Diviners show off their skills

Press, 20 October 1980, Page 27

Diviners show off their skills

By

JACQUES CHARMELOT,

otAgence France-Presse, through NZPA. •With two fret-saw blades, and his supple wrists, Andre Danis these last 20 years has been conjuring up water spirits from the Sahara sands and from deep in the earth of S o u t h-E a s t Asia. A chartered accountant from Toulouse, Mr Danis, who is 60, . has spent a third of his life in North Africa, Laos, Vietnam and China. He ranks as one of France’s foremost waterdiyiners. Predictably he was in the. thick of dowsing recent!j’ ! when 14 of France’s leading artesian sleuths gathered at Auch, in the mountains 70km west„ of Tbulese, to pit their powers against one another in friendly contest.

, The 1 V-shaped rod that Mr Danis uses — “just a pair of ordinary sawblades” — came in for plenty of attention from fellow-dowsers, most of whom favour the line-and-sinker method of detection: a simple metal pendulum suspended on a thread. ’ Few or none of the con-

testants use the immemorial forked willow wand, although one man was seen wielding a steel joiner’s yardstick. “The most common detectors we use are the dowsing rod or the pendulum,” said Mr Danis. “Personally, I prefer this forked steel thing because I find it gives good accuracy.” Even as he spoke, the twin blades gave a swift succession of upward kicks and almost escaped his grasp. Since he was holding the blades by just his finger-tips, there was no visible way he could have been activating them deliberately. “We are really a kind of human radar or sonar depth-finder.” said Mr Danis. “The wave impulses we send out homes in. on the layer of water underground and the return waves move the dowsing rod.” ■ . ' ■

Mr Danis said that by counting the number of kicks and turns, the dowser could determine the depth at which the waterbed lay: roughly, one metre for each kick. ' “What we can’t judge with any accuracy is the amount of water down

there.” he said, “The flow in the water-bed is too variable for that.” Mr Danis said that dowsers make no claim to supernatural powers. He prefers to describe the ability to detect water lying deep underground as “a faculty,” a sixth sense basically similar to the other five. He first became aware that he had this faculty when he was a boy. One day he was out walking with his uncle, himself a practised dowser. “My uncle told me to take the rod and try,” said Mr Danis. “I did. and it worked the first time.” Dowsing, in Mr Danis’? view, is a faculty akin to spiritual healing. He himself admits being able to. cure headaches and rheumatism. What continues to puzzle him, however, is how water-divining really works. “Scientists should be working on the phenomenon to' find a rational explanation for it,” he said. Perhaps they have begun. A professor in charge of the department of parapsychology at Toulouse University turned up at Auch to watch the dowsers play their gifts.