© Tom Lethbridge 1969 [1]
Nature apparently always consists of a balance of opposites. Where there is night there is also day: where there is evil there is always good. Positive and negative, male and female; it is the same story. So it is not surprising to find in our study that it is not one-sided. Although you can tune in on what appears to be a repulsion rate to substances, there are other substances which act as a complete obstacle to this. I call them interrupters, but this is not the right term, for they are really conductors and counteract the repulsion effect which gives us our rates.
The first interrupter I found was lead. Lead has the same, or nearly the same rate, as several metals; but while it is an interrupter, silver with the same rate of 22 inches is not. The effect of an interrupter is instant and quite dramatic. If you tune in to a gold object and, while the pendulum is gyrating, put a piece of lead beside the gold, the gyration changes in a moment to a back and forth swing. If you hold a piece of lead in your left hand while the pendulum, suspended from your right hand, is gyrating over the piece of gold, and then transfer the lead from the left hand to the right, the gyration stops at once and oscillation begins.
ave reasoned correctly before, we find the rates of substances because they cause a block in a circulatory system of electric current, which includes your personal field and that of the earth. This may be wrong, but the current must flow between you and something of that sort. The pendulum oscillates because the pressure tries to get through and on that particular rate there is an obstruction, which forces it aside and round through a circle.
It makes the water-diviner’s rod turn over for the same reason. The rod is in unstable equilibrium with the current passing through its apex and the obstruction of the flow causes it to turn aside and rotate. The force is very great and breaks the rod if you try to hold it tight and prevent its rotation. This is not difficult to understand, perfectly reasonable and within the bounds of science. It is also magic, for divination is one of the magic arts. I think that all magic arts could be interpreted in terms of science, if it could be bothered to study them.
Now our lead somehow neutralizes the obstruction. In man-made electricity it is an insulator and prevents current leaking away from copper wires. Why it should do so, I do not know. Presumably it was found long ago that it did so and it may have been used without question ever since. It may be known why it works, but I do not know. An archaeologist cannot be expected to have a wide knowledge of physics. Yet an observed fact in physics is the same as an observed fact in our study. Lead is an insulator in both. In our study the very presence of a lump of lead, within the radius of its pendulum rate, prevents current flowing from our electro-magnetic field into that of a piece of gold.
Thinking that since gold has a rate of 29 inches and a conic radius at the base of 29 inches, there might be a zone outside the 22 inch radius of lead in which the gold rate could still be found. I tried this. There is no such zone. The lead neutralizes the field of gold at its centre. There are not two double cones of force one inside the other, with a dead lead cone inside and a live gold cone outside. The effect of the lead is complete.
Now you can take the short pendulum and get a victim to lie on the floor. If you keep the pendulum oscillating across his backbone, at any point in the victim’s back where there is damage and the current in the nervous system does not run freely, the pendulum will gyrate. I have done this with some people and apparently the pendulum tells the truth.
Arthritis can be located easily. This is not imagination. The back can be examined by X-rays and the pendulum proved to be telling the truth. It has been done with one of my victims and arthritis revealed at each point where the pendulum indicated an obstruction. I am not setting up as a healer or anything of that sort. I am simply an inquisitive person trying to find out what is going on. As far as I can see the pendulum is an aid to diagnosis.
Now you can find the arthritic joint, or whatever it is, easily with the pendulum; but, if when this is gyrating over that joint, you place a piece of lead beside the injury, or against the hand holding the pendulum, the gyration stops at once and oscillation begins. The effect with a human being is exactly the same as with inanimate matter such as gold.
This is surely not the same as enclosing copper wire in a tube of lead. It is not simple insulation, which takes place, but something of a different order. The field of the lead blocks out the obstruction. [2] It has the same effect if you use it with a letter, which registers opposition or hostility. This is no longer physics as it is now known. It is something more extensive connected with the whole study of life.
I am sure I do not know whether it would prevent the spread of arthritis if you wore a lead object about your person, but it does seem as if the lead neutralizes the effect and permits current to flow freely.
Lead is an insulator to radio-active rays and is regarded as a dead metal. It appears to absorb these rays and it was interesting to see that when I was asked to test a sheet of lead, which had been bombarded for some time by them, it did not react to the 22 inch rate. There is something here of very great importance, which might have a radical effect on healing. However, lead is not by any means the only interrupter. But of metals it appears to be the strongest. Aluminium is another; although it is weak compared with lead and has a different rate.
