Water Witching: Ancient Art or Pseudoscience?

[Grahame]

Water Witching: Ancient Art or Pseudoscience?
If you were lost in a desert, what is the one indispensable object you should have with you? Some may answer the obvious and say a canteen. Others may say a compass. Still others may opine that you must have a multi-tool. Then there may be a few people who say you must have a branch shaped like the letter Y.

Those who would provide such unorthodox advice may be members of the American Society of Dowsers. These people claim that using tools and techniques more ancient than antiquity can locate things beneath the earth. They are most well-known for allegedly locating water through a practice called dowsing — or water witching.

Scholars have derided water witching as a pseudoscience, while those who practice it and many who hire water witches believe it to be an ancient art — both venerable and indispensable. The truth is that water witching is both an ancient art and pseudoscience. Let's find out why.

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