Tom Graves / Tetradian

The headline article in The Independent caught my attention this morning: ‘Head of bomb detector company arrested in fraud investigation‘. “This is an act of terrible betrayal”, wrote the Independent’s defence  journalist Kim Sengupta in a parallel piece – clearly an accurate comment given that the detectors in question failed to detect literally tons of explosives that were used to kill and maim hundreds in Iraq in a single suicide-bomb event, and all too many others like it.

As I read the article, my heart sank still further – though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the ‘bomb-detector’ has proved to be unreliable: there are huge problems on that score, without doubt. But to me the ‘betrayal’ turns out to be much more complex than it seems on the surface – because despite the ‘military-hardware’ packaging of the device in question, and its impressive-looking dials and cables and the rest, the underlying technology of the ‘bomb detector’ is a plain old ordinary everyday dowsing-rod.

Dowsing has been a serious interest of mine for several decades: over the years I’ve written what are now some of the best-known books on dowsing, in fact. Hence – unlike many of the critics – I do have some solid understanding of what’s going on in this case. And because of that longstanding background in the field, I’ll freely admit that I have few fundamental doubts about the use of dowsing in this context, not least because there’s plenty of long-documented, long-proven military practice in dowsing for land-mines and the like (contact the British Society of Dowsers for case-studies in Aden, for example, or the American Society of Dowsers for US use in Vietnam).  Like most people, I would much prefer a predictable and reliable machine to do the job, if there’s one available and it actually does work – which many don’t. But when lives are on the line and you don’t have anything else, a dowsing-rod in experienced hands can work wonders: so at least that part of this sad, messy story is no fraud. Yet that point about ‘experienced hands’ is extremely important: in unskilled hands a dowsing-rod can easily be worse than useless – as those on the receiving-end of those undetected explosives would have discovered to their cost…

(This is getting very long: better put a ‘Read more… link in here.)

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(Following up on the furore from my previous post – somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but with a serious point.)

After Dave Snowden started accusing everyone – especially me – of ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘psychobabble’ – I began to worry. What if he’s right? What if everything I do is just pseudoscience, caught up in a cult?

(Oops – another long one: better split it here with a ‘Read more…’ link)

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It started, as these things so often do, with a Tweet on Twitter.

(This has turned out to be an enormously long post – I’d better put a ‘Read more…’ link in here before continuing.)

Read more…

It’s both saddening and sobering to reach the age where close friends and colleagues start appearing in the Obituary columns in the national newspapers…

A couple of years ago it was Mike Mepham, who worked with me for some years in the Wordsmiths days, back in the mid-1980s, and went on to fame amongst puzzle-fans as the person who brought the Sudoku craze to Britain. This time it’s a perhaps more famous friend, John Michell (see the obituary in the London newspaper The Independent).

The rather gushing obituary concentrates on his writings, and indeed it was his The View Over Atlantis – the ‘rather peculiar book’ that my parents brought home from a Bristol bookshop in 1969 – that really started me on my own earth-mysteries researches, building on previous schooldays-experiments with Tom Lethbridge’s work on dowsing. I’ll admit, though, that I found almost all his later work impenetrable to the point of incredulity – with the exception of a brilliantly acerbic little poem written in the aftermath of the unprovoked assault by police (the Battle of the Beanfield) at Stonehenge in 1985:

…but here’s the subtle dodge:
Stonehenge has now been proved to be / an old Masonic Lodge
…[so] they’re not just simple coppers / spoiling other people’s fun
they’re members of the Brotherhood / out worshipping the sun

But to me it wasn’t the writings that that meant so much: it was the man. One who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses – literally so. A cultured Etonian voice; a sculptured, elf-like face; a bird-like manner, quick, sharp, like a heron; an intense scholar’s intelligence balanced by bright wit and a warm, genuine inclusiveness – I was stunned when, at a book-launch of mine a few years back, he told me that he regarded me as one of his peers, because to me he had no real equal either then or now. An eccentric in the best sense of that term: one who stands aside from the usual centre, and applies that leverage to change the world.

I last met him a year ago, at the Megalithomania gathering in Glastonbury. (Reading the Megalithomania site, I’ve just realised I’m a bit late in this – John died almost a month ago, 24th April. His obit was in The Independent only yesterday, though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.) He’d always looked older than his age – back in the 60s and 70s he looked to be in his sixties at least, though I now realise he must then only have been in his mid-forties – but he was definitely looking old by then, yet still active, engaging, aware, alert to all the subtle nuances of ideas.

