A pendulum session, step by step
Ten minutes, a table, a board, a pendulum. This guide follows a session from start to finish, including the blind test, which tells you honestly what the pendulum adds.
Before you start
- Choose a quiet place with no draught: a breath of air is enough to move the pendulum.
- Print the board at 100% scale and get the test notebook ready.
- Take a light pendulum (see the tools).
The session
- Settle in. Sit with your elbow on the table and the thread held between thumb and index finger. The weight hangs a centimetre or two above the board, over the centre point.
- Wait for stillness. Breathe calmly until the pendulum has almost stopped moving.
- Set your reference points. Say in your mind "show me yes", then "show me no", and watch the movement. Write them down: they are personal, and there is no "official" meaning.
- Ask a closed question. "Do I like the colour blue?" works. "What should I do with my life?" does not suit it.
- Watch without guiding. Let the pendulum go. If you feel you are pushing it, that is normal: it is exactly the ideomotor effect (see what science says).
- Note it down and stop. Write the question, what happened and what you make of it. Stop after ten minutes.
What questions to ask
- Questions for fun or curiosity, whose answer you can check afterwards.
- Never about health, money, a separation or a court decision.
- Never about an absent or missing person: if someone has disappeared, call the police.
The blind test
This is the step that matters most. Another person slips a coin under one of two cups, without you seeing which. You consult the pendulum, you choose, then they lift the cup. Do 20 trials, noting each one in the notebook.
- Chance gives on average 10 right answers out of 20.
- Between 7 and 13 is perfectly ordinary.
- 15 or more happens by chance about 2 times in 100: do it again, to see whether it repeats.
If the results stay close to 10, the pendulum adds nothing to your intuition or to chance. That is useful information, and it is what controlled tests generally find.
Common mistakes
- Asking a question whose answer you already know, then seeing a confirmation in it.
- Starting over until you get the answer you hoped for.
- Remembering only the hits and forgetting the misses.