The Trouble with Levitation and Bilocation
Unlike spontaneous healing miracles, which really do occur with some frequency and are acknowledged by skeptics and believers alike, including medical professionals who are atheists, levitations and bilocations are extremely rare events that are seldom taken seriously outside certain belief systems. Levitation and bilocation are but two of several physical phenomena that have been linked to mystical ecstasy in various cultures and religions around the world for thousands of years.
They are also among the oddest of wonders, everywhere, not just because they seem to happen infrequently but also because by suggesting the presence and power of an unseen force that can toy with nature, they tend not to serve any practical purpose other than confirming the special status of the person who levitates or bilocates. In a religious context—and most accounts of levitations and bilocations have religious origins—the unseen force is usually ascribed to some higher being, but it can also be ascribed to the levitators and bilocators themselves, who are so obviously unlike most of their fellow human beings for whom the tug of gravity within a single location is inescapable. In Christianity, that higher being could be God or the devil, and levitators could be viewed as either holy or diabolical, or, in some cases, as clever frauds. As awesome displays of raw unnatural power, the phenomena of levitation and bilocation have few equals, and this fact alone makes them inherently ambiguous and powerful all at once.
But how is it possible to speak about something that can’t possibly happen? Where is the fact, that most essential component of history? “Fact” is an English word with many meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary lays out dozens of them. But only one of these applies in this case:
A thing that has really occurred or is actually the case; a thing certainly known to be a real occurrence or to represent the truth. Hence: a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to an inference, a conjecture, or a fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based on it.
So where is the “datum of experience” in any account of levitation or bilocation? What is the fact of any levitation or bilocation that anyone can hope to deal with in accounts from the distant past? Acts of levitation or bilocation are “wild facts,” to use a term coined by philosopher- psychologist William James over a century ago. As he defined it, a wild fact is any occurrence that has “no stall or pigeonhole” into which “the ordinary and critical mind” can fit it. The alterity of any such phenomenon is so extreme, said James, that it becomes “unclassifiable” as well as an unimaginable “paradoxical absurdity” that must be considered inherently untrue as well as impossible. Such wild facts puzzle scientists so much, he observed, that they “always prove more easy to ignore than to attend to.” James was intensely interested in psychic and mystical phenomena and greatly pained by the dismissive attitude his fellow scientists displayed toward these phenomena. Most of them, he quipped, thought that passing “from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity.”
The situation James described long ago has not changed all that much, and in some respects has worsened for anyone who wants to take wild facts such as levitation and bilocation seriously. This leaves the historian or anyone with a critical mind in a tight spot. If wild facts are “paradoxical absurdities,” are there any facts whatsoever left to study? The answer is yes, of course, and my book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, is proof of it. The fact we can explore is not the act of levitation itself, the wild fact that is inaccessible to us. The fact we can deal with is the testimony. This issue is as brutally simple as it is brutally circumscribed: since we have no films or photographs to analyze for authenticity with the latest cutting-edge technology, all we have is the fact that thousands of testimonies exist in which human beings swore they saw another human being hover or fly, or suddenly materialize in some other location. As one historian has argued, facts can be “hammered into signposts, which point beyond themselves . . . to states of affairs to which we have no direct access.” They are “the mercenary soldiers of argument, ready to enlist in yours or mine, wherever the evidentiary fit is best.” Testimonies, then, are the only fact—as well as the only evidence—upon which any investigation of levitation and bilocation, or history of any “impossible” event that might have occurred in the past, can rest.
Consequently, a history of the impossible is a history of testimonies about impossible events. Our dominant culture dismisses these testimonies as unbelievable and merely “anecdotal”—that is, as accounts that have no point of reference beyond themselves, no wider context, and little or no credibility. So why not call it a history of lying, a history of hallucinations, or a history of the ridiculous? The answer to this question is as brutally simple as the issue itself: We need not dismiss all accounts of the impossible as mere anecdotes or falsehoods because the testimonies themselves self-consciously accept the impossible event as impossible, as well as bafflingly and utterly real—even terrifying—and of great significance. Moreover, the sheer number of such testimonies is so relatively large, so widespread across time and geographical boundaries, and so closely linked to civil and ecclesiastical institutions that they most certainly do have a broader context into which they fit. And that is a very rare and credible kind of evidence, as unique as the events confirmed by it.
