Sunday 12 July 2015

Dowsing and Dousing

I'm starting to understand why the prophets were always complaining about syncretism - the merging together of two different religion's practices.

The whole idea, as an illustration of Amos 7, was for Daphnia to go around measuring walls with a plumb line, telling us which were straight and which were not true. A really good illustration in a post-modern community, littered with the walls of previous alt.lit scenarios involving building cairns and dry-stone walls to the point where they litter the landscape like Pac-a-macs  in the Peak District.

Turned my back, and by the time I'd got control of the situation Daphnia's found three thin places and an underground stream. Of course I don't really go for this dowsing stuff, so I insisted we dig down to see if the underground stream was really there.

Turns out she'd hit a water main. Still, it's not so bad. We now have another holy well. Shame it's in the library.

1 comment :

  1. I'm glad you didn't go investigating the thin places. I've always thought the Celts were a tad too trusting when they assumed such places were thin patches allowing access to the divine vision. Rather as the Charismatics open themselves to speaking in tongues.

    There is more than one possible origin of these influences. I've always wondered if the practice of the Early Church in turning such places into shrines and chapels was not so much a tapping into their divine access as it was a sort of, well, protection from much less benign powers. Manichaeism?

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