My dad drilled water wells in the US after spending many years working on oil wells overseas. His clients would often hire witchers (water witches, water witchers, well witches - I think the distance from Appalachia to Montana clouded the specific vocabulary). You'd have this very old man dodder around the property with a pair of sticks, and when the sticks magically chose to pull together and cross, that's where you'd dig the well.
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.
In most cases you can drill just about anywhere and find water. So any approach from random to looking at geological features (which you can gather from seismograph data, if needed set off an explosion in controlled locations...) will find water. The latter approach may find a specific place where a less deep well can work, but in most locations there isn't that much a difference (at least not among the reasonable places to drill your well - if you are willing to pay for miles of pipe you can maybe have a useful choice of location).
When I built my house in the country, the well driller insisted on witching. He said "we should drill right here." I said "No, move it 100 feet that way. Your spot is right in the middle of my future driveway."
"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.
Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country has a whole section on wells. The main key seems to be onsite when it is drilled, because otherwise they'll just leave after drilling one, even if it is dry.
When I was about 12 my dad wanted to do some work plumbing in the house but couldn’t find the stopcock to turn off the water. Figuring it was buried somewhere in the hedge he got me to dowse for the water line with a couple of bent coat hangers.
Waking back and forth across the front lawn the bent coat hangers crossed consistently along a line so he started digging. Unfortunately the pipe he holed with the garden fork was the gas supply and the day ended with the gas company coming around to patch the line. I don’t think we ever found the water stopcock.
Though we can’t explain it dowsing does seem to work. There is however no guarantee that what you find is what you were looking for…
I mean statistics may, if someone spent enough time, show that things are generally where they feel best being because a human like you put it there. also you have about a 50% give or take winning anything so leaving it to odds feels better than trying to push one way or another.
I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I tried it myself to prove someone else wrong and I couldn't help but feel like it actually worked.
We were looking for a water pipe, not just sitting groundwater. The only explanation I could come up with was that for some reason a magnetic field was being created by the pipe underground. I don't remember if the water was flowing or not when we did it.
I feel silly even commenting this, but we truly did find the pipe exactly where I was standing when the rods pointed together.
Of course it's very possible that I unconsciously tilted my hands in the spot where I suspected the pipe would be. Even though I did make a conscious effort to not do exactly that, I wonder if there is some psychological factor in the phenomenon.
Slightly tangential but I've found it insightful: there are studies, e.g. [0], showing correlations between lifespan and date of birth. Causal factors could include for example seasonal viral infections, lesser amount of vitamin D in the winter, etc.
Of course, this tells nothing about well-witching, but illustrates that at least some old beliefs aren't as unreasonable as one might think.
Even without evaluating the quality of the study, I don't have a hard time accepting the notion that the season of your birth may affect your average lifespan by a few months. It is a very modest claim.
The claims of astrologers are not at all like this. They are vastly more specific.
Okay granted; my intent wasn't to justify astrology either, but merely to encourage prudence when dismissing "old ideas." To be clear, I'm not talking about modern astrology, but really about old beliefs that could have been built on repeated observations, but weirdly/poorly phrased.
In The Republic of Plato, there's this idea of rotation between political regimes[0], and it's explained by the way each generation treats the next one. Down to Earth example: think of overprotecting parents making their child unprepared for an ordinary adult life.
Now of course, this is again distant from the discourse of our favorite astrologers, but if you squint a little, there are conceptual similarities.
Thinking about it a little more, and on point to your original remark, I wonder if the fact that a considerable amount of people like to believe in astrology isn't tied to the same instinct that made old people personify everything and anything as Gods: a strong tendency to see order and intelligence in chaos.
After all, science is still about doing just this, minus the anthropomorphism. So, not so shocking: just human nature at works.
While I don't think this particular wikipedia page is especially concise, I do think it's a great jumping off point for links you will find interesting:
I first learned about the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and hyperreligiosity from Robert Sapolsky's Biology and Human Behavior. From your comments I think you'd find it as interesting as I did.
A Facebook friend was talking about how overwhelming and chaotic her life has been feeling lately and people were chiming in to say they were in the same boat and attributing it to the Mercury retro-whatever.
Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.
Might not have been dowsing but a geoelectric survey of the inductive/capacitive/resistive variety. The BBC Time Team folks occasionally use these for non invasive surveys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU9aRZK4j84&t=663s
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.