DIVINING INTERVENTION
With the water crisis reaching new depths and nighttime rationing in force, all taps are off – but could there be a miracle solution on the horizon?
CHILDREN playing kerb ball nearby stop to eye me suspiciously — and I don’t blame them. I look like a witch with her magic wand performing some sort of spell, a woman gone mad in the heat.
I’m grasping both ‘Y’ ends of a twiggy branch between my thumb and baby finger, with my palms facing upwards and am shuffling across the grass with my eyes closed, hovering my ‘wand’ over the sunburnt ground, while trying to keep the tension just right. It’s a bit like a wishbone challenge except I don’t want either end of the springy oak branch to snap.
To the untrained eye, or indeed a curtain twitcher looking out at me on this Tralee housing estate, I look like I’m holding a standard issue tree branch.
But savvier country and farming folk, in touch with the ancient ways, would recognise my simple wooden wand — usually fashioned using hazel, oak or willow branches — as a traditional ‘divining rod’.
‘Walk into a farmyard with one of these and they’ll know you’re a diviner, it’s a calling card to farmers, a bit like a doctor with a stethoscope,’ explains Joe Mullally, who’s giving me lessons today on what farmers all around the country would consider real magic — how to find untapped springs of gushing water beneath Ireland’s bone dry, scorched ground.
As Ireland endures its worst drought in decades, with no end in sight, diviner Joe’s phone is blowing up with calls and messages. One reads: ‘Can you divine for a well without doing a site visit? Short of water and getting a well borer in.’
Joe says: ‘He’s asking if I can divine remotely. I’ve had more calls than usual and the longer it goes on the more I’m getting. It’s people with their own supply in bungalows or farmers with water supplies where they’re using the mains but because of the restrictions, they want another source. I’ve had people with wells that are going up or down and want a secondary water stream.’
Suddenly both my thumbs and lower arms start to tingle, as if I’ve tipped off an electric fence. ‘You’re a natural,’ nods Joe, as his hands flutter in front of my face. ‘Just so the stick doesn’t fly up and clatter you — it happens,’ he explains.
A moment later, the rod end of the Y drops like a dead weight towards the ground.
I try to pull it back to the horizontal but it’s as if someone is yanking it downwards with a powerful magnet and I’m powerless to stop it.
‘Eureka!,’ says Joe. ‘You’ve divined water.’
But before I get too excited, or plan a career change, Joe bursts my bubble and reveals it’s not some hidden untapped spring I’ve discovered. He’s taken me to a spot near the home he shares with his wife Mary — also a healer and life coach — where a stream runs below ground, just beneath our feet, flowing directly under the exact spot where my wand dropped.
Dowsing or ‘divining’ is an ancient method of locating ground water or mineral deposits without scientific devices. As well as ‘Y’ wooden rods — the most traditional device — diviners use metal ‘L’ rods, which face forward like pistols and are bought as two metal rods or easily made by bending the wire of two coat hangers.
Joe explains it plainly. ‘In places where there’s water or mineral deposits, the geo-magnetic field of the earth alters and the divining rod picks up on that.’
He adds that sensitive diviners such as himself don’t need rods at all and can detect ground magnetic changes in their hands and muscles. ‘It’s an instinct in us to detect these anomalies — animals can find water but we don’t need to use this skill any more.’ Not until now, that is.
Joe is an unlikely diviner and angel whisperer, having trained in the eminently practical field of electrical engineering before discovering his divining and psychic abilities.
These days he also does angel readings, traditional healing and shamanism but remains a committed diviner and teaches the only course in Ireland on the subject at his retreat centre, Anam Spirit, in Blessington. It’s built on his old family farm, where he first picked up a divining rod aged 18, with no idea how it would change his life.
‘It seems very hocus pocus but it’s very practical — you can learn it in 15 minutes and eight out of ten people can do it,’ explains Joe.
‘Water divining is reacting to the physical anomaly in the ground, the magnetism. The magnetic field upsets your coordination and the rod amplifies the small movements so you can see it. It makes sense and for most of us it’s intuitive.’
Joe tells of his first encounter with divining and how an electrical engineer ended up talking to angels.
‘My dad wanted to find a well on the farm as we were working off a tank and it was a hill farm and the spring used to dry up. He called a local diviner in and he found us a new one.
‘Years later after I learned about it, I divined a spring and it’s still going to this day — it’s strong and we easily fill domestic supply of around 40 gallons an hour.’
‘I grew up around superstitions and relics on the farm and I went to Lourdes because of double glaucoma in my eyes when I was seven and the idea of miracles, I never forgot it,’
Suddenly, my thumbs begin to tingle
says Joe, of his move into working with angels and tarot cards.
