BIO location – more commonly known as dowsing – is an age-old technique. The first known recorded use is illustrated in a 6000BC cave painting found at Tassili n Ajjer in Algeria, which shows a crowd of people eagerly watching a dowser at work, his Y shaped stick held with both hands, in what experts believe is a search for an underground desert spring. IN 50BC, Cicero also recorded the use and beneficial effect of the Virgula Divinatorium (Dowsing rod), while Herodotus noted that the Persians, Scythians and Medes regularly practised the craft. In more modern times, Albert Einstein became an enthusiastic dowser in an effort to try and quantify the physics of the technique, something even his prodigious mind failed to fathom.
Dowsing is based on the theory that the human mind can perceive in ways traditionally considered ‘outside’ our commonly accepted five senses. Because our physical and psychological apparatus is designed primarily to satisfy our many basic desires, this ‘integral equipment’ is never really used to anywhere near its full potential.
Dowsers train themselves to develop this extra perception, believing that the human mind is structured to be the very best radio receiver on earth, in that it can detect many things that machines and technologies cannot, especially in the unquantifiable areas of emotion, feeling, and consciousness. Seemingly, all of us are walking ‘radio receivers’ and as long as we breathe, we are permanently switched on, but can hear nothing without an accompanying loud speaker.
When people dowse, the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind is to the fore, with the whole process seen as a handle on that abstract world of feeling and intuition. Dowsing then is considered a perfectly natural tool enabling us to amplify and tune into what we are already aware of, but simply haven’t noticed before.
Now, if all this sounds just a bit on the touchy-feely, cranky side of life, conjuring up images of dotty dames in dirndl skirts sporting wild hair and driving around the countryside in Morris Minors clutching bent coat hangers intent on finding the lost city of Atlantis in Hayward’s Heath, then think again.
That was my picture, which I totally had to revise after meeting Tony Heath.
Tony is a large, amiable chap, mercifully bereft of sandals, dodgy tasselled bag, or a neck swathed in crystals and swinging crosses. In fact he looks every inch the respectable retired bank manager, except Tony has a sense of humour, something he has had to hone to take the stick whenever he pulls out his dowsing rod.
We met on site at Paleapaphos – Aphrodite’s temple outside the village of Kouklia, a site that Tony and his fellow dowsers have been ‘marking’ for the past few years. Armed with their L shaped one-metre length rods, the group, under the watchful eye of Tony, walks across the site, holding their rods in front of them. Depending on the response from the rods, whether they move left or right or sideways, this movement is interpreted, and plastic markers are placed to indicate what the dowser believes once stood on the spot, or indeed what is still beneath the ground.
“Dowsing is not based on theoretical underpinnings,” Tony explained, “but on the claimed success of the dowser. No one has yet come up with an inclusive explanation, and maybe it is not possible to do so; to my mind, if the method works, and I believe firmly that it does, just because this controlled world we inhabit cannot explain it, well, so much the worse for us.
“If the truth be known, we are all more afraid of being too gullible than of being too sceptical, and, yes, many folk laugh at us as we wander around pointing away with our dowsing rods.”
At that very moment a Cypriot couple arrived on the site to observe the process. Frixos Ioannides had travelled from Limassol to visit the remains of the temple; soon, he got into conversation with Tony, telling him that in his village they had successfully used a dowser to track some underground wells.
Frixos, a retired teacher, then had a go with the dowsing rods. His reaction after the experience? “Very interesting the rods moved, and I had nothing to do with it, it just happened, and, yes, I am coming back next week to learn more from Tony as I am fascinated by this method of charting this very important archaeological site.”
The dowsers moved on, leaving in their wake several tourists who had watched with increasing fascination as every step taken over the next 15 minutes revealed a large three-tiered temple of Zeus that consisted of over 40 columns, something that has never before been fully charted.
In fact, this whole site, which is about the size of eight football pitches, has been largely overlooked, with little or no charting having been done of the separate temples, burial grounds, etc. Tony has been working on the site for a few years. Every January until April, every week, he comes out to dowse, then he takes his dowsing readings back home and creates maps of the site, carefully creating the once great structures that were in situ all those thousands of years ago.
Over the years, he has dowsed Roman forts on the lawn of a stately home in Devon, ancient villages that were buried deep beneath Dartmoor, but he admits that “this site at Kouklia is mind-blowing in its magnificence; it’s on a par to the Pantheon at Olympus, the sheer volume of information stored here, the richness is beyond belief, to say nothing of the extraordinary energy generated by the six energy lines that pour into the mouth of the site, giving off an energy field that goes all the way down to the Petra Tou Romiou site (Aphrodite’s birthplace) by the sea.”
Sceptics say that no plausible physical explanation has ever been put forward for the stimuli to which a dowser might be responding. Objectively, however, a total rejection of dowsing simply because physics or physiology cannot provide an adequate explanation, smacks of scientific arrogance.
Holding the dowsing rods, you feel as though a weight is pulling the tip of the rod towards the ground; there was no seizure, no involuntary muscular spasm on my part when I tried it, the rod just moved. It was then I had the dawning sense that the science we expect so many answers from may not be the key to the universe after all.
