Rhabdomancy

Rhabdomancy is a type of divination by means of any rod, wand, staff, stick, arrow, or the like.

Specifically it has been used to describe various methods of divination, such as (a) setting staffs on end and watching where they fall, to divine the direction one should travel, or to find answers to certain questions, (b) divination by arrows (which have wooden shafts) - otherwise known as belomancy and (c) using a Y-shaped tree branch to locate the presence of underground minerals, metals, ores or water sources - in other words dowsing.

In the dowsing sense, traditionally the branch was taken from a hazel tree, a tree which has long had mystic significance - the rods of Moses and Aaron were of hazel, and Apollo gave Mercury a hazel rod. However, any other sort of appropriately shaped branch could be used, and in modern times two separate pieces of wire are often substituted. The method basically involved holding the divining-rod before oneself and wandering over the land, when above the thing sought for the rod moves involuntarily in some manner. Rhabdomancy of this type was in extensive use from the 16th century in Germany for discovering ores. Sebastian Münster's "Cosmographia universalis", 1544, and Georg Agricola's "De Re metallica", 1546, provide early descriptions of this art. Its use for the discovery of subterranean water, hidden treasure, thieves, etc., does not seem to be recorded before the seventeenth century. In modern occultism this type of rhabdomancy is generally explained as a form of radiesthesia.

Rhabdomancy has been used in reference to a number of Biblical verses. Hosea iv.12 reads "Populus meus in ligno suo interrogavit et baculus ejus annuntiavit ei" ("My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them").Ezekial 21.21 is thought to describe belomancy. Numbers 17 has also been ascribed to rhabdomancy.

The word first appears in English in the mid-17th century (used in Thomas Browne's "Pseudoxia Epidemica", 1646), where it is an adaptation of Late Latin "rhabdomantia", from a presumed (unrecorded) ancient Greek "*rhabdomanteia", from the ancient Greek "rhabdos" a rod. Liddell & Scott are "dubious" about the word's existence in Classical Greek, though the word is well attested in Patristic Greek. Note that none of the divinatory practices denoted by "rhabdomancy" in English are documented from ancient Greece sources.

From Kalevala, translated from the Finnish by Aili Kolehmainen Johnson (1950): "In Runo 49, Vaiamoinen (ncint bard-hero of Kalevala)is described by the English translator, W.F. Kirby, as using rhabdomancy, or divination by rods, to learn where the sun and moon are hidden. It seems more likely that the instrument of divination was a kind of sieve-shaped pictured bowl with a chip placed within it and rattled about while the charms words were spoken. Uno Holmberg's explanation of the drum used by Lapland shamans appears to bear out this assertion, for Holmberg states that the 'drum' was used in the manner described, even by the layman for minor ceremonies such as the finding of stolen objects. This form of divination is also known to Finns of Upper Michigan."