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Hamish Miller

In Search of the Southern Serpent
(Penwith Press and StonePrint Press 2006 ISBN 0-9582434-1-7)

In the summer of 2002, I stood with three other Tamar Dowsers next to the standing stone on St Breock Downs on my first dowsing field trip with the TDs.  It was an exciting time, a new venture with like-minded people.  Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that a little over four years later, I would be standing next to one of the world’s best known and best loved dowsers, in front of an audience of over 60 people. 

Hamish Miller is a man with truly remarkable ideas - not that his modest manner and understated delivery would give you any indication that this Cornish Scot was on to anything out of the ordinary.  Perhaps the most remarkable idea of all is that he has become the conduit for a string of profound concepts.  However, it’s a mantle he has taken up in his stride.

The first concept to get one’s mind around is that ‘the management’, as Hamish calls ‘them’, only drip feed information and enlightenment to him, and by inference to the
rest of us, as we develop the capacity take it on board.  His encounters with the spirituality of the land of Aotearoa (aka New Zealand) brought this home to him in a very personal and a very graphic manner.

On one level, his beautifully-illustrated talk describes his study tour of parts of the Southern Hemisphere, in the company of his wife and constant companion, Ba.  This was certainly interesting in its own right - after all, not many of us have holiday slides
of some of the most sacred sites of the Maori and their peace-loving predecessors, the Waitaha, to illustrate our presentation. However, this was just the tangible medium through which the ethereal substance of his discoveries flowed.

HM gave a quick précis of several decades of dowsing experience in Europe, starting with the work on the Michael and Mary earth energy lines, which traverse southern England - and subsequently on their counterparts, the Apollo and Athena lines, which sweep across Europe from Ireland to Israel.  This was an important precursor to the work he was to undertake on similar lines in South Africa - confirmed in astonishing fashion by a Zulu elder - and later in Aotearoa itself.

On his travels, Hamish became aware that the earth energies of that part of the Antipodes were running faster and freer than we are used to in the north.  He mused as to whether this was due to the more mechanistic and militaristic attitudes of the north. Whatever the reason, the energy felt fresher and feistier.

Comparative dowsing on the invisible serpentine energy features in England and Europe had shown them to display ‘manifestations’ - ethereal shapes on the ground - at certain wavelengths and at certain significant places.  The shapes changed slowly and subtly over time, but were reproduced right along the energy imprint in a gradual, apparently linked, organic evolution.

Through this, he was drawn to the conclusion, supported by the work of others, that there is an inter-action between the dowser and the earth energies themselves – that the earth is ‘listening’ and the dowser plays an active part in the unfolding process.

Hamish’s initial search for similar manifestations in New Zealand was a bit disappointing – just the outline of an irregular oblong.  As Ba had said at the time, they had travelled 13,000 miles and found the shape of a dog bone.  Quite!

However, as time passed and the dowsing got underway the ‘dog bone’ transformed, inter-actively, into a series of ever more complex patterns of stars, petals and outlines of omegas.  The energy was certainly moving and changing much faster than in the UK and the feedback was stronger and more explicit.  He witnessed local sensitives working in a very different way with their native energy nodes - and he had the good fortune, if that’s the right phrase, to meet elders and academics with residual arcane knowledge of how the sacred sites had acquired their individual significance.

HM felt he was being drawn to certain places as it became appropriate for him to visit them - and was then assisted by unseen forces, to some extent, in understanding the nature and essence of the various locations. 

So much of the narrative of the earth energy dimension has been all-but-lost in the north, or left to the silent witness of stone sentinels.  However, in the south, the oral tradition of passing down the legends describing the ‘power of place’ persisted well into colonial times – and, in a few precious instances, right up to the present day.  In Western Europe, successive waves of invaders superimposed their own pantheon and their own epic sagas on to the sacred sites of the vanquished.  In so doing, they wove layer upon contradictory layer into the legends of the latter-day tribes of the British Isles and its neighbours.  In New Zealand this has happened to a much lesser extent - and consequently the expansive chronicle can be connected to the ‘real world’ of time and space, geology and geomancy, with much greater clarity.

While his revelations of earth energy dowsing are always riveting in themselves - all the more so, because you can tap into them very directly yourself - Hamish’s final message, imbibed during an on-site meditation down under, was perhaps the most sobering.  The intangible forces, that have helped to shape the social and the spiritual environment on the other side of the planet, issued him a dire warning about the misdirected materialism of the developed world.  Change your attitude or be consigned to the small-print of someone else’s legends.  The scientific dialogue about whether or not we are nearing an ecological tipping point (and perhaps an energetic one too), suddenly seemed to jump into the sharpest of focus.

At the end of the last millennium Hamish Miller produced the deeply autobiographical It’s Not Too Late (Penwith Press 1999).  Now in his 80th year, and clearly buoyed up by his Aotearoan adventures, he is still committed to the cause.  Let’s hope there is a strong enough undercurrent to prove him right.

Many thanks indeed to Hamish and Ba for taking time out to talk to us - and to everyone who helped on the day, despite atrocious weather, to make it happen.

Nigel Twinn, Tamar Dowsers, December 2006