A pendulum is a small weight attached to a length of thread or chain. It’s a remarkable, deceptively simple instrument that can reveal information not able to be obtained in any other way. It can also be used for many other purposes, such as answering questions, continuing spiritual healing, enhancing inner growth, eliminating negativity, sending energy, and setting intentions.
The pendulum is a dowsing instrument. The word dowsing means to detect hidden substances, usually with the help of a forked stick, L-shaped metal rod, or pendulum. Many people dowse with their bodies instead of using a dowsing instrument (see Appendix).
The pendulum has been used for thousands of years. The ancient Chinese used them to deter evil spirits, and thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians used them to determine where to plant their crops (Copen 1974, 20–21).
In his history of the Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325–391 CE) wrote about a plot to assassinate the Roman Emperor Valens. A ring attached to a fine linen thread was suspended over a circular platter that contained the letters of the alphabet. The ring moved and spelled out T-H-E-O. This told the conspirators that the next emperor would be Theodorus. The conspirators were caught and executed before they were able to kill the emperor (The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus, 000IX, 29).
Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), a director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, spent twenty years studying the pendulum. He concluded that there was a strong relationship between the thoughts of the dowser and the movements of the pendulum. This phenomenon is called the ideomotor response, and shows that suggestion can create involuntary, unintentional, and unconscious movement. The term ideomotor action was first used by Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852. He created the word from ideo, meaning idea or thought, and motor, meaning muscular action.
In the early twentieth century, Abbé Alexis Mermet (1866–1937), a village priest, became known throughout Europe as the “king of dowsers.” He learned the art from his father and grandfather, both well known for their dowsing skills. Using a pendulum, he discovered petroleum in Africa, conducted archaeological researches for the Roman Catholic Church, found water in Colombia, and located missing people and animals in many countries. In 1934, he located the body of a six-year-old boy in an eagle’s nest, high in the mountains of Switzerland. This sensational case attracted enormous media attention, and even skeptics were unable to explain how the boy’s body had traveled so far. Abbé Mermet’s book, Principles and Practice of Radiesthesia, was published in 1935 and is still in print today.
The word radiesthesia means dowsing, and was coined by another priest, Abbé Alexis-Timothée Bouly. He located water for troops during the First World War, and after the war, dowsed for unexploded shells. He was one of the founders of the Society of Friends of Radiesthesia. In 1950, he received France’s highest honor when he was knighted and became a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Staffen 2019, 11).
The pendulum became popular with the general public in the early twentieth century when it was marketed as a sex detector. In this case, the pendulums were pea-sized hollow metal balls attached to a thread. I have one of these that was made in the 1920s. The instructions, printed on a postage stamp-sized piece of paper, said that if the pendulum was suspended over the palm of a pregnant woman it would move in a circular motion to indicate a girl, and in a straight line to indicate a boy.
During the Second World War, the Germans used dowsers to follow the movements of British warships (Willey 1975, 192). There are also many accounts of soldiers using pendulums and L-shaped rods to locate hidden mines and tunnels during the Vietnam War.
In early 1959, Verne Cameron, a professional dowser, contacted Vice Admiral Maurice E. Curtis and told him he could locate submarines using nothing but a pendulum and a map. He also claimed to be able to identify the nationality each submarine belonged to. The US Navy accepted his offer and watched Verne Cameron and his pendulum dowse a map of the Pacific Ocean. He located all the US submarines in a matter of minutes, and then located all the Russian ones. Despite this success, the navy didn’t ask him to repeat the experiment. Several years later, Verne Cameron was invited by the South African government to dowse for precious resources. He applied for a passport but wasn’t given one, as the CIA considered him a security risk (many sources, including Eason).
In 1977, a unique experiment called Project Deep Quest began. There were two parts to it. The first part, a classified project for the US Air Force, tested long-range remote viewing from inside a submersible. The second part was unclassified, and involved two map dowsers, Ingo Swann and Hella Hammid, who were asked to locate sea wrecks at the bottom of the ocean in a 1,500-square-mile area near Catalina Island, close to Los Angeles. The two dowsers worked separately, and a composite map was made of their findings. All the shipwrecks that were previously known were eliminated, leaving one target that had been marked by both dowsers. Their sites were only a few hundred yards apart. A previously unknown shipwreck was found in the area that the two dowsers indicated (Jacobsen 2017, 195–200).
In 1991, Dr. Elizabeth Mayer’s daughter’s harp was stolen in Oakland, California. Despite considerable publicity, the police couldn’t find it, and two months later a friend dared the skeptical doctor to contact a dowser. She phoned Harold McCoy, president of the American Society of Dowsers, who lived in Arkansas. She told him what had happened and he checked to see if the harp was still in Oakland. As his pendulum told him it was, he asked Dr. Mayer to send him a map of the city. He dowsed the map with his pendulum and sent her the coordinates of the location where the harp could be found. She told the police she’d received a tipoff, but they told her that wasn’t enough to obtain a search warrant. She placed flyers around the neighborhood asking for help in getting it back, no questions asked. The harp was returned in three days. Dr. Mayer was a psychoanalyst and an associate clinical professor with a private practice in Berkeley. This experience changed her life, and she wrote a book called Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind.