Human Levitation

Human Levitation

There are reports of over 200 Christian saints levitating – usually involuntarily – during religious raptures, and some cases are supported by an impressive amount of eyewitness testimony.1

For instance, the 16th-century mystic St Teresa of Avila was observed on many occasions, typically when deep in prayer, to rise anywhere from a few feet to as high as the ceiling of the room. When she felt an ‘attack’ coming on she would beg the sisters in her convent to hold her down, though they were not always successful. Once while receiving Holy Communion from the Bishop of Avila, she felt her knees begin to leave the floor so she clutched onto the grille. But after receiving the sacrament, she let go and rose into the air.

    The 17^th century Franciscan monk St Joseph of Copertino began levitating during services and was often observed by whole congregations. Once while walking in the monastery grounds, he soared up into the branches of an olive tree and remained kneeling on a branch for half an hour, the thin stem hardly moving under his weight. Unable to glide down, after his ecstasy had passed, he had to wait for a ladder to be brought. For 35 years he was banned from all public services, but he levitated not only before the Pope and his fellow monks but also before Europe’s titled heads and the philosopher Leibnitz.

The Spanish ambassador to the papal court watched him fly over the heads of a crowd to a statue of the Virgin Mary, where he briefly hovered. After giving his customary shriek, he flew back; the ambassador’s wife had to be revived with smelling salts. The duke of Brunswick hid himself in a stairway to observe one of Joseph’s levitations. After observing a second levitation, the duke renounced his Lutheran faith and became a Catholic. At Osimo, Joseph flew eight feet into the air to kiss a statue of Jesus then carried it off to his cell and floated about with it. He is also reported to have caught up another friar and carried him in the air around the room.

    The annals of 19th-century spiritualism contain many references to human levitations, as well as to tables, chairs, and other objects gaining or losing weight, levitating, and moving without human contact.2 The most famous levitator of all was the medium Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced: Hume). His first recorded levitation took place at a seance in August 1852. He was suddenly ‘taken up into the air . . . He palpitated from head to foot with the contending emotions of joy and fear . . . Again and again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the ceiling of the apartment, with which his hands and feet came into gentle contact.’

    He later became able to levitate at will, and believed he was lifted up by ‘spirits’. During a public career spanning 30 years, hundreds of people witnessed his levitations. The most famous incident was when in the company of Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay, and a friend of theirs, he floated out of one window of a London house and in at another. The eminent English scientist Sir William Crookes saw him levitate on several occasions and verified that there was no trickery involved. On one occasion, Crookes’ wife, who was sitting beside Home, was raised off the ground in her chair.3

    The magician Harry Kellar, who enjoyed showing audiences how mediums did their tricks, described how during a world tour in the 1870s he was watching a Zulu witch doctor go into a trance when suddenly ‘to my intense amazement, the recumbent body slowly arose from the ground and floated upward in the air to the height of about three feet, where for a while it floated, moving up and down’. In 1882 he challenged the medium William Eglinton to perform some feat which no conjuror could repeat. Eglinton then levitated, carrying Kellar, holding his foot, into the air – an achievement which Kellar had to admit he could not explain.4

    The Italian medium Eusapia Palladino occasionally used to levitate and was also able to increase or decrease the weight of objects. Her paranormal powers were verified in investigations conducted by European scientists around the turn of the 20th century. After witnessing her demonstrations, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion stated that levitation should no longer be any more in question than the attraction of iron by a magnet.⁵

    In the 1920s Brazilian medium Carlos Mirabelli performed stunning phenomena under test conditions. Full-form materializations of deceased individuals known to the witnesses appeared, who were able to converse with the investigators, and to touch and be touched. He was also able to levitate and remain floating for minutes at a time. In one instance, a chair with Mirabelli in it rose into the air until it was two metres above the floor, where it remained for two minutes.⁶ Levitations of mediums have frequently been reported since then in spiritualist journals but, as far as is known, no medium has been able to produce them in fraud-proof conditions.

Fig. 6.1 Mirabelli levitating.
 

    

Levitation is one of the Catholic Church’s criteria for demonic possession. In 1906 a 16-year-old schoolgirl from South Africa, Clara Germana Cele, who was allegedly possessed, levitated up to 5 feet off the ground, sometimes vertically and sometimes horizontally. She fell if sprinkled with holy water.⁷

    In the mid-19th century, Louis Jacolliot, Chief Justice of Chandernagore, travelled all over India to learn more about wonder-working fakirs. He witnessed many extraordinary phenomena, which he tried to view in an objective and unprejudiced manner. In Varanasi (Benares) he met a fakir named Covindasamy, who performed various paranormal phenomena for him. On one occasion he crossed his arms on his chest and slowly levitated to a height of ten to twelve inches, remaining in the air more than eight minutes.⁸ Another of his levitations is described by Jacolliot as follows:

Leaning upon [his] cane with one hand, the Fakir rose gradually about two feet from the ground. His legs were crossed beneath him, and he made no change in his position . . .

    For more than twenty minutes I tried to see how Covindasamy could thus fly in the face and eyes of all the known laws of gravity; it was entirely beyond my comprehension; the stick gave him no visible support, and there was no apparent contact between that and his body, except through his right hand.⁹

    A similar display was reported by American journalist John Keel. While travelling in Sikkim in the 1950s, he met an old lama who demonstrated his ability to levitate.

