How Does a Pendulum Actually Work, and Is It Just Telling Me What I Want to Hear?

It’s late, you’re scrolling, and a video stops you. Someone is holding a crystal pendulum on a chain over a board marked yes and no. They ask if the person you’re thinking about is coming back. The crystal swings toward yes, and the caption says whoever needs to hear this, this one is for you.

For a second, you wonder if it’s about you.

I get why those videos pull you in. A pendulum looks simple, the answer comes fast, and it feels like something bigger is weighing in on your life. Before you take a stranger’s swing as the final word, though, it helps to know what actually moves that chain. Once that’s clear, you’ll see why it can’t answer for you. You’ll also see how you can learn to use one yourself.

Chevreul, Faraday, and a Ouija Board

The pendulum moves because your hand moves it. You just don’t feel yourself doing it.

Your fingers and wrist make tiny muscle movements below your awareness. The weight on the end of the chain picks those up and turns them into a swing you can see. Back in the 1800s, a French chemist named Michel Chevreul studied this with hand-held pendulums. In 1852, a physiologist named William Carpenter gave it a name, the ideomotor effect, meaning an idea turning into movement without a conscious decision. A year later, Michael Faraday tested the table-turning that was popular at séances. He showed the people around the table were moving it themselves, in the direction they expected, without knowing they were doing it.

For a long time, that settled it for most skeptics. It’s just your muscles, so it’s nothing.

You can see the first half of this for yourself. Hold a pendulum as still as you can, then picture it swinging side to side without moving on purpose. Watch what happens when you keep that picture in your head.

Then in 2012, researchers at the University of British Columbia tested whether those small movements carry real information. They asked people yes or no questions and had them respond two ways. One was out loud. The other was through a Ouija board, which runs on the same kind of small movement a pendulum does. When they believed they were only guessing, their guesses out loud were right about 50 percent of the time. That’s chance. Their answers through the board were right 65 percent of the time.

Same people, same questions. Their hands knew more than their conscious minds thought they did.

Where I Believe It Connects

I don’t believe there’s a fairy or an entity moving the pendulum. I believe it’s accessing a higher part of our consciousness that bypasses the ego. It uses those micro muscle movements to help get us to the solution without our mind, and our attachment to the result, getting in the way.

The research gets you partway there. It shows those movements can surface something your thinking mind can’t reach on its own. Where I go further is in what that something is.

I don’t know exactly what it attaches to, other than a higher state that isn’t attached to ego or identity. Is it another version of us? Is it creator, or source? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does.

Some people will read that and decide it’s all in your head. In a way, it is. I just think there’s more in there than most of us ever use, and it reaches further than we give it credit for.

What I do know is that it’s there, and it’s already in you. You don’t have to earn it, and you don’t have to buy anything to reach it.

You Can Force It Without Knowing

Those same small movements will carry what you want just as easily as what you know. Faraday’s table-turners expected the table to move, and their hands obliged without asking permission.

I do believe you can force it, even unconsciously. So it’s important to know when there’s a strong attachment to a specific result. When there is, learn to put that away for a bit, so it can show you the truth and not what you want to hear.

Asking it 20 times until you see what you want isn’t the right thing either. Every time you re-ask, your wanting gets another turn at the chain, and eventually it wins.

Think about the questions that come up most in those videos. Is he coming back? Is she thinking about me? Will I get the job? Those are the questions we’re most attached to, so they’re the ones the chain handles worst.

So what about the stranger swinging it for you? Even if it reaches something bigger than them, their chain still carries their own small movements and their own expectations. They’re also asking a vague question about someone they’ve never met. That’s the same mistake my son made with the jack of hearts, just aimed at your life instead of a deck of cards.

The Jack of Hearts

I tell people to start with a deck of cards. Pull out three of something, like three sevens, and one face card, then lay all four face down.

Years ago I did this with my son. He was about 10, sitting on the couch in our living room with his pendulum. The cards were face down, and he had no idea which one was the jack of hearts.

It wasn’t working at first. He was asking wrong, and it kept telling him no over and over. Card after card, no.

He could have quit and decided the whole thing was broken. Instead, it taught him how to ask specific questions and to think critically about what he was really asking. Finally, he learned he had to ask, “Is there the letter J and a heart symbol on this card?”

And he found it.

“Is this the jack of hearts” is a label. “Is there the letter J and a heart symbol on this card” is a picture, and the picture gave him something concrete to check each card against. Every no had been pointing at his question. So he fixed the question and kept going until it was clear enough to answer.

That’s a different thing from fishing. He changed the question each time instead of repeating it, hoping for a better answer.

One find on its own could be luck, since he had a one in four shot. What convinced me is what I’ve watched it do again and again since then.

Already Connected

You’re already connected to that higher state. You can access it, and you can depend on it, once you learn to set aside what you want to hear.

Start small. Use a deck of cards on your own couch, and ask questions you don’t have a stake in yet. Notice how the swing feels when you care about the answer, and how it feels when you don’t. That difference will teach you more than any video will.

When you catch yourself leaning toward one answer before the chain even moves, put it down. Then come back when you can ask the question and be okay with either result. That’s when it has room to show you something real.

If you’re curious where you land on the psychic spectrum, the quiz below is a good place to start.