Yes, and a real ‘character’ too. The obit coyly states that he “joined the civil service as a Russian interpreter”, but it was more likely the intelligence-service, either MI5 or MI6: in other words, he was, bluntly, a spy – part of the same Cambridge clique that produced the double-agent Kim Philby. Yet though he may have come from the Establishment, he was certainly not of it: there is a happily apocryphal tale of him in one of his post-Cold War visits to Moscow, chatting to the security-guards at Vnukovno airport whilst rolling up a joint literally under their noses, lighting up and waving to them as he wandered out of the door surrounded by a cloud of that so-characteristic aroma. It undoubtedly never occurred to him to be concerned about its extreme illegality, and they probably never had a chance to notice: like the best of anarchists, he harmed no-one, yet he made up his own rules everywhere he went.

Oddly, I know almost nothing about his earlier life beyond his writings and research. The Independent obituary mentions his time at university and in the Royal Navy, but no mention of parents or childhood. In a very literal sense, he seems to have come from nowhere: it certainly felt like that when, as an awed, angst-ridden eighteen-year-old, I first met him in Glastonbury almost forty years ago.

Yet there’s a quote from him in the Independent obit that seems to sum up almost perfectly his life and his work:

The important discoveries about the past have been made not so much through the present refined techniques of treasure-hunting and grave-robbery, but through the intuition of those whose faith in poetry led them to scientific truth.

Life as poetry: that was John Michell. Like so many others, my own life has been enriched by his gifts and his presence: so my thanks, and fare you well.

Another new book completed.

Disciplines of Dowsing went off to press this afternoon – hooray!

The usual info-piece and book-blurb are already up on the Tetradian Books website; likewise the PDF e-book, which is now available for free download (though note that it’s a lot larger file than the others, weighing in at more than 2Mb). Physical books should become available on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and so on in a couple of weeks.

As for its purpose and so on, see my previous ‘Flat-out writing‘ post. The aim was to get it ready in time for the British Society of Dowsers’ conference at Cirencester on the weekend after next, and it looks like we’ll just make it.

More later, when I’ve had a chance to rest up a bit – this has been a solid slog for a fair few weeks. A lot to catch up on, too. Ah well… still feels like it’s been worth the effort, though.

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book The Dowser’s Workbook (also known as Discover Dowsing). The aim is that it’ll come out, together with Pendulum Dowsing, as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Again, as with Pendulum, it’s ready to go once the proof-copy comes back, so ready to launch together with Pendulum and the Grey House ’30th Anniversary Edition’ of Needles at my presentation at Megalithomania.
Turns out to be almost the same size as Pendulum – 132 pages rather than 128 – so will aim also retail at £9.95 inc. P&P. But again, should it go out at £8.95 instead? Comments / suggestions, anyone?

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book Elements of Pendulum Dowsing, to go out as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Editing and layout and the like are all complete; I’m just waiting on a proof-copy before sending it to press.

Still on track to launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in mid-May.

Aim is to retail at £9.95 inc. P&P – perhaps a little high, for 128 pages, but hey, it is a classic, and (though I say it myself) still one of the best books out there… But should it go out at £8.95 instead? (It’s a POD book, so I can’t afford to do it for less – apologies! – though there will also be an e-book version soon.) Comments / suggestions, anyone?

Graeme Talboys at Grey House In The Woods tells me that his new ’30th Anniversary Edition’ of Needles of Stone has just gone off to press.

The new edition has two new chapters:

• Looking back – a chapter-by-chapter review of changes (good, bad and sometimes outright ugly) in the earth-mysteries scene over the past three decades
• Looking forward – a review of some issues such as ‘newage’ and ‘golden-age’ myths that are crippling current research in the earth-mysteries field, and suggestions about which aspects of the domain seem most likely to yield worthwhile results in the next few decades

It’ll retail at £12.95. Order direct from Grey House via their website at www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/nest.htm – or pick up a copy at the launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in May.

Support Your Local Friendly Earth-Mysteries Theorist – Buy Now!!

Delighted to say that a new book-format edition of my 1986 monograph “Inventing Reality: towards a magical technology” has just been released.

It’s available from Grey House – GBP7.95, http://www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/inre.htm

Publisher info is as follows:

Grey House in the Woods
PO Box 8211, Girvan, Ayrshire, KA26 0WA, Scotland
www.greyhouseinthewoods.org

Many thanks to Graeme Talboys, who’s struggled through the joys of system-crashes and many other trials and tribulations to get this out. (I don’t think words can express how much I admire his persistence in this – I feel greatly honoured that he’s worked so hard on this project, so please buy the book to thank him for me!)

This new edition extends the 1996 online edition with a new chapter, ‘Round The Bend’, which uses the twists and turns of the traditional labyrinth to describe the process of learning new skills. Beyond that I have made only a few minor edits, to correct date references and the like, and the two quadrant diagrams in Chapter 3 have been redrawn (the original 1986 printed book, for reasons which were never explained, had contained the rough drawings rather than the finished artwork provided). Otherwise the text is much the same as the 1986 original.

Enjoy?