(05-14-2024, 07:46 AM)FlickerOfLight Wrote: ...
I came to these same conclusions, pretty much in the last day.
...
Well, I've been laying off to make a post in this thread for a couple days, since you first made the thread. BUT, I didn't know quite what to post, so I've been letting it percolate through my brain for that whole time. Apparently, you've been doing some percolating on it, too. Might be that we just tapped into the same 'lectricity circuit.
I believe it was Carl Sagan, or maybe it was Asimov... I misremember just who it was... who said something along the lines of "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But I wonder... is the converse not possibly true? Could magic simply be a poorly understood technology, or perhaps a different form of technology altogether?
I can "water witch". I learned it a long, long time ago. There's no sacrifices involved, nor any incantations, spells, rituals, or calling on spirits. Nothing like that. it's just me and a pointer, usually a forked twig cut from a live tree, although I have copped out and used coat hangers and the like upon occasion. The fact that I can use different materials tells me that it's not in the pointer, and it's probably not in me, either... it's something in the "fields" between the witcher and the Earth where whatever he's hunting for resides - it doesn't have to be water. I've found arrowheads with it, too. It can be anything you're looking for, anything you concentrate on.
But it works. Of that I have no doubt. I've found all sorts of things using it. I've had the pointer twig wring so hard in my hands that it wrung the bark off of it pointing at something. How does it work? I don't have a clue, and I'm the one doing it. Is it "witchery"? Not that I can tell - I don't call on any spirits or gods, I don't mumble any spells or incantations to make it work, it just does.
So why do they call it "water-witching"? It's just another tool in the tool box... and maybe a "technology" so poorly understood that it's indistinguishable from "magic", poorly understood even by those who can use it. Going back to your cell phone analogy, I don't know how they work, either, but I know how to push the button to MAKE it work!
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