TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge | Tekh's Anthological Review

Ghost and Divining Rod

Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963

Sir William Ridgeway’s advice regarding the ‘striping off the layers’ was taken metaphorically by Lethbridge who used it as a mission statement in his 1963 publication Ghost and Divining Rod. By removing the superstition, hearsay and traditional views on his investigation into the paranormal, it enabled him to return to ‘the beginning’.

Ghost and Divining Rod is a classic. It is the book that collates all of his previous theories and ideas and presents them as a working prognosis. His tales of the ghoul in the Golden Ball covert near Wokingham and the one at Ladram Bay are all here. Lethbridge presents his theory that past and future events and emotions could somehow be recorded onto ‘fields’, a kind of ‘electric haze’ associated with dampness and moisture. The naming of these ‘fields’ after nymphs - Naiads, Dryads, Oreads and Nereids - is pure genius and exposes him as the great storyteller, a true poet.

The use of the pendulum is introduced in Ghost and Diving Rod, it being a tool, like the divining rod, that enables us to make contact with psyche-fields and other dimensions. It also enables us to detect the presence and existence of lost objects. For Lethbridge believed that everything had an invisible field around it and that his scientific experiments with the pendulum enabled him not only to detect, but also to establish contacts with other dimensions.

A constant gripe, common to all of Lethbridge’s work, is that of the dogma that surrounded not only his own vocation, but also the world of science and the church. Again, in Ghost and Divining Rod, he takes swipes at those who rely on second-hand knowledge and tradition as ‘a given’ in the research process. Lethbridge believed that it was these views that inhibited the quest for wisdom. He highlights his desire to avoid reading subject matter of a similar nature, in the fear that it would influence his thinking. This may also be partly due to the criticism that he had evoked from his links with the likes of George De la Warr and Margaret Murray in previous works.

Ghost and Divining Rod is basically a continuation of where 1961’s Ghost and Ghoul left off. In the Preface, Lethbridge displays his astonishment at the areas that his investigations were leading him and likens them to the realms of science fiction. Even reading his books today, and having personally undertaken some of the experiments, it is quite unbelievable that his own investigations have not been researched or embraced by science. A reliance on the demands of the material world will inevitably condemn this line of enquiry to the fringe areas of society. Sadly, only a radical change in culture will enable the genius of Lethbridge’s discoveries to be brought to the masses.

Colin Wilson suggests that Lethbridge’s books should be viewed as a series of notebooks or working journals and not as a complete, definitive thesis. This style of writing is typified in the final chapter of Ghost and Divining Rod. One can almost imagine him reaching the final chapter still bursting with ideas, yet the constraints of his publisher prohibit him going into further detail. Undeterred, he throws in a handful of ideas anyway; force fields as cones or spirals, the charging of sacred sites with energy… all are theories that would be pursued in later works.

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