Summary
Yes, one can "ask" a pendulum questions about one's choices in life.
But no supernatural prediction of the future is involved.
The pendulum operator is determining the "answers" received.
Early psychologists made efforts at explaining such phenomena. As humans we are able to fool ourselves about objects answering questions unless careful "blind" experimental designs are used that rule out not only dishonesty but also mere suggestion or other knowledge of the correct answer.
Contemporaneously, from the 1600s onward the science of physics developed an excellent understanding of what actually makes pendulums move in various ways and how that can be put to practical use.
The Claim
From the first link, pendulums are claimed to be useful in these areas:
Appropriate Types of Questions to Ask It is appropriate to ask a
pendulum about things that are within your control, about situations
where you have the right to make a choice, or about things your
subconscious already has access to. For example, it is appropriate to
ask whether it would be good for you to marry a particular person, but
it not appropriate for you to ask whether he is going to ask you to
marry him, because that is not your right to choose. In the same way,
it is not appropriate to ask if you are going to meet your prince
charming today, because that is not within your control. However, it
is appropriate to try to divine other people's motivations or who they
are inside, because you already know this at a subconscious level
anyway. For example, it is appropriate to ask "Can I trust him? Does
he want me for a friend, or only for what I can give him?"
Furthermore, and mostly consistent with the above principles, they provide a list of applications:
The pendulum can be used for choosing between alternatives in a
relatively wide range of areas. To get an answer from the pendulum,
simply ask any yes/no question about a specific thing that would be
good for you, but only in areas where you have the right to make the
decision, for example, anything to do with health & healing, love or
domestic relationships, career. Here are some typical areas where the
pendulum can be used to good advantage:
Making a Choice of any kind. (Do I want to travel for my vacation or
stay home?) Figuring out what is best to do. (Would it be better to
keep my present job or look for a new job?) Figuring out how you
really feel about something. (Do I want children in the near future?)
Becoming more conscious of who someone is inside, to know his
motivation, his compatibility with you. Determining your probability
of success in a situation.(Do I have what it takes to complete this
course?) Finding the cause of physical symptoms. (Is my diet causing
my migraines?) Determining what foods or vitamins to take. (Would it
be good for me to double my Vitamin C intake?) Determining what is
causing an allergic reaction. (Am I lactose intolerant?) Prospecting
for water, oil, treasure. (Is there gold over here?) Finding missing
people or pets, or lost objects. (Is my key under the bed?) You can
even use the pendulum with a map. Put the pendulum over a small area
of the map and ask "Is Bowser here"?, and narrow it down in this way.
Part of the knowledge that comes with experience in working with the
pendulum is learning to sometimes start with broad questions, and then
narrow them down.
I find the second link unreadable. Maybe someone with IE can try it.
The third link http://askyourpendulum.com/Tips.asp
also places various restrictions on how the pendulum functions. According to the headings, you have to:
- Prepare Yourself
- Ask Well Phrased Questions
- Troubleshoot -- if you didn't get the answer you wanted.
Furthermore, you must
"Always cite the source before asking questions. "
Sounds a lot like advice on how to ask a Stack Overflow question, doesn't it?
Except for this bit of boilerplate that has to go in front of all the questions:
"I call upon the higher self to answer these
questions. I will only accept answers from the higher self and not
from my conscious mind. I seek absolutely truthful answers that are
aligned with the highest and greatest good for all concerned." You can
definitely craft your own version of this – just make sure you use it
each time.
I'm so glad Stack Overflow doesn't require that, instead deprecating pleadings and thanks.
Explanation
Now many of these applications can be explained as simply a person taking the time to recall or think about the facts and circumstances of their situation.
The use of objects, places, or situations as cognitive or meditation aids to assist in the recall or processing of personal mental information is well known.
In this way. the usefulness of a pendulum in determining the cause of an allergy or the truth about a girlfriend or boyfriend is similar to that of a rubber duck debugging a computer program.
If it helps someone remember that dust preceded sneezes (and thus, helped determine the cause of an allergy), or that a friend is kind but seems to have stronger romantic interests elsewhere (and thus, might not be an ideal marriage partner), or that a particular message about a missing file preceded a program crash (and thus, help isolate a bug to a section of the program that depends on the missing file), it was useful.
However, as to causation, the most likely explanation is that the person asking the questions is making the decisions, or predictions, or insights, not the pendulum or the rubber duck or other cognitive aid -- since the person has a brain that is the store of information and source of processing, whereas the pendulum or rubber duck lack information storage and processing capability.
To go beyond this, and attribute to the object itself an ability to correctly answer questions and claim that they are not known to the person asking, is an extraordinary claim. It requires similarly strong evidence that the answers thereby obtained are correct and would be obtained by chance with low probability.
The ideomotor effect has been proposed as a credible alternative explanation to the extraordinary claim that the pendulum is making the predictions or decisions. Put more simply: people are suggestible, and fool themselves.
From Quackwatch, How People Are Fooled by Ideomotor Action, R Hyman, PhD:
This "influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular
movement, independently of volition" was given the label ideomotor
action by the psychologist/physiologist William B. Carpenter in 1852
[4]. Later the concept was more widely publicized by the Harvard
physician-turned-psychologist William James [5]. Carpenter wanted to
show that a variety of currently popular phenomena had conventional
scientific explanations rather than the widely believed supernatural
ones. The phenomena he tackled included dowsing ("water witching"),
the magic pendulum, certain aspects of mesmerism, spiritualists'
"table turning," and Reichenbach's "Odylic force." Carpenter did not
question the reality of the phenomena, nor the honesty of the people
who were involved. He only disputed the explanation, arguing that,
"All the phenomena of the 'biologized' state, when attentively
examined, will be found to consist in the occupation of the mind by
the ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the influence which
these ideas exert upon the actions of the body." Thus Carpenter
invoked ideomotor action as a nonparanormal explanation for various
phenomena that were being credited to new physical forces, spiritual
intervention, or other supernatural causes. He published many books
and articles during the latter half of the nineteenth century
expounding his ideas about ideomotor action [6,7].