He . . . pressed one hand on top of his stick, a heavy branch about four feet long, frowned a little with effort, and then slowly lifted his legs up off the floor until he was sitting cross-legged in the air! There was nothing behind him or under him. His sole support was his stick, which he seemed to use to keep his balance. I was astounded.

The lama then conducted the rest of the conversation ‘sitting there in empty space’.¹⁰

    In July 1916, P. Muller, a German veterinarian stationed in Turkey, attended a gathering of the Rufai dervishes. He described a large hall in which white-robed dervishes wearing tall black caps ‘moved in a circle with sideways steps and curious jerking motions’. About an hour into the ceremony, the music and dancing and cries of the dancers intensified, when suddenly one of them bounded into the middle of the circle. He stood still, with his arms upraised, palms facing the sky:

And now the incomprehensible happened . . . [S]lowly the whole tense body of this man elevated itself about eighteen inches off the floor and remained there, floating in the air with the toes pointing down.

The ecstatic man remained suspended for about a minute.¹¹

    Tibetans speak of a power of fast-walking known as lung-gom. An eye-witness account was provided by Alexandra David-Neel, an early 20^th century explorer, journalist, and Buddhist. While in northern Tibet, she saw a man approaching with an ‘unusual gait’ and ‘extraordinary swiftness’.

I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum.¹²

    The native American Indians apparently knew of a similar method of magical running. In the 1920s anthropologist Carobeth Laird reported on one of the last men to travel ‘the old way’: the tracks left by his feet were very faint and far apart, as if his feet had barely touched the ground.¹³

    On 6 June 1936, Indian yogi Subbayah Pullavar levitated for four minutes in front of 150 witnesses. He was in a state of deep trance and, once back on the ground, his limbs could not be unbent at first.¹⁴

Fig. 6.2 Indian yogi Subbayah Pullavar. 

 

    

In 1984 a German film crew filmed the levitation of an African witch-doctor, Nana Owaka, in Togo. After meditating for a full day, he placed dry leaves and twigs in a circle and sat in the middle.

Just as the sun was setting, Owaka started to stir. A villager lit the circle of twigs and flames shot up. Drums began beating wildly – then we were hardly able to believe our eyes as Owaka stood and rose straight upward! It was as if he were being lifted on a pillow of air. He simply hung as if suspended, with nothing above or below him.

After about a minute, Owaka fell back to earth. He was filmed from two angles, and no one who has examined the film has been able to detect any signs of trickery.¹⁵

    Paranormal phenomena, including levitation, are sometimes reported in connection with UFO encounters. For instance, in 1954 a man who was coming back from the fields with his horse had to let go of the bridle as the animal was lifted several feet into the air when a dark, circular object flew fast over the trail they were following. In 1968 a French doctor saw two glowing discs in the sky merge into a single object, and during the sighting he was hit by a beam of light. A few days later he and his baby son each developed a strange, reddish, triangular mark on the abdomen, and this mark recurred in successive years.

Strange paranormal phenomena began to take place, including poltergeist activity, unexplained disturbances in electrical circuits, meetings with a mysterious, nameless man, and on at least one occasion uncontrolled levitation.16
 

References

1.  Rodney Charles and Anna Jordan, Lighter than Air: Miracles of human flight from Christian saints to native American spirits, Fairfield, IO: Sunstar Publishing, 1995, pp. 155-180; Stuart Gordon, The Paranormal: An illustrated encyclopedia, London: Headline, 1992, p. 395; Brian Inglis, The Paranormal: An encyclopedia of psychic phenomena, London: Paladin, 1985, pp. 159-160; Richard S. Broughton, Parapsychology: The controversial science, New York: Ballantine Books, 1991, pp. 52-53.

2.  William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874, Pomeroy, WA: Health Research, n.d., pp. 9-19, 21-43, 88-91; H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1972 (1877), 1:202-204, 358-359.

3.  Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, pp. 89-90; Gordon, The Paranormal, pp. 395-396; Inglis, The Paranormal, p. 161.

4.  Inglis, The Paranormal, pp. 161-162.

5.  Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A history of the paranormal, Bridport, Dorset: Prism Press, Lindfield, NSW: Unity Press, 1992, p. 425.

6.  Brian Inglis, Science and Parascience: A history of the paranormal, 1914-1939, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984, p. 224.

7.  Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, New York: Checkmark Books, 2nd ed., 2000, p. 221.

8.  Louis Jacolliot, Occult Science in India and Among the Ancients, NY: University Books, 1971, p. 257.

9.  Ibid., pp. 237-238.

10.                    Lighter than Air, pp. 64-65.

11.                    Ibid., p. 132.

12.                    Alexandra David-Neel, With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, London: Penguin Books, 1937, p. 186.

13.                    Lighter than Air, pp. 98-99.

14.                    Gordon, The Paranormal, pp. 358/9.

15.                    D. Hatcher Childress (ed.), The Anti-Gravity Handbook, Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1993, p. 171.

16.                    ‘UFOs: the psychic dimension’, section 6, davidpratt.info.

From Bibliotecapleyades @ http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_gravity02.htm#5.%20Human%20levitation  


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