More or less how I got here on this topic

Last updated on: August 12, 2025 at 9:53 am by Dan Peterson

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More or less how I got here on this topic 2025-08-12T09:53:18-06:00 Dan Peterson

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“Swan Princess,” by visual artist Viona ielegems (Wikimedia Commons public domain image). She looks nothing at all like the anime Odette that we watched last night.

Last night, my wife and I watched an anime film version of Swan Lake with a very young third-generation unit. (The name and gender of the third-generation unit have been redacted so as to obscure a potential target, at least partially, from attacks by some of my anonymous detractors.) I’m not a real fan of anime, and the pacing and the dubbed voice-acting in this film were, I thought, unusually poor. But the story is a good one and, moreover, the music was by Tchaikovsky, so I judged the benefits for the third-generation unit to be worthwhile.

Anyway, at the point in the story where the evil sorcerer Rothbart has tricked Prince Siegfried into declaring his love for Odile, Rothbart’s equally evil daughter, thus dooming the beautiful Princess Odette, the third-generation unit erupted with indignation, crying out “This isn’t a good story! I don’t like this story! I don’t want to watch it! I hate this story!” I calmed the third-generation unit down with assurances that this wasn’t the end of the tale — although, in some versions, it pretty much is — and we held on until the satisfying resolution finally arrived. It was a very cute moment.

The Orem Utah Temple by night, in a photo by Brent R. (presumably my former stake president) on ChurchofJesusChristTemples.org. The temple sits within the boundaries of my stake, and is located not terribly far from where this afternoon’s meeting took place.

I spent several hours today in a meeting with the three vice presidents of the Interpreter Foundation and the leaders of a newly-founded organization called United Advocates. The apologetic ecology is changing a bit, and we’re looking at ways to make our work more effective. But heck, I just love meetings.

In other Interpreter Foundation news, this installment of the Interpreter Foundation podcast went up today: “The Interpreter Foundation Podcast — July 30, 2025: Abraham and His Family Conference“

In the 30 July 2025 episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and John Thompson discussed the Abraham and His Family Conference that was held in May. You can listen to or download the discussion segment of the podcast at the link that I’ve embedded above.

H.M.S. Titanic at the dock in England, in April 1912 (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should never, ever, have been appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services:

An illustration from the eight-volume “A Tour in Wales” (1781), by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Four or five times now, perhaps, I’ve publicly mentioned my one and only direct experience with water witching, or dowsing, with a divining rod. It was successful — completely against my expectations and to my considerable shock. (See one account here.) Although I’ve simply described what happened in my case without drawing any grand conclusion from it, I’ve been severely attacked and ridiculed in certain quarters for having recounted the story. They like to portray me as obsessed with dowsing, as claiming great divining ability, rejecting science, and so forth, essentially because I won’t falsify history by pretending that I didn’t have the experience that, in fact, I had. (It seems that some critics’ professed commitment to transparency and accurate history isn’t very deep, or, at least, that their ideological commitments and/or their need to be seen as conforming to acceptable elite opinion and/or their urge to mock me are deeper.)

Anyway, with that as background you’ll understand why this passage, from Eric A. Eliason, “Seer Stones, Salamanders, and Early Mormon ‘Folk Magic’ in the Light of Folklore Studies and Bible Scholarship,” BYU Studies Quarterly 55/1 (2016): 73-93, caught my attention. Eric Eliason (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a folklorist in the Department of English at Brigham Young University:

The presumption that the difference between magic and proper belief is something intrinsic rather than relational to the definer is still very much alive. But on close analysis, complex definitions distinguishing “magical” from “modern” thinking rarely amount to more than “What you do is superstition, while what I do is science or true religion.” One of the biggest surprises rural students have in American university folklore courses, including at BYU, is discovering their suburban peers need to be taught what divining rods are and how to use them. Today, regardless of class, race, education, wealth, region, or religion, rural students tend to know of holding a forked stick gently in one’s hand to feel for the downward tug that points to underground water and a good spot for a well. Dowsing seems not only understandable, but essential, in rural areas where families are on their own to secure water, and where hired well drillers make no guarantees and charge by the foot. City kids are shocked that their country classmates could be such shameless occult dabblers in a modern age where you don’t have to think about where water comes from. You just turn on the tap and out it comes — like magic. My rural LDS students don’t understand why their suburban counterparts have so little respect for or belief in a common spiritual gift often displayed by their educated and reasonable bishops and stake presidents.

It is simply wrong to assume that divining practices are some long-abandoned exotic aspect of America’s frontier past rather than a continuing worldwide phenomenon, used not only by rural Americans, but by soldiers in Vietnam to find enemy tunnels, by oil and precious metal prospecting companies, and even by contemporary salvage professionals to recover, yes, lost treasure. (82)

For what it’s worth — I’m merely reporting here — I have a friend, a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford who holds both a Stanford law degree and an M.D. from the University of Utah, who grew up in southern Arizona and who has told me of his successes there with water witching. And another friend, now passed on, was a professional landscape architect with (as I recall) a master’s degree in horticulture who dowsed for water lines before commencing any job. Colleagues laughed at him, he recalled, but they often cut water lines, while he reported that he never did. Finally, I remember sitting parked with my brother near a vacant lot in a St. Louis suburb. We were early for a flight and were enjoying hamburgers when, suddenly, a Department of Water and Power truck pulled up. Its driver got out, fetched a divining rod from the back of his truck, and proceeded to walk up and down the vacant lot, making notes in a small book. Then he put his divining rod back where it came from and drove away.

I grew up without the slightest belief in paranormal phenomena like water witching, telepathy, and clairvoyance. I assumed that they were mere superstition, supported by no evidence, refuted by repeated negative experimental results. My faith doesn’t require that I believe in them, and lack of evidence for them would leave my theology unaffected. But I freely confess that my experience with dowsing jarred me.

Years later, I went through a period in which I read a number of books by the late John Hick, a well-known Anglo-American philosopher who taught at Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University but spent most of his career at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and Claremont Graduate University in the United States. In one of his books — I don’t now remember which one of them — he surprised me by writing with considerable respect about the work of the Society for Psychical Research, in Great Britain.

Then, shortly after it was published in 2003, I read The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death, written by Professor Gary E. Schwartz. I found it surprising, as well.

More recently, I read (and a few weeks ago, reread) Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, by the late Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. This book opened my mind still further to the possibility that, just maybe, my onetime certainty that no evidence exists for paranormal phenomena might rest on at least slightly shaky ground.

Most recently, of course, I read (and publicly admitted that I had read) The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing:The Secret Military Remote Perception Skill Anyone Can Learn, which was given to me by its author, Paul H. Smith, Ph.D., Major–U.S. Army (ret.).

I apologize abjectly for my willingness even to look at such things, and for my openness to the possibility that I might have been wrong.

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