Disproving that a "exploring pendulum" identifies chemical substances involved some early applications of the "blind study", where the subject (who uses the pendulum to identify a substance) and/or the experiment manager purposefully are kept ignorant of which result is the correct outcome, thereby negating the possibility that the manager influenced the subject. In this case, an actual blindfold was used...
Hyman explains:
The first recorded use of the exploring pendulum occurred around 371
C.E. A priest would bow over a plate, the edge of which was marked
with the letters of the alphabet. This "diviner" or "oracle" would
hold a ring, suspended from a thin thread, over the center of the
plate. A question would be put to the priest. The movements of the
ring would then be observed. When the ring was set in motion, it would
swing toward one of the letters. This letter would be recorded; then
the same process would be used to select another letter. This would
continue until one or more words, which answered the question, would
be generated. In this, we see the origins of the modern Ouija board,
used to this day by occultists for divining purposes [8].
In the early nineteenth century, certain chemists were advocating this
method for analyzing the composition of substances. In 1808, a
Professor Gerboin of Strasbourg wrote an entire book on use of the
pendulum for chemical analysis [9]. As a budding scientist, Chevreul
was intrigued, but he remained skeptical. He was surprised, however,
to find that the pendulum worked as advertised when he tried it over a
dish of mercury. He carried out more tests, however. To see if a
physical force was responsible for the movement of the pendulum, he
placed a glass plate between the iron ring and the mercury. To his
surprise, the oscillations diminished and then stopped. When he
removed the glass plate, the pendulum movements resumed. He next
suspected that the pendulum moved because it was difficult to hold his
arm steady. When he rested his arm on a support, the movements
diminished but did not stop altogether.
Finally, Chevreul did what none of his predecessors had thought of
doing. He conducted the equivalent of what we would call a
double-blind trial. He blindfolded himself and then he had an
assistant interpose or remove the glass plate between the pendulum and
the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing
happened. Chevreul concluded, "So long as I believed the movement
possible, it took place; but after discovering the cause I could not
reproduce it." His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is
"to mistake illusions for realities, whenever we are confronted by
phenomena in which the human sense-organs are involved under
conditions imperfectly analyzed." Chevreul used this principle of
expectant attention to account for the phenomena of dowsing, movements
of the exploring pendulum, and the then current fad among
spiritualists, table-turning.
These early efforts to dispel the notion that one can obtain answers to questions by asking objects like pendulums and moving them around to get the answer should hopefully suffice in showing that the modern pendulum claims are no different and are not credible.
Quackwatch: references cited by Hyman
[4] Carpenter WB. On the influence of suggestion in modifying and
directing muscular movement, independently of volition. Proceedings of
the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 1852;1:147-153.
[5] James W.
Principles of Psychology. New York, NY: Holt; 1890. Carpenter WB.
Mental Physiology. London, UK: C. Kegan Paul; 1874.
[6] Carpenter WB.
Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Etc. New York, NY: D. Appleton; 1874.
[7]
Carpenter WB. On the influence of suggestion in modifying and
directing muscular movement, independently of volition.
[8] Jastrow J.
Wish and Wisdom. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts; 1935.
[9] Faraday M. Experimental investigation of table turning. Atheneum. July 1853:801-803.
Another approach: replication and principles of operation
On a separate note, suppose we take as a null hypothesis the statement given in the initial article that Pendulums can answer only certain types of questions (questions related to things one can control, choose or things one has seen and remembers subconsciously).
But then we find that pendulums in fact reliably answer other kinds of questions in a very different way.
Then that null hypothesis about how pendulums work in discovering knowledge will be falsified.
It turns out Pendulums are able to answer certain physics questions. 400 years of study in science and engineering have shown pendulums useful in measuring time, determining that the planet is rotating, measuring latitude, standardizing length, measuring gravitational pull and variations in gravitational pull. [Wikipedia: Pendulum ]
What is interesting about this latter class of scientific and engineering questions is that they are not personal questions, or questions of choice, or things likely to have been seen previously by a person and stored in memory and the answers do not occur in the mind of the user but instead require the application of mathematical skills to careful observation of the behavior of the pendulum. Mathematical skills can also be applied by 3rd parties to the observations to obtain identical results, something that might be difficult to do with using a pendulum to answer questions of a personal nature. In the case of the pendulum clock, the motion of the pendulum is measured by a primitive single purpose "computer" consisting of various gears (instead of transistors or modern CPUs) attached to a display of rods (clock "hands") that could be read (via a clock dial) with minimal training. This allows multiple people to get the exact same answer from the pendulum clock without concern as to variations in mathematical or magical training or whether they had the right to ask what time it is or had cleared their mind of negative influences.
The nature of this latter class of questions calls into question the operational principles of how pendulums work in the realm of knowledge if we were to assume the null hypothesis advocated in that first link. It is clear that it falsifies the requirements proposed by advocates of the pendulum as a prognosticator separate from the human operator. The alternative explanation, founded over 400 years, is that pendulum motion is the result of physical laws, including force inputs from someone at the top of the pendulum.
