Twinn
04/06 A Line in the Sand
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Dowsing at the Solar Eclipse - March 2006
Woomera Australia
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The desert is not an obvious choice of a place for a day’s dowsing - but there we were. Four years after the eclipse of the sun in the Australian Outback, my wife Ros and I were back on the endless beach, this time 300 miles out into the Libyan Sahara.
For a country which is usually a bit doubtful about the public use of point-and-shoot cameras - let alone motor driven telescopes that take a pin-point perfect picture of a star zillions of light years away - our raggle-taggle entourage of serious scientists and seriously well-equipped sight-seers must have been something of a culture shock.
Perhaps even more surreal was the arrival of the Tavistock Two. Amongst the 21 coach loads of astronomers, resplendent with their thousands of pounds worth of state of the art photographic equipment, we must present a strange image – with just two halves of a coat hanger and a doily ‘borrowed’ from the ship’s restaurant to our names. The Americans must have had every stereotype of the eccentric Englishman confirmed in spades. In the chaos of the final few minutes before the start of the eclipse – and having spent the last 7 hours on an aging Egyptian tour bus with cutting-edge air conditioning, I didn’t even get around to taking off my jumper! Of course, to the dowser, this is just de rigueur at a time when reality bends a bit.
The point of all this time, money and effort was to try again to measure the effect of a total eclipse on the energy of the earth. Our non-dowsing travelling companions intuitively, and very helpfully, spread out our borrowed blanket smack onto an earth energy line (makes me wonder why I bother with the coat hangers at all). I marked the line in the sand at its centre, as surreptitiously as possible, and then marked the edges of that line at rest – about 15 paces across. During the event, local lads scuffed their newly purchased Nike’s through most of it, but hey, they weren’t to know a serious scientific experiment was underway.
As first contact was made (when the shadow of the disc of the moon starts to be projected onto the backcloth of the sun) little happened to the energy line. Only when the eclipse was well advanced, with the three celestial bodies coming increasingly into alignment, did any serious effect manifest itself. As the light level started to fade, the shadows sharpened and the light quality changed eerily, the line started to narrow – at first just a pace every couple of minutes, then more quickly. In the sheer excitement and euphoria of the event it is difficult (no, quite impossible) to undertake this experiment in a clinical manner, but I did have enough time to confirm the collapse of the line from 15 paces - to a single strand with no apparent width.
In 2002, we had had just 28 seconds to do the final important bit, but spent most of it standing with tears running down our faces and jaws wide open, saying ‘wow’. This time there was a generous 4 minutes and 3 seconds, and we were a bit more prepared (if you ever can, or should be) for the sheer glory of the aerial tableau.
In addition to the shrinking line, I had time to check if that energy was re-emerging elsewhere. This seemed to be the case, with a ‘new’ energy line super-imposed on the previous one, a couple of paces wider than the original, at a longer wavelength and with reversed polarity.
This event was also memorable - for eclipse veterans and virgins alike - in that there was a rare appearance of ‘shadow bands’ – waves of interference that occasionally manifest themselves at the start and the end of totality and appear like a rippling ghostly mirage of a gentle incoming tide – without the water. For the dowser, such energy interference is a gift, in that it is another piece of practical evidence for the impact of macro-astronomical phenomena on earth-bound subtle energy patterns.
I had some reservations about dowsing at all in a country with a different view of the divine, but I need not have worried. Apparently, the prophet Mohammed also witnessed a full eclipse and was very impressed by it. Consequently, there were groups of local Muslims celebrating the event alongside us with prayers and music. The dowsing duo therefore occupied just one point on the spectrum of inter-action.
One of our travelling companions, who had never seen a total eclipse before, exclaimed (unprompted and without her long-distance specs) that the full eclipse looked like a ‘Star of David’ pattern. Solar activity differs at every eclipse - and with it the energy rays around the darkened disc. It is therefore not too surprising that in the epochs before Astronomy, people who had the cosmic spectacle thrust upon them, unannounced - and had been half blinded by the run up to totality - might find such an event thoroughly spiritual. The more subtle impact of the changing earth energy would compound this experience and leave the observer, who would never see it again in their lifetime, feeling that they had been given some form of divine sign. Even in our hard-edged social and scientific environment, at a time of impending global climate change, this warning from history has something of a chilling ring.
Amongst other phenomena to be observed during an eclipse are the remarkable patterns of light that can be displayed though any object with a small hole in it – projecting the image, or multiple images, of the eclipsing sun onto any flat light surface, such as the sand. This not only prevents potential damage to the eyes, but is a fascinating piece of natural art in itself. A pin-hole camera is the normal way of carrying out this experiment, but the humble colander is the preferred astronomical implement of choice (if you can be bothered to cart one all the way from your kitchen to Benghazi - and then explain to the understandably bemused customs official why you have two bits of bent wire and a bean-strainer in your baggage). A doily and a straw sun hat work almost as well – and are much lighter to carry.
For anyone with an interest in Earth Energies and the impact of geology on dowsing, an eclipse is ‘something to do before you die’. We feel very privileged to have seen it twice. We were amongst the millions who were so disappointed to have missed out at the 1999 event in the UK, that we set off to find the next one available – and we’re still travelling. The hard-core eclipse-chasing addicts were waving farewell to their occasional companions at the baggage reclaim with a cheery ‘see you in the Gobi in 2009!’ For them, it was just a statement of fact.
Many thanks indeed to Brian McGee and the staff of Explorers for getting us to the site at all, to all those in Libya who worked so hard to put the facilities in place to make it happen for us - and to Reed & Linda for sharing our precious experience and for lending us their culinary equipment and headgear.
Nigel Twinn Tamar Dowsers - April 2006