A friend complained to me that he was unable to find a gold watch when it was hidden from him. In theory the gold case should have reacted to the 29 inch rate. But it did not. This would have seemed insoluble if we had not already learnt of the existence of interrupters. But having got so far, it seemed clear that something was getting in the way. I tried other watches. It made no difference what the case was made of. None of them reacted to the appropriate wave-length.
Since their works only appear to contain iron, brass and the bearings for their wheels, it seemed clear that the interrupter was in these bearings. I had always heard of the bearings being spoken of as rubies. One had seen lists of stolen articles: ‘A gold watch jewelled in nine holes, and a gold Albert (meaning a watch chain)’, and so on. What were the bearings made of? A search revealed that they were either made of indifferent rubies, or a hard form of garnet. Both were complicated compounds containing the metal calcium.
I had some garnets, which came from a glen on the south side of the head of Loch Morar. These showed at once to the pendulum that they were interrupters. But they were relatively weak. Still interrupters they were and whether the bearings were of ruby or garnet, this was the reason why my friend could not find the hidden watch with the pendulum.
Part of the large hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure discovered in Staffordshire, England in 2009. Many of the gold objects were inlaid with garnets which would have made discovery of the hoard by divination difficult if not impossible.[Ed]
We knew that to find a gold object, which had no interrupters was relatively easy, for my wife had once accidentally thrown away a ring of gold into a bed of nettles and brambles and we had found it in less than five minutes. There must be however some method of circumventing the interrupters, for I have been told of a gold watch being recovered from a dustbin with a pendulum. I do not suppose that the long rate was used. It may have been the short one and the watch have been located by the ‘affinity’ method.
Although many substances figure in antiquity and at the present day as being of supernatural importance, the one above all which comes to mind is salt. There are many perfectly good objective reasons why this should be so. Animals will go miles to ‘salt-licks’ to get it. It is necessary for the blood, and so on. Of course it makes food taste better. In fact most food without salt tastes incredibly dull, although cats seem to prefer it that way.
When you come to the superstitions, the picture is quite bewildering. Salt makes a bond between householder and guest, which cannot be broken without loss of honour. It was supposed in India to create a life tie between the giver of the tie and the receiver of the salt. No longer, since the Hitler war, are the Sikhs regarded as the epitome of heroic virtue, because many of them betrayed the British salt and went over to the Japanese. They will probably never recover their status.
Salt was terribly important, but why? Coming back to our own land from those which none of us really understands, we find a variety of apparently absurd conventions. If you spill salt, and this must happen almost every day in most households, it must be thrown over the left shoulder, and then, according to the better informed, it goes into the Devil’s eye. In other words, this act wards off evil luck. Why this should be so, I cannot for the moment see; but let us go further.
You must not on any account mention salt at sea if you come from the Celtic lands. If you have been born a Sassenach, an Englishman, it does not matter in the least. East Scottish fishing luggers have often been known when out of salt to run alongside an English boat and say something like: ‘We are oot of ye ken what, will ye lend us a wee bit?’ This seems quite incomprehensible. Why not say that they were out of salt and have done with it?
Salt appears in old superstitions then in a curious double manner. It can bind people together and yet it is unlucky to spill it ashore, or mention its name at sea. It seems to have been regarded as very powerful and yet uncertain in the exercise of its power. It had to be guarded carefully or it might get out of hand and do you harm.
I tested some salt with the long pendulum beside a copper object. The field of the copper was neutralized. Salt is an interrupter. Then with the short pendulum, I tested it against myself. Here the result was unexpected. For a moment or two the pendulum oscillated showing affinity and then suddenly this changed to a violent circular swing. It was more strongly obstructive than elder. I tried salt against rowan. The salt interrupted the rowan. It interrupted the male rate for elder on the long pendulum.
I took a piece of rusted blacksmiths’ iron. With the long pendulum it gave reactions at 32, 27, 26.5 and 24 inches, which should be the rates for iron, thought, oxygen in the rust and male rate from the blacksmith. Salt interrupted each of these rates in turn. It also interrupted the rate for lead, 22 inches, and lead interrupted the 22-inch sodium rate in salt.
This is very remarkable, but the behaviour of graphite, ordinary pencil lead, is more so. Graphite reverses the rate given on the pendulum for sex. It turns female into male and male into female. It will do so for animals and human beings and for the objects, such as pencil drawings, which human beings impress with their sex rates. Further than this, it can over-ride salt as an interrupter.
