617 - "Jean du Chatelet, Baron de Beausoleil was a mineralogist and alchemist, who lived during the first half of the seventeenth century. He travelled over most European countries looking for metals with the aid of a divining ring. In 1626 his instruments were seized under the pretext that they were bewitched, and he himself prisoned in the Bastille, where he died in 1645. In 1617 he published a work entitled Diorisinus, id est definitis verae philisophiae de materia prima lapidis philosophalis. Beausoleil was the-greatest of French metallurgists of his time." |
| ~1630 - "...in France there was a famous murder case of a wine merchant and his wife. The police asked a dowser for help. He tracked the man involved in the case with dowsing tools and helped solve the case." |
| 1691 - Jean Nicholas de Grenoble published a book in Lyon under the title of La Verge de Jacob or L’arte de Trouver les Trésors, Les Sources, les Limites, les Métaux, les Mines, les Minéraux et autres choses cachés par L’usage du Baton fourché. (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). |
1703 - "Aymar was dowsing for the Church, tracking down Protestants for massacre...only two years earlier the Inquisition had forbade the use of the dowsing rod in criminal prosecution. Whether this was by order of the Pope or one of the Tribunals we do not know. It is recorded that the dowsing rod was used not only to track down the accused, but as a lie detector in the trials proper." |
| 1859 - "The most famous of Victorian dowsers, John Mullins, was an English mason, who took up dowsing on a near full-time basis more than two decades after the estate on which he worked was visited by a dowser in 1859. He supported the use of a forked hazel twig, taking payment from customers only if he was successful and on many occasions he was, finding wells to improve water supplies. Mullins insisted on making pendulums from the local environment in which he was working, and the success of the business resulted in it later being taken over by his sons." |
| 1870 - "...a young French peasant herdsman, Barthelemey Bléton who was exhibiting a new phenomenon in the act of dowsing. Bléton had been tested repeatedly by the Bishop of Grenoble for his oddity..... Ever since, this method of ascertaining water depth has been known as "The Bishop's Rule." |
| 1874, "Thomas Welton translated and published Jean Nicholas’ book in English." |
| 1943 - "Farmer J W Young convinced wild-catter, Ace Gutowski, that oil lay beneath West Edmond, Oklahoma by demonstration with a goatskin-covered bottle hung from a watch chain which invariably swung from north to south when over oil. As a result, in 1943, Gutowski drilled a hole and discovered the largest oil deposit in Oklahoma for 20 years. And that is just one of very many examples of oil strikes by dowsers." |
| 1944 - "Hoffman-La Roche, the huge multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, has been employing dowsers on the company's payroll since 1944. The dowsers are used in seeking water for the company's operations. When interviewed as to the unscientific nature of dowsing, a company spokesperson replied as follows: "Roche uses methods that are profitable, whether they are scientific or not. The dowsing method pays...." (Christopher Bird, "Dowsing in Industry: Hoffman-La-Roche," The American Dowser, August 1975, 106. )" |
| 1952 - "Colonel Harry Grattan, CBE, Royal Engineers was given the task of building a new Headquarters for the British Rhine Army at Mönchen Gladbach, Germany in 1952. ... Using the traditional forked twig the colonel began dowsing and getting reactions everywhere to the west of the test bore. On the strength of this two further trial bores were executed with spectacular results." |
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1966 - "a team of Soviet geologists were carefully monitoring the blasting of several million tons of rock into a ravine for a dam. One of the principal recording instruments used by these hardheaded government scientists was the dowsing rod." |
| 1990 - "The most successful treasure dowser in Britain is Jim Longton from Lancashire. Jim took up dowsing when he retired from the wrestling ring and first hit the headlines in 1990 after finding a spectacular hoard of Viking silver brooches valued at over £40,000. ($60,000)" |