Pendulums
Wow. Not a single comment about X-Ray vison… I guess we can leave that subject out of the Skeptologist’s bag of tricks. No problem. I’ve got a million of ‘em. …Well, maybe not a million. How about that old stand by: the pendulum?I’m sure most readers have seen or heard of these silly things. They can be made easily at home using an object like a ring or washer tied to the end of a piece of string or you can toddle down to your local psychic emporium and pay upwards of fifty bucks for a fancy newage version. Whether it’s made of Lallique crystal or a cat turd, both work the same way. Known variously as “The Sex Detector” or “Lie Detector” and other names and sold by the thousands for “dowsing” or finding hidden sources of water or whatever you can convince yourself you are going to find, I never leave home without one.
I have several. One is an expensive little bauble that is solid brass with a top that screws off to reveal a marble-sized cavity. I was told by the seller that this particular model can be used to find oil by putting some oil in the cavity or gold if I put gold into it, etc. Chances are if I had a piece of gold that big in the first place, I would’t need to buy a pendulum to find more, but you get the idea. Another one I carry with me is just a smooth beach pebble with a hole through it for a rough string to pass through. That one is for the more “earthy” types I may encounter. Then I have another one that is a small carved ivory skull from Tibet that is very popular with the Goth crowd. Basically, there’s a pendulum for every taste in my bag of tricks. In the realm of psychic entertainment, one has to be versatile.
There are supposedly solid scientific aspects to this little gem in the mentalist’s arsenal. My understanding from the books I have read (some admittedly nutty) is that the pendulum (or pendulum power if you prefer ) works off “ideomotor responses” or tiny involuntary muscle responses so small they cannot be seen, but are nonetheless true “vibrations” coming from the brain/mind/subconscious. Yes, I know. It sounds crazy – but it works. Or at least it can work marvelously with the proper techniques of verbal coaxing or deception. What the pendulum really uses is a very strong dose of suggestion on the part of the operator or whomever is doing the convincing. The “sitter” or “client” as they are called in the psychic business is set up in a brief “test” to deduce from his or her reactions while holding the pendulum and asking (as if it was some enitity outside his or her self) yes and no questions. It all depends on whether the object tied to the end of the string or chain swings in a circle or in a straight back and forth line. If it goes in a circle it’s usually a “no” answer and if it swings back and forth in a straight line, it’s a yes answer. It’s simple to suggest this to a gullible sitter. Remember that the sitter is usually sitting there because they are a believer to some degree and thay want things to work. After the “test” procedure is finished, both parties in the experiment know what is a yes and what is no answer for the particular personality who has been tesetd. Sometimes with some people these can be reversed, but there’s basically only two “outs.” Eventually even the most stubborn sitter will swing one way or another.
Now here’s the fun part: The sitter can now answer their own questions simply by thinking about them. That’s right, they don’t even have to ask their question out loud. What might have started out as a casual psychic reading gets transformed into a little bit of psyho-drama inside the sitter’s head. This “phenomena” can be truly amazing with some people and I have seen mentalists wring a whole act out of a single susceptible audience member. Chalk it up to the same “energies” released through table-turning, muscle reading (how Kreskin used to find his hidden pay check), strength resisters, magnetic ladies, Quija boards – and even modern day lie detector machines.
In the case of psychics, science can be once again turned into magic in the right or wrong hands depending on how you look at it. I have seen well-known psychics totally convince people their spirit guides worked through pendulums. In spite of the cons and scams, there are some real world benefits of pendulum power for the enterprising medium or psychic entertainer:
I carry pendulums whenever I do any sort or readings because on more occasions than I would like to admit, the pendulum and the carefully worded verbal suggetions that went with it saved me from the embarassing reality of having to answer sensitive questions I wouldn’t dare touch otherwise. Imagine being cornered with questions like: “Is my husband faithful,” or “Can I trust my lawyer?” or “Do I have cancer?” I don’t take legal or medical questions, but when things are going smoothly and I have been accurate with what I have “read” in a person, these kinds of awkward questions can become an uncomfortable trap and every psychic worth their salt needs to know how to delicately extricate themselves from such a predicament. It’s inevitable for questions like these to come up and the pendulum allows me to side-step them without a hitch.
