© Tom Lethbridge 1965 [1]
It must occur to some readers that everything I have written may be entirely imaginary. Being a born doubter myself, I completely understand such a view. But it is impossible for it to be imaginary.
If you can use the pendulum to work out within a inch or two exactly where something lies hidden beneath undisturbed turf, and do this in front of witnesses, and then go to the spot which the pendulum has indicated and take off the turf, dig up the soil beneath and find the object.
If you can do the same operation again and again and almost always succeed, this cannot be imagination, delusion, or any of these things. It is scientific experiment however crude it may be. There are of course numerous points which we do not understand.
The interrupters may interrupt and on occasion prevent your finding something. There are many rates, which are much the same and so instead of finding some silver object answering to the silver rate, you may find some compound of sodium and so on. But the thing works and the proof of the pudding lies not in its appearance but the taste of it.
Therefore, however strange may be the information that the pendulum gives, we may be confident that it is not imagination, which is playing tricks with us. In this book it has already told us so many almost incredible things that one begins to feel quite nervous of it. For one thing it is amazingly simple.
In analysis of a compound, for example, if you have the rates worked out, you can get a very good idea what it is in a few minutes. It may be a little difficult to tell sodium from calcium. But one is an interrupter, while the other is not. You can tell at once whether it has sulphur or carbon in it.
It is not my job to work out all these rates. I am trying, as I said before, to get at the main points in all this. But I am confronted with a very strange world, far stranger I feel than anything produced by physics, botany or biology.
These cones of force, there must be millions of them in any backyard, which can be contacted instantly by a ray projected from our own psyche-field, are much more difficult to comprehend than molecules, atoms and electrons, for we were more or less brought up to take these for granted, even if they are just as impossible to sense.
These theories are at first inferred and then comes the proof of the pudding. Do they react as they ought to do? So far, in practice, they have stood up to the test, or people would not be so worried about atom bombs.
But they may not do so for more than a generation. Our cones are not so vague. Anyone who can work the pendulum can find them in his own house. Of course he may have to do it in a concrete floored kitchen, or in the lavatory, because of the peculiar behaviour of elm floor-boards.
So we live in a world and walk about in it, where everything could look to a four-dimensional eye like a tightly packed forest. We can stretch out our arm with a finger pointing and select one of these cones at a considerable distance; judging by the Manx shearwater at thousands of miles. The vixen, in theory, just sends out her ray and the dog-foxes gallop for miles to it.
If the ray were visible, it would be easier to understand it. But perhaps we have forgotten how someone turned a radar beam up into the sky from a Canadian airfield when geese were migrating and they came to earth in hundreds utterly confused. The radar beam is invisible and so are ours. So there is nothing really difficult to understand about all this. It is just strange.
It would be far less strange to people of the East, where ‘holy men’ have been thinking about such things for thousands of years, but without the background of modern science.
The men of the east believe that, after years of contemplation, they can bring their own personal selves into a higher level of existence. They believe they can look out of a window and see a cow walk through a wall. They also believe that they can their dissolve bodies into atoms, fly instantaneously through the air, and reconstitute the body in some distant place.
Well, to us this sounds the most utter piffle. We are northerners, who won what position we may still hold in the world by what we may call ‘guts and ginger’. Few of us have ever bothered even to look at the writings of the East. Writing as a northerner, with the bones of many relatives lying under foreign soils, not only in the south, but in the far north, I feel slightly antagonistic to these eastern ideas. Still I keep an open mind all the time.
These easterners have thought a lot about it and they may have got some of the answers right. Our western outlook is obviously too materialistic today. This view, based on far too little information, obviously needs breaking down. It is based ultimately on five senses and there are clearly at least six. It is confined to three dimensions and there must be at least four. This is the predicament in which one is landed if one thinks about this kind of thing at all.
As far as I know, there has been no study of dowsing in the eastern world and precious little in our own part of the globe. There is no mention of it in the classics that I know of. One would have thought that there might have been eminent Arab diviners.
