With Hazel Wand & Twig

In backward U.S. country districts last week (and not-so-backward ones, too), "water witches" paced solemnly, holding forked twigs of peachwood, hazel, willow or witch-hazel, the butts pointed upward. Some muttered incantations; some prayed; some were intensely silent. At last the twig swung downward or spun around wildly.

On that spot, according to the ancient art of "divining," "dowsing" or "water-witching," the rural landowner should sink his well. There he could seek and certainly find water.

Some dowsers were undoubtedly sincere, accepting no fee and believing themselves to be agents of an unknown natural law or supernatural force. Others were small-time swindlers. Their hoary profession survived because, in the many parts of the U.S. level enough for farming, underground water was easy to find, at least in spring. But honest or crooked, the U.S. Geological Survey was against dowsers.

It had put together a fascinating booklet on the subject (Water-supply Paper 416; 15-c-) which told the history of the dowsers, beginning with Moses, who lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly (Numbers 20: 11). Few modern dowsers hoped to equal Moses, but some of them offered prizes, such as oilfields or mineral deposits, which Moses and his nomads never coveted.

"Divining" with rods or twigs or arrows goes back to earliest history. But "dowsing" in its modern form, using the forked stick, seems to have started in 16th-Century Germany. Even educated men like Melanchthon believed that the twigs of trees above mineral veins drooped downward, attracted by the deposit below. Miners in the Harz Mountains put this principle to hopeful use, searching for minerals with forked, ore-seeking twigs.

The practice spread to England when German miners were imported to Cornwall during the reign of good Queen Bess. Some religious authorities condemned it as fraud or dealing with the devil. Others gave it clerical approval. From England, it emigrated to the U.S., where it is still going strong, with most of the emphasis on water-finding. Modern, up-to-date dowsers often abandon the hallowed forked stick for an elaborate gadget pretending to use some scientific phenomenon, such as radioactivity or radar. That is dowsing just the same.

One mile across Washington, the Department of Agriculture was battling another perennial set of rural superstitions. Examples:

In the South, farmers were still planting root crops in the dark of the moon, and above-the-ground crops when the moon was full. This practice, probably as old as agriculture, was supposed to steer the plants' efforts in the right direction. Elsewhere, farmers still believed that a silver coin in the churn would make butter come faster; that a storm was brewing when pigs ran around with sticks in their mouths, or when cats and rats played together after sundown.

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