These days a lot of his work involves divining for ‘geo-pathic’ stress.
‘If there are underground water lines flowing under a house it can cause ill health and drain energy — maybe it’s under the bed where you sleep, it could be 400ft down. I work with copper coil to neutralise the magnetic field.’
Of course, such claims can raise eyebrows and there are those who write off dowsing as bunk pseudoscience or medieval hocus pocus, and there’s no scientific evidence to prove it works. Yet Joe is kept busy with calls — and it’s not only desperate farmers, but even publicly listed water companies that are hedging their bets.
Last year, a number of British water firms confirmed some of their technical engineers used dowsing rods to detect leaks. But after media reports revealed their practices, they tried to distance themselves from the admissions lest they alarmed the public with talk they used ‘witchcraft’.
Which begs the question — has Irish Water been in touch yet?
Joe smiles: ‘No, I haven’t been contacted by Irish water companies and I don’t know if they use them but in Britain it’s common and the US army used rods to divine traps and mines in Vietnam — it’s all coming out now. There’s a lot about it on YouTube.
‘If they weren’t giving the results they wouldn’t be hired. If they were digging dry holes or diving for pipes that weren’t there they wouldn’t be kept on. But dowsers means they’re not wasting money digging 20 drains to find one line.
‘The other alternative is to get in an expensive machine that goes along ground and detects pipes but only if it’s close to the surface — if it’s further down you can’t detect it so you’ve to keep digging holes until you get lucky.
‘Commercially, I’ve had a few golf courses and also farmers who are trying to stop water. They’ve water coming out on golf courses or some drains aren’t working so I find the source and tell them where to put in drains.’
He adds: ‘Scepticism is good — as long as it’s not closed-minded. What you’re saying is true, one set of people won’t believe it, but with others, you’re preaching to the converted.’
The earliest accounts of dowsing appeared in a German thesis on mining by writer Georgius Agricola, listing its use to find metal ore deposits, but not water.
Well-known British science writer Philip Ball has said: ‘Let’s be clear — dowsing doesn’t work. There is no known influence in physics that would account for how buried water would move metal rods.’
He points to experiments in Germany in the 1980s saying that the dowsers tested weren’t locating water at levels better than random chance. So how does Joe answer the naysayers dubbing dowsing as unreliable?
‘To say divining doesn’t work scientifically is nonsense and what’s funny is most people who work as diviners are engineers,’ he tuts. ‘In my background in electrical engineering, I’ve met so many technical people into these things. It works but they say it can’t be proven as in science it has to be repeated under controlled circumstance and always give us the same result to be science.’
Now it’s Joe’s turn to give me a history lesson.
‘In the Middle Ages divining was treated as top secret technology by governments,’ he says. ‘Then the main thing was the iron ore and copper and the diviners found those in mainland Europe — Holland, France and Germany had big mines so Britain ended up going after the divining technology and found huge deposits.
‘Anything seen to be holistic, people are afraid to be seen to be endorsing them — even doctors and scientists who believe it. They know they’re opening themselves to ridicule.’
I’ll admit to arriving as a sceptic myself — as I was the last time I wandered into this neck of the woods.Earlier this year, I came to Kerry on a fairy-hunting mission after TD Michael Healy-Rae told a gobsmacked Dáil the little people were turfing up chunks of road, in petty acts of sweet revenge on councils who’d disturbed fairy rings.
I didn’t find any fairies then but today there’s no denying it — the wand in my hand certainly seems to be imbued with ‘magical’ powers. And Joe is pretty convincing, although I do put my suspicions to him that he might have placed magnets in the rod or performed some other snake oil salesman-like stunt to win me over.
He laughs and tells me I can take my rod home.
So how is he responding to people ringing him desperate for water in the drought?
‘I’ve found hundreds of wells, that’s no bother — if they bore where you ask them to bore, there will be water there,’ he explains, adding how divining a water source is one thing but getting it up and running is a painstaking and pricey process that might not be worthwhile.
‘Often the spots can be awkward where you can’t bring in an articulated lorry to set up a well rig and bore. It could be a few thousand and over the long term it may be good but the short term it mightn’t be and sometimes it’s just not worth it. My advice would be if there’s a local well borer with a good reputation, they’d be good to tell people if they should call in a diviner.’
As for the chap who texted him to ask whether he could find a well without a site visit, he reveals: ‘I can do that, yes. I can divine remotely.
‘I use a pendulum and look at the map although it wouldn’t be accurate enough for a well borer to work from.
‘But that line of work, it’s different and more about intuition and psychic abilities.’
He laughs: ‘Yes, for some people, that is a bit far out — but not for those of us in the work...’
‘Eight out of ten people can do it’