Levitation is one of the best of all entry points into the history of the impossible, principally because it is an event for which we have an overabundance of testimonies, not just in Western Christianity but throughout all of world history. Yet levitation is still a subject that attracts disparagement and repels serious inquiry: the very claim that any human being can defy the laws of gravity seems way too absurd nowadays, more than two centuries after Newton, despite the existence of high-speed trains that employ magnetic levitation to hover and fly forward while suspended just a few centimeters above their tracks. Human levitation seems incompatible with seriousness. It’s a light subject: weightless, flighty, insubstantial, the quintessence of levity. It smacks of occultism too, or overcredulity, especially if anyone dares to suggest it is possible rather than impossible. And such suggestions can seem shockingly unscholarly. Any study of levitation is difficult to get off the ground, as the pun would have it, for the subject gets little respect and not much has been written about it. Even a crank such as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, a Spanish historian who eagerly defended absurd notions—including the claim that Catholic orthodoxy was genetically transmitted among pure-blooded Spaniards— had no patience with levitation and other physical phenomena associated with mystical ecstasy. What this most unreasonable man had to say long ago about levitation and other related phenomena, such as stigmata, is still very much in line with prevailing thought: “Leave all these cases lying in oblivion. Let them be brought to light, in due course, by those who are researching folk customs, or those who wish to satisfy a childish sort of curiosity.”
Bilocation is another entry point into the history of the impossible and another subject that Menéndez Pelayo would have wanted to sink into oblivion. Like levitation, it is a phenomenon found in many religions and cultures from ancient times to the present. But, like levitation, it seems incompatible with seriousness, and therefore it receives an equal amount of disrespect and contemptuous dismissals, even though we now have the technology to make bilocation or multilocation possible via the internet. Testimonies of bilocations are fewer in number than those of levitations in Christian history, and the phenomenon is impossible in a double way: not just as something that “cannot” happen but also as something that no one can ever witness in both locations simultaneously. Verifying its occurrence requires matching up eyewitness accounts from different locations ex post facto, something that makes all testimonies less immediate and therefore more open to the likelihood of fraud. But there is no denying the fact that such corroborations have been recorded and accepted as factual, as in the case of the bilocation of Saint Ignatius Loyola to the bedside of the ailing Alexander Petronius.
Circling back to Menéndez Pelayo’s dismissal of all such testimonies, we conclude that since this is not a book on folk customs, then, the only other option open to us is a childish one. But what is more childish: to ignore levitation and other such impossible phenomena or to acknowledge their presence in history? If the past itself includes bizarre events and beliefs, are these to be dismissed simply because they seem illogical or because our current frame of reference differs so much from that of previous centuries? The easiest path is to say, yes, of course. But a wiser path to take might be to say, no, of course not. As Lucien Febvre, a very savvy historian, once said: “To comprehend is not to clarify, simplify, or to reduce things to a perfectly clear logical scheme. To comprehend is to complicate, to augment in depth. It is to widen on all sides. It is to vivify.” And this vivifying requires not only embracing what might seem strange in the past but accepting the strangeness as an essential rational feature of the past, not as something irrational. As Darren Oldridge has observed, in tandem with Febvre: “However peculiar they now seem, the beliefs of pre-modern people were normally a rational response to the intellectual and social context in which they were expressed.”
To bring the past to life in Febvre’s sense, then, one must take stock of what might seem outrageously alien, especially if it was once an essential component of a culture’s worldview. Yet, what seems alien is only analyzed piecemeal in our day and age. Take witchcraft, for instance. Hardly anyone nowadays would doubt the significance of this subject or the interest it generates in Western cultures. In fact, witchcraft studies are very much in vogue. Thanks to historians who have vivified it, we now have so many books and articles on this subject that it has become