In most of these cases the sitter already knows the answer to their question but doesn’t want to admit the truth to themselves. The truth is usually locked in their subconscious or laying dormant quite near the surface of their waking thoughts. They may be in deep denial or just looking for someone else to lean on or validate what they already know the answer to. When this happens, I defer to my trusty pendulum. They never lie since I have aken the time to test the sitter and soon we both know what is a yes answer and what is a no answer for them. When they ask the pendulum their deepest darkest secrets, they are basically talking to themselves. I love that! I get off the hook, but still get the credit for psychically “empowering” them. They go away happy (hopefully) and the whole procedure looks awesome to the onlookers who see something apparently very serious (well, it is to the sitter anyway) going on. As a tool to answer deeper questions in a troubled sitter’s mind, pendulums can be quite helpful. Put me down as a skeptic but watch out for the real stuff when it happens…
What do you think? Can you handle the truth? Of course I’m available to help you unleash the awesome powers of your mind.
My favorite episode dealing with pendulums was seeing a lady at the local health food store diligently and with devoted ritualistic purpose waving her crystal pendulum over an array of chicken breasts laid out on the butcher’s counter, trying earnstly to determine which one of the lot was meant for her dinner. The look on the butcher’s face was priceless.
This are the sorts of “magickal” issues I hope we will one day examine, look at and laugh together about on The Skeptologists.
I thought this was going to be about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and The Pendulum…
Oh well.
To be honest I get a little freaked out whenever I meet a psychic or the like. I have to constantly remind myself it’s just a trick and to look for the natural explanation. It can take a while (a long while) to I get it so I usually don’t berate believers to much.
But this is just absurd. It’s the same thing high school girls do in front of their mirrors, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s just my sister.
Don’t take a lack of comments to indicate a lack of interest. Some posts (like the one about X-ray vision) are so thorough that many readers have nothing to add.
I’ve tried this a few times (with a pendant and chain I happened to be wearing!). The weird thing about dowsing is how eerie it feels even when you _know_ why it’s moving. One area where it’s easy to see how people get suckered into believing something supernatural is going on.
I’d love to have seen the woman dowsing chicken breasts…. and the butcher’s face – what a great image!
Though there’s a more unpleasant side – my ex-boyfriend once dowsed my chakras and on the basis of the moving pendulum told me all sorts of things that were apparently wrong with me psychologically. What people are prepared to believe…
Meant to say… I tried it as a sceptic because I was getting annoyed with new-agers saying “you can’t know because you haven’t tried it”!
When I was in graduate school, my best friend insisted that microwaves were destructive to food nutrition (which may or may not be true), and the way she knows this is if you bake an apple in the oven and bake another apple in the microwave, and swing a pendulum over each one, the pendulum swings differently.
I told her she was probably just, you know, swinging the pendulum differently, and that to test to see if there was any correlation between the way the pendulum swings and how the apple was cooked you’d need to have a dozen or so apples, half of which are baked and half are microwaved, and where the pendulum-swinger doesn’t know which is which.
She didn’t like that answer.
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. So what if I prefer Ella to stones and string? I’m a rationalist with a soul.
Nearly forgot. Fluffy, none of them ever do. Some people like to be “odd” in a search for identity. Common sense is their hated enemy.
Feel sorry for them and help them get their feet on more solid ground, if they’re willing. Otherwise, just hope they grow up a bit.
I sort of zeroed in on the answer, or truth, being “locked in their subconscious” and “laying dormant” statements. Is there really such a thing? Personal experience says not, but perhaps I don’t hang around the right sort of people. My experience is that if one is considering a question, they are actively thinking about the answer, looking for and evaluating data. Isn’t it wrong to give them random data?
I agree many people may want confirmation, but the fact they are asking the question means they have suspicions regarding the topic, but that does not necessarily mean they know the answer. It seems vile to leave the possible outcome of a marriage hanging on what may be nothing more than an unfounded suspicion on the subject’s part.
