Original headline:
Dry Spell Awakens Water Witches from the Graves
PHILIPPINES: In this country where water wars are being fought between tribes over vanishing water holes due to fast diminishing forests, farmers are asking help from the most unlikely sources—witches.
Nanay Selda Timora is a bent 72-year-old herbal practitioner. Throwing suspicious glances over several farmers hunched over her, she holds two guava sticks measuring three feet each, probing the dry earth. Hal-dragging her gaunt frame, she walks and probes for almost an hour across the rocky and arid soil that used to grow cabbages. In an instant, her hands tremble, her arms quiver and she shrieks saying, “Here, dig here!” The farmers dig for almost two hours and suddenly water spurts from the dry caked earth.
Nanay Selda, the water witch, has done it again.
How? It is no secret. Water witching has existed for hundreds of years all over the world.
The ‘Force’ is with Her
Nanay Selda is no necromancer, as water witches, water diviners or dowsers are ordinary people gifted with the art of finding water.
Fr. Herve Gardeu, a French Canadian missionary priest in Davao who popularized water witching in the city in the early 80s says, “Dowsing is the action of a person--called the dowser--using a rod, stick or other device--called a dowsing rod or stick or divining--to locate such things as underground water.”
“There’s nothing mysterious here, some have the gift, some don’t, some have learned it like Nanay Selda,” says Fr. Gardeu who does not only run a parish of 5,000 people but also looks for the water of the Davao Development Foundation through water witching.
Nanay Selda says she is guided by a “force” when she extends her arms using the guava branches. Her arms contort as the Y-shaped points of the guava twitch upon locating water.
Scientists Attempt to Explain
Various theories have been given as to what causes the rods to move: electromagnetic or other subtle geological forces, suggestion from others or from geophysical observations, ESP and other paranormal explanations.
Of more interest than why the rods move, however, is the issue of whether dowsing works. Obviously, many people believe it does. Dowsing and other forms of divination have been around for thousands of years. There are large societies of dowsers in America and Europe and dowsers practice their art every day in all parts of the world. There have even been scientists in recent years that have offered proof that dowsing works. There must be something to it, then, or so it seems.
Some of the strongest evidence for dowsing comes from Germany and the so-called "Scheunen" or "Barn" experiment. In 1987 and 1988, more than 500 dowsers participated in more than 10,000 double-blind tests set up by physicists in a barn near Munich. (Scheune is the German word for barn.) The researchers claim they empirically proved "a real dowsing phenomenon." Jim Enright of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography evaluated the data of the so-called "real dowsing phenomenon” and attributed it to chance.
Further evidence for water witching has been presented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) [the German Society for Technical Co-operation] sponsored by the German government. They claim, for example, that in some of their water dowsing efforts they had success rates above 80%, "results which, according to responsible experts, could not be reached by means of classical methods, except with disproportionate input." Of particular interest is a report by University of Munich physicist Hans-Dieter Betz, ‘Unconventional Water Detection: Field test of the Dowsing Technique in Dry Zones’ published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1995.
Betz ruled out chance and the use of landscape and geological features by dowsers as explanations for their success. He also ruled out "some unknown biological sensitivity to water." Betz thinks that there may be "subtle electromagnetic gradients" resulting from fissures and water flows that create changes in the electrical properties of rock and soil.
Water witches or dowsers, he thinks, somehow sense these gradients in a hypersensitive state. "I'm a scientist," says Betz, "and those are my best plausible scientific hypotheses at this point.... we have established that dowsing works, but have no idea how or why."
Which is exactly what Nanay Selda and her followers say to their critics who blame them of practicing occult and black magic. “Many things can’t be explained by science.”
Prof. William Paclin of the Ifugao State College of Agriculture and Forestry, a water witching believer says, “it is not important to determine the scientific merit of dowsing, what matters is it works. Need we question how the psychic Uri Geller bends spoons?”
Amen the farmers here say. “We need water, we go to Nanay Selda. Twenty-one farms are proof to that. Who is better than her, there is no one,” they say.
They still remember how in the neighboring Mountain Province, fifteen farmers died. It all started from fighting over ownership of a water source. The five tribes of Sadanga, Saclit, Dalican, Fedilisan and Betwagan fought it out in the mountains for weeks, breaking the stillness of the forests with the stoccato of M-16and AK-47 assault rifles. They stopped only when the military stepped in.
Believe in What You See
In finding water, Nanay Selda holds the guava branches by its two arms, with the main stem of the branch pointing to the sky. Then she begins to struggle as she approaches a water vein. Closer to the site, the stem of the branch begins to swing forward little by little, until directly above the vein. Then suddenly the branch forcefully transcribes a half arc and points to the ground. In the process, Nanay Selda’s arms go through minor contortions.
After she’s used the branches, one can see red welts on her palm, evidence of struggle with a force, which shows unusual strength in such small frail arms. When I asked how she did it, she snapped like a bitch warning her pups, “I don’t know so don’t ask me.”
One water expert and former regional water adviser of the World Health organization, Dr. Edwin Lee, had this to say when asked about water witching, “There is no empirical basis for water divining, yet it works. Water witches have not studied hydrogeology academically, but they know it intuitively.”
Such a response is likened to the use and effectiveness of acupuncture. Dr. Charles Cheng, noted medical researcher and director of the Baguio Chinese General Hospital and an acupuncturist, said when asked about water witching, “I’ve heard of them but I have not seen them work. But if they are effective, why should they be criticized. In acupuncture, we know it works but centuries of Chinese knowledge can’t explain why.”
Yet even as water witching groups have spread all over the world, the academically-trained skeptic will always be critical. The National Groundwater Association of the United States for instance scoffs at water divining and says, “The academically trained hydrogeologist is the best authority to find where water is.”
Perhaps. But to the growing number of farmers who believe in Nanay Selda and who live by the motto “we believe only what we see,” Nanay Selda is the best hydroegologist there is.