The Moslem peoples were far advanced beyond what they called the ‘Franks’, for several centuries. In mathematics they were very skilled and the study of algebra is theirs. I cannot have an encyclopaedic knowledge, but, as far as I know, in countries where water was scarce, they did not employ dowsers to find it. They cannot have known how to do so, for their outlook was apparently flexible.
Dowsing then, and you must not trust my knowledge in this matter, seems to be something evolved in the West. For some obscure reason, when science began to grow, dowsing was ruled out of the curriculum. Alchemy grew into chemistry, but divination grew into nothing.
In the early days of science, many must have known that water could be divined. But apparently it was anathema to Holy Church, which could not perhaps do it itself, despite the story of Moses, or else other matters seemed more interesting and it was overlooked.
But one would have thought that the alchemists would have jumped at it. Perhaps they did, but not knowing about interrupters and that the female rate is the same as for gold, they were discouraged. In any case dowsing did not attract general interest.
It is hinted at in Leland’s Aradia, a gospel of the Italian witches, where it says that one of the benefits of the worship of Diana would be the power to locate hidden treasure and money concealed by priests.
People from the eighteenth century onwards seem to have tried to locate gold by some form of dowsing, but there is little evidence that it was a great success. Of course if it were such a success, no one would be likely to mention the fact, for gold is gold, even if it lies unused in American vaults.
But if it had been a magnificent success, why has no one yet found the treasure of Attila? This prodigious booty, buried after he had had a fit on his wedding night, not his first wedding by any means, was secured by a diversion of the river. That treasure, the loot from most of Europe, must still be there and of incalculable interest to a world thrilled by the discoveries of archaeology.
If I were a little less stiff, I would try my hand at finding Attila’s treasure. This is the period, the Dark Ages, on which I have done most work. It would fascinate me to see what Attila had looted from the late Roman Empire.
But here we come to another interesting matter. Witches, by which are meant those who cast hostile spells against others and not just devotees of an old religion, are by common belief in the countryside, unable to cross running water. So are ghosts for that matter. If there is anything in the belief, then running water is, like rowan, probably an interrupter.
It is not difficult to test this. Stand on one side of the sink in the kitchen. Put a piece of elder in the opposite side of the sink and test between yourself and it with the short pendulum. At once the pendulum gyrates. The opposition of the elder to an even flow of current is clear.
Now turn on the tap so that water runs between you and the elder and test again. The pendulum does not gyrate. The hostility, if it may be so termed, of the elder cannot pass the running water. Presumably this is due to a field of force caused by the friction of the running water against the bottom of the sink, for there is no such interruption with standing water.
In any case, if the active malice of magicians can be sent out as a ray between one personal field and another, running water would interrupt it. Of course I do not know whether it really can, but it seems probable that this popular belief originated in some similar kind of experiment. There is something in the idea.
Unfortunately this probably dispels any great hope of finding Attila’s treasure by dowsing. If the hoard is still covered by running water, or surrounded by it on an artificial islet, the water would act as an interrupter, so would garnet inlays in the jewels, and the gold fail to register. Still the courses of rivers frequently change and the treasure may now be on dry land. One would have thought that air photographs would give a hint at where Attila’s warriors made their artificial cut to divert the river.
This is not really a diversion. I am trying simply to draw attention to the practical side of all this. It is not known where the power comes from to work a pendulum or divining-rod. It is not known where it comes from to enable a shearwater to find its chick, or a fox to find its mate. But the power appears to be undoubtedly there and we can guess that it comes from the life force which makes the universe work. Many peoples of antiquity and some in this country today believed that the power could be generated and harnessed.
Highly excitable circular dances were believed to generate the power. Perhaps one might see a comparison here with an electric coil. The power generated by the excitement could be canalized by those who understood the art and they could store it in the fields of stones or trees until they wanted to use it.
I do not know whether power can be generated by this means, although everyone now knows of the power of mob hysteria. But we have seen that something from the human field can be fixed for long periods in the fields of various inanimate objects, including bits of stone. We have seen also that two dowsers working two pendulums can apparently produce a much more vigorous effect.