It seems particularly cruel in the case of “Do I have cancer?” to even rely on a pendulum instead of saying something along the lines of “check with your doctor”. Actually, for all the sample questions I would suggest the proper answer is “it is not within the power of the pendulum to give you the answer”, as anything else seems dishonest and possibly harmful, especially if the subject believes in “power” and the practitioner knows it’s bullsh*t.
In fact, this whole post seems advice on how to fool deluded people, some of which may be in a fragile mental or emotional state. But that’s just me; perhaps many find it quite amusing, and they can’t wait to try it on what are purported to be their loved ones.
> She didn’t like that answer.
I have a co-worker who’s absolutely convinced that one of the inhabitants of her home is a mischievous ghost named Emily, who likes to hide things and play pranks with electrical equipment (unplugging alarm clocks and the like). When I started to point out more mundane explanations for many of Emily’s pranks, I was accused of taking ‘all the fun out of the world’.
That’s a large part of what we as skeptics are facing – the fact that, for some true believers, things like ghosts, bigfoot, Nessie, etc are fun. They provide a sense of mystery, wonder and awe that the believers can’t find in science and reality.
Oh – and how did my co-worker find out that the ghost’s name was Emily? They talked to a friend of theirs (whose house is also, naturally, haunted) who said that they should wait until they could feel that Emily was there, then slowly focus their thoughts on names. When they hit the right one, they’d feel a wave of warm, positive engergy from the ghost. So they tried this one night, and felt the ‘energy wave’ at Emily.
/facepalm
Ejadise seems to have missed my point entirely. My post was most certainly NOT meant to be contrued as “how to fool deluded people, some of which may be in a fragile mental or emotional state.” My point was to bring to light the fact that things like giving medical and legal advise to gullible folks is a practice that is going on day in and day out given through thousands of phony psychics or people who are; 1)complete charlatans, or 2) genuinely deluded in suggesting such antics as trusting one’s health and well being to a completely un-supported gewgaw tied to the end of string. If I inadvertently invoked amusement in my choioe of words, please forgive me. Such is the way I have learned to deal with all this nonsense. If I didn’t have a sense of humor to fall back on for all these years throughout my investigations of purported psychic phenomena, I would have gone bonkers or thrown in the towel decades ago. I have come to refer to this malaise as “Psychic Blues” and written a book on it with the same title. At one point, I wanted to be a believer, but it just didn’t work out.
As I wrote “in most cases” the sitter does indeed know whether or not their spouse is cheating on them or whether they have symptoms that might lead them to suspect issues about their health. Those types are looking for a sort of (usually free at private parties) “second opinion.” Since I never give such opinions, I have made the choice to feed those questions directly back to the sitter and let them literally talk to themselves. This is not cruelty, just a common sense approach to staying in the character I am often paid to assume. I realize this is a sad fact for skeptics to deal with. In my case at least,rest assured that when and if I get into these fortunately infrequent jams, I always clearly tell each sitter that I do not take medical or legal questions and that it would be better for them to consult their doctor, lawyer or marriage counselor. If pressed,(which is unfortunately frequently when they can’t take this hint) I will perform this “pendulizing” process to hopefully give them some level of solace for their time. Bear in mind that at many of these private functions, people may have stood in line for an hour or more (!) and giving them a simple brush off is not always easy or wise if one wants to please the crowd, the party host and most impotantly; the agent who booked the event. The times where this situation has happened usually reflected back to me a profound sense of heartfelt relief from the sitter, generally because they really did know deep down what the answer would be before they ever sat down. It is true that many may not know the answer, consciously or subconsciously. Problem is: most con artist psychics tell people what they think they want to hear instead of what they may truly need to hear. My point was and what to me is really vile is the fact that there are people who call themselves “medical intuitives” out there on the streets today like Sylvia Browne and Natalya Demkina and many others who don’t even put the onus squarely into the hands of their sitters through the swinging of an object on a string. They are not given the chance to “look inward.” Rather Sylvia and her ilk make bold statements from the highest positions in the media with the tacit approval of the hosts and hostesses of those platforms. This is cruelty on a mass degree that pales in comparison to my twiddling about with my toys. All so-called “psychic readings” are random data to a certain degree. I’m not sugesting larking about trying to fool anybody. I’m pointing out a potentially dangerous self-hypnotic “tool” that has been around for centuries without being scientifically investigated, clearly understood or been given the rout a solid team of scientists, doctors and other investigators like The Skeptologists might achieve if we were given the chance. The “baked apple” experiment is the kind of thing we need to see demonstated on network television, not another Larry King psychic call-in session. We don’t need a pendulum, we need a wrecking ball.