As I mentioned earlier in this account, I have some skulls of whitings, which are useful for experiments. Some give male rates, others female. A piece of graphite put down beside a male skull at once changes the rate to female and vice versa. Now, if you take a male skull and put salt beside it, you can get no reaction on the pendulum. Masculinity is blotted out. You do not get anything and no reversal of the sex rate.
Even the smallest scrap of pencil lead, however, not only gives a marked reaction, but that reaction is on the female rate and not on the male. Graphite completely overcomes salt as an interrupter, and it goes on to reverse the sex rate also. Of all the strange phenomena we have met, this seems to me to be the oddest. Graphite is not lead; although it is spoken of as being lead. It seems to be a semi-vegetable fossil mineral.
As far as I know there are no superstitious beliefs regarding graphite and there is no apparent reason why there should be any. In the ancient world people wrote either on sheets made from papyrus leaves, on vellum, which is made from split skins, or on wax in square wooden tablets with a stylus, a kind of pencil made entirely of hard metal. Sometimes the stylus was pressed so hard into the wax that Latin letters can still be read on wooden tablets dug up today. It was not until the Chinese had invented paper and its use became common for writing letters and for drawing in Europe that a use was found for graphite as a writing material. Before that it may have been a known curiosity, but was not apparently in general use. So unlike salt, superstitions did not grow up around it.
Had the ancients discovered its curious property of reversing the sex rate, anything might have happened. It has no sex rate of its own. But I have only to scribble the smallest mark on a piece of paper with a graphite-filled pencil for the pendulum to react strongly not to the male rate, but to the female. Ink, however, gives the expected male rate. Wooden pencils in frequent use have no sex rate from the user. You cannot impress apparently your sex rate on vegetable material, nor on graphite.
It may be important that the rate for graphite is half that of vegetable matter, the first being 10 inches and the second 20. Carbon obtained by burning wood, however, has a rate of 12 inches and diamond, derived from carbon, 24. Since all the other rates appear to have come in some way from changes wrought in vegetable material, it is curious that these rates are not all multiples. Neither is there any relationship to atomic weights. This subject appears to be entirely distinct from other sciences.
All this talk of rates must be very dull to the reader; but there is no other way in which it can be easily expressed. One has to show how one arrives at the conclusions and it is not enough to say that one thing likes, or dislikes, another.
There is another substance which reverses sex rates, for all I know there may be a lot of them. This is elm. Elm is used frequently for floor-boards and if you do not know that peculiarity it can lead to a lot of confusion and mistakes. Elm, unlike graphite, itself reacts to a male rate and it is not an interrupter.
So we have a variety of properties which can be possessed by a given substance. It may have its own rate and interrupt. It may have its own rate and a sex rate and interrupt. It may have a sex rate and reverse, or no sex rate and reverse sex rates. It may neutralize some interrupters. There are many variations. But it does not look as if any of this was due to ordinary magnetism. We do not know what it is, but it vaguely suggests a complication which might be expected of magnetism if it were given the field of another dimension.
My baptismal name is Thomas and it was most correctly given. I doubt even my own evidence. However, there are some things about this pendulum business, which I cannot doubt. I cannot disbelieve it when it produces things from under the ground which I could neither see, nor possibly know about.
Therefore I feel I must accept, with great unwillingness, the other information, which it appears to give me. I know well that its information may seem absurd and even totally impossible. But I also see that I do not really know enough about what may be known to a mind, distinct from a brain, to be able to question it.
What seems to be shown by the pendulum, as I have said before, is that there is something invisible and intangible attached to our body, which knows far more than we do. I call it a mind, but I might just as well put it in religious terms and call it a spirit. Words are quite useless here. Who knows the difference, if any, between mind and spirit? Both, I think, are quite distinct from brain-activity.
At present I am not wise enough to distinguish between mind and spirit. So, for the moment, until something else comes along, I am prepared to think that our bodies, including our brains, are linked by some kind of electro-magnetic field, which I think of as a psyche-field, with something in a higher dimension, which we may style alternatively as mind, or spirit. Furthermore, the evidence appears to show me that earlier men knew far more about all this than we know today.
Endnotes
[1] Source: Chapters 7 & 9 in ESP: Beyond Time and Distance; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.
[2] Many churches in England date back to Anglo Saxon and Norman times when lead roofs were the norm. [Ed]