These three points, the mob hysteria, the fixing of rates in the fields of inanimate objects and the increase in activity of pendulums when there are more than one of them, certainly point to the possibility that if you had a number of people generating power, you might obtain a great deal of it, and also that you might be able to focus it in the field of an inanimate object.
But, although you may be able to collect your power in the field of a given stone, it is not so easy to see how you could draw it out again, or use it if you could. This is beyond any stage in our investigation to which we may have attained.
Also investigation with the pendulum does not seem to show that you can impress anything of your own on the field of something which once had a sex rate of its own. Unlike alabaster which, when I have carved it into figures, takes up my rates of sex and thought, rowan when similarly treated accepts neither. It obstinately retains its own sex rate of femininity and nothing else.
It is possible that living trees are different. They certainly have very strong fields which are easily detected with a divining-rod. It is not easy to devise an experiment to show whether anything can be impressed on the field of a living tree or not. [2]
There is no exact science about finding the rates in the way I do it. But you can take a compass and establish the rates for the cardinal points with no trouble at all. Colours present no difficulty. The death rate is inherent in the remains of all dead animals and the life rate in all living ones. Earth, air, fire, water, sun and moon are not difficult. Heat and light a little more so. Electricity can be found by tuning in over a piece of exposed cable with a current running through it. And so on. It is not really so nebulous as it seems on paper.
But always there has to be something selective in the operator’s mind. This is best employed as ‘interest’ and not as ‘hard concentration’. In fact it seems that hard concentration and firmly held preconceived ideas are liable to upset some delicate mental balance and spoil the results. The operator must be indifferent to the results; but also interested in obtaining them. If they come contrary to what he had expected, it is no part of his experiment to worry about it. There will be some answer, which he has not yet thought of.
All through this research work, which I have been doing now for some years, I never have any idea what will be round the next corner. One must reason from the information given to you and not from preconceived theories, or opinions given by others.
But in no work that I did before was the Biblical saying: ‘Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ so clearly demonstrated. Every clue leads to another. Loose ends become picked up and tied in, and at any stage one can stop for a while and draw a picture, but all the time it is an unfolding story.
Who would have guessed when we started with our first simple experiments in finding the rates of this and that, that they might presently lead us to something which looks remarkably like a cosmic plan with an intelligence at the back of it? It is the complete negation of the Darwinian School of Evolution on which I was educated.
Evolution is still there, of course, but instead of being an haphazard affair, it seems to be revealing itself as a most elaborate scheme worked out in minute detail from a prearranged series of tables. Whoever put, or puts, it into operation, could, or can, work out his blue-print for an organism so that it would function correctly in detail.
We have only found the most minute fraction of these tables and there are innumerable gaps in what we have found. But we have found enough to show that the table must be there and that there must be an intelligence to put them into operation.
There is more to it than this, important as it is; the rates do not appear to refer to our three-dimensional world. We will leave this for the moment. But what did Jesus mean about the sign of the prophet Jonas?
Jonas, or Jonah, was sheltered by the leaves of a gourd, some kind of marrow, which grew up apparently by a miracle and sheltered him from the sun. It died with equal celerity, because the caterpillar of some insect ate its root. The point was that the three dimensions of this world, length, breadth and thickness were not all. There was something else beyond these three, a fourth dimension, a fifth and perhaps an infinite number.
We are dealing with the fourth and perhaps the fringes of a fifth. But science, in its temporary pride, has not realized that there must be a fourth. It cannot attempt to examine it, because its rules tie it to an examination of only three.
That is why there are so many difficulties before the student of parapsychology. He is bound to be opposed by the priests of the three dimensions. Their whole bread and butter depends on their mastery of three alone. The greater their mastery of the three, the control of atomic power and so on, the less willing they will be to accept that there is something more powerful and more important outside their range of knowledge in a fourth.
Endnotes
[1] Source: Chapter 8 in ESP: Beyond Time and Distance; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.
[2] Source (from here): Ch. 4 (pps 55-56) in A Step in the Dark; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, ISBN 07100 1741 3.