Edward, you mentioned that the Pendulum is basically ‘powered’ by the ideomotor effect. In essence, we are answering our own questions.
I had a lady once tell me that when she forgets where her keys are, she uses a pendulum to ‘remember’, she simply asks herself ‘Did I leave them in the bathroom?’, and her subconcious memory (which she believes knows where she left the keys) answers. She claims it works well.
Do you believe this is plausible?
To Andres: Yes, I do think it’s possible. Anything that we might use to “jog” our memories in these types of situations works basically the same way. There’s nothing supernatural about it. The lady you mentioned probably would have found her keys if she asked nearly any object outside of her own mind, like a pendulum. Her pet chihuahua might be expected to do the same. Yes or no questions are the key. Most people won’t take the time to simply stand in each room and ask themselves yes or no questions.
Haha. I obviously didn’t think there was anything supernatural about it, but it was still pretty fascinating to say the least.
Now if only we could develop one of those Harry Poter ‘remembrance’ balls that light up when we forget something. Those would be useful as heck.
I can see how I might have misconstrued the tone of your article based on the following excerpts:
” Yes, I know. It sounds crazy – but it works. Or at least it can work marvelously with the proper techniques of verbal coaxing or deception. What the pendulum really uses is a very strong dose of suggestion on the part of the operator or whomever is doing the convincing.”
And :
“It’s simple to suggest this to a gullible sitter. Remember that the sitter is usually sitting there because they are a believer to some degree and thay want things to work.”
And:
“I carry pendulums whenever I do any sort or readings because on more occasions than I would like to admit, the pendulum and the carefully worded verbal suggetions that went with it saved me from the embarassing reality of having to answer sensitive questions I wouldn’t dare touch otherwise. . . . It’s inevitable for questions like these to come up and the pendulum allows me to side-step them without a hitch.”
And:
“When they ask the pendulum their deepest darkest secrets, they are basically talking to themselves. I love that! I get off the hook, but still get the credit for psychically “empowering” them. They go away happy (hopefully) and the whole procedure looks awesome to the onlookers who see something apparently very serious (well, it is to the sitter anyway) going on.”
Perhaps I am dense, or English being my second language, I missed the subtle clues differentiating the above from the practice of unscrupulous psychics who only *claim* to know what their subjects are thinking, hoping, or know for sure. Obviously you are a cut above because you really *do* know when “the sitter already knows the answer to their question but doesn’t want to admit the truth to themselves.”
Seriously, you did not “invoke amusement”. To be clear, my point is you do not know for sure what will come from a believers arriving at a given conclusion based on them swinging a pendulum following your tutelage toward the efficacy of the practice. Then again, I am neither a believer nor a practitioner. I am merely pointing out my views on the matter, to wit your explanation of the difference between what you may be doing unintentionally and what others do intentionally seems a moot argument to the outcome for the believer.
My views notwithstanding, how you justify what you do is your business entirely, and if I once again missed your subtle point, perhaps I should buy a pendulum to confirm what I might already know.
Did anyone ever actually try the expeiment with the apples cooked the different ways?
Is there a higher purpose than ‘fun’? What is it?
Shouldn’t that be ‘pendula’, not ‘pendulums’?
I love posts like this that give me ideas for party tricks. I wish I had more videos to watch which demonstrate these tricks so I have a better idea of how they work in practise.