Types of pendulums: the eight shapes
A pendulum is a weight on a chain. You hold it still, and then you watch it start to move.
What people are usually asking
Not many people pick up a weight on a chain out of an interest in mechanics.
The questions are nearly always the same few, and none of them are small. Whether this one is the one. Whether the offer will come. Whether to stay or go. Whether the results, when they arrive, will be the news you are hoping for.
A piece of wood cannot answer any of that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does instead is more particular, and we think more useful.
You hold it still. It begins to move. The direction it goes is the direction you were already leaning before you sat down, and that is often something you have not said out loud, possibly not even to yourself. A chain is simply long enough to make a very small movement impossible to miss.
Which is not a small thing to be handed. Most of us carry the large questions around sideways for months without ever sitting down alone with one.
So: this will not tell you whether you pass the exam. It is remarkably good at showing you whether you believe you will, and how much it would cost you to be wrong. What you do with that is yours.
Why it moves
In 1833 a French chemist named Michel Eugène Chevreul began working on what was then called the magic pendulum. He kept at it, on and off, for twenty years. His finding was that the movement comes from the hand holding it: small involuntary muscular reactions, below the level of anything you would notice deciding. The sharpest part came next. Once a holder understood this, the swing stopped, and no amount of trying brought it back.
In 1852 the physician William Benjamin Carpenter named the effect, from ideo for the idea and motor for the muscle: the ideomotor effect. It is the same mechanism behind a planchette moving under several pairs of hands.
Leverage is the whole of it. A few millimeters at your fingers becomes a wide, slow, legible arc at the bottom of the chain, and an arc is far easier to read than a hand. A pendulum is a tool, and the power is in the one handling it.
What actually differs between the shapes
Not accuracy. None of these is more accurate than another, and anyone who tells you otherwise has something to sell you.
What changes is how the piece behaves while you hold it, which matters more than it sounds, because you need to be able to watch the thing without straining.
A longer body swings wide and slow. There is time to see it happen, and it carries on long enough that you are not left wondering whether you imagined it. The Isis and the Double Isis are the long ones.
A shorter, stockier body swings tight and comes to rest sooner. Some find that easier to trust, since there is less room for the arc to wander off. The Osiris and the Drop sit at that end.
That is the whole of the difference. Everything after it is which one you want to pick up, and for an object you will be holding while you think about the questions above, that is a perfectly sound way to choose.
The turned shapes
The Drop is short and heavy, one of the two smallest, with the mass concentrated low and close. Properly this is the Mermet, after Abbé Mermet, the Swiss priest who documented dowsing in the early twentieth century. The teardrop he used became the standard form, which is why almost every pendulum you have ever seen is a version of it.
The Osiris is the stockiest of the turned shapes. The mass sits high and close, so it settles sooner than the longer ones. In practice that means a tighter arc that comes to rest quickly rather than carrying on.
The Karnak is the essential one: a short body with turned rings and no ornament beyond them, which is why it reads as clean rather than plain. We do not know where the form comes from. The accounts differ, none of them hold up, and we have stopped repeating them.
The Double Isis is the narrowest and lightest of the range, two tapers meeting, which is where the name comes from. This was the original design, and we called it the Isis until the current Isis joined the range. If you bought one from us years ago as an Isis, this is the piece you have.
The Isis is the longest of the range: a slender body with a long taper, so a wider and slower swing than anything else here. It is also the one most often chosen for its name rather than its shape, by people who came to it through the goddess rather than through dowsing.
The geometric one
The Merkaba is the only one that is not a turned shape: two interlocking tetrahedra. It is carved on the same machines as the rest, which is what makes the points meet. The form comes from sacred geometry, and people generally arrive at it already knowing what it is and why they want it.
The animal ones
The Cat is a Karnak body with a cat's head above the rings, pointed ears and a rounded face. People choose it because they feel connected to the animal: as a spirit animal, as a symbol, or as the one snoozing on the couch.
The Owl is a Karnak body with an owl's head above the rings, a round face with a short beak. An owl sees in the dark and turns its head about three quarters of the way round, which is why it has stood for watchfulness and for knowing things other people don't, from Athena's companion onward. People choose it as a spirit animal, a symbol or a guardian.
Choosing one
If you have read this far without forming a preference, the Karnak is the plain center of the range and the Drop is the form everything else descends from. Either is a sound place to start.
Practical notes
Each piece is carved from a single piece of palo santo, Peru-sourced and Taiwan-crafted, reclaimed from trees that had already fallen and aged here for more than twenty years. Computer-guided carving is what makes the rings exact and the balance repeatable. No two pieces of wood are identical, but every Karnak is the same Karnak.
The chain is stainless steel. Hold it wherever the length suits you rather than at a fixed point; the arc changes with the length you leave, and finding the one you like is most of setting a pendulum up.
The wood has been drying for more than twenty years, so it is stable in a way fresh wood is not. Keep it out of direct sun and dry heat, as you would anything wooden you care about. Take it off before water and dry it rather than leaving it wet. There is nothing to oil or wax: the oil is inside the wood, not on the surface. The surface scent softens with handling, which is normal, and the resin is still there underneath.
Color runs from pale yellow to deep amber depending on where in the log the piece came from. Nothing is wrong.
More from the Journal: how to wear your mala.