Twinn
Eclipsed on Anaa
​
It was always going to be a strange sort of week. It got off to a predictably unpredictable start, with the celebration of our 35th Wedding Anniversary in the all-but-empty bar of the Comfort Hotel at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport - empty of customers, that is, at getting on for midnight, but in the company of a large group of schoolchildren from Scotland. Had it not been for the inconvenient timing of a total solar eclipse, it could have been so much more romantic.
Those who have followed our eclipse dowsing adventures over the years will be familiar with the scenario. Unashamedly low-tech dowsing in unavoidably exotic and eccentric locations, delivering fascinating results.
In a sound-bite summary, what we have found is that during solar eclipses common-or-garden earth energy lines seem to disappear, water lines expand a little and lines of consciousness seem to be unaffected.
The BSD’s scientific stalwart, Jim Lyons, has explained that the earth energy lines don’t disappear as such, but describe a wave motion; leaving the static observer with the sense that a line progressively narrows during the planetary alignment, until it appears to have no width at all – and then expands back to it’s previous width. Jim told me that I could chase the wave down the road - or along the beach in this case, if I had had the space - but more of this later.
So it was, that in the company of some of the UK’s leading amateur celestial observers, together with professional astronomers Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, we found ourselves on the beach of the coral atoll of Anaa in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia. Believe me, this is a real place, but you will need a very large-scale map of the empty blue bit of the globe to find it. Anaa is home to about 600 people; its highest point is just 4 metres above sea level and in 1983 every home on the island was destroyed by a cyclone, leaving just the island’s catholic church standing. It is a beautiful, but vulnerable, place - right on the frontline of the climate change debate.
Having had several goes at dowsing energy lines at previous events, this time we decided to widen the approach to examine the impact of an eclipse on the pictograms and manifestations discovered by the late Hamish Miller. These phenomena are described in both Hamish’s own work - and also in my recent book about his life and work, A Life Divined. In a nutshell, manifestations are dowsable patterns that occur at the junction of certain energy lines, while the pictograms are icons and symbols in the ‘ether’, which seem to occur randomly - and, so far, have denied any logical, or illogical, explanation.
When we realised we were heading for our first beach eclipse, we equipped ourselves, in true British style, with a supply of sawn-off plant stakes for dowsing and a large bundle of lollipop sticks to map out the patterns. It has always bemused the astronomical fraternity that while they are setting up thousands of pounds worth of state-of-the-art optical equipment, there are two westcountry janners marching up and down the observation site with bits of bent wire, looking more like they have just escaped from some sort of institution. Fortunately, both they and we are far too busy in the pre-event phase to discuss the quintessential weirdness of the ritual - and when it’s all over everyone is too awash with spent emotion and exhausted euphoria.
What we hadn’t bargained for was that while we were indeed on a beach, there was no sand; just piles of pebbles and lumps of dead coral of various sizes. Lollipop sticks in mounds of rock? – well, it sort of worked.
Quite frankly, when the force is with you it doesn’t seem to matter. I found an energy line, right where we were left a gap between the photographers. I was initially confused to find two overlapping energy lines, which took a bit of disentangling - but I concentrated on just one of them and it proved to be a good yardstick to consider the results of this event against previous eclipses. Just a couple of paces away my wife, Ros, found a trademark Miller manifestation. It wasn’t quite a labyrinth shape, but it made a distinctive pattern - and not one that I had seen in any of Hamish’s work. For good measure, I found a multi-petalled pictogram just a few paces further away. We mapped them out with our scientific spatulas, as best we could, and waited with the UK’s finest, as the clouds drifted across the sky. The concept of the ‘desert island’ is something of a misnomer. Pacific Islands get a lot of rain, but have next to no soil to retain it. In fact, just about the only living things that thrive in this marginal ecology are banana and coconut palms.
In the end, we saw the first contact - when the dragon takes the first bite out of the solar disc - and also the whole of totality, so the optical observers were able to capture the most important parts of the performance. There was, however, a lot of relieved sighing in the post mortem that the clouds had broken at just the right times. Other observation sites were less fortunate. For the dowsing duo, it was business as usual. Geological and planetary energy are unaffected by atmospheric turbulence and, despite the incongruous dowsing platform, we were able to carry out our experiments effectively. However, there is very little tidal range in this part of the world and consequently the beach is a rather shallow strand - and certainly much too narrow, uneven and crowded to enable me to run after an energy wave.
The standard energy line collapsed in spectacular but predictable fashion, much as we had experienced at other eclipses, so we knew we were on solid scientific ground. The manifestation reacted directly to the planetary alignment. It appeared to change at much the same pace as the reduction in the width of the control line, accelerating in the last few minutes prior to totality. In the chaos of the short period of dowsing during totality, and the overwhelming spirituality of the experience even for a seasoned eclipse chaser, it was impossible to be certain how much the manifestation had changed shape. However, from what I could measure, and Ros could chart, it looked as if it had developed into a more complex pattern, and that it had expanded significantly - much more than one might have had expected - from approximately 4 paces across to about 36.
Although there was a debate between the two of us about the impact of the planetary movements on the pictogram, I concluded that it was essentially unaffected. It seems a long way to go to find this out, but it’s actually a very important finding. The manifestation, being an earth energy phenomenon, reacted to the pull of the planets, but the pictogram didn’t. This seems to imply that pictograms may not produced by the interference patterns of physical energy, as had previously been postulated - and may well be akin to lines of consciousness. This, in turn, opens a whole new field of research, which justifies the cost, effort and carbon expended in going to the other side of the world - well, that’s what I’m telling myself now.
Many thanks indeed to the kind and genuine people of Anaa, who opened their homes and their hearts to an inundation of total strangers - and they don’t come much stranger than us.
Nigel Twinn
Tamar Dowsers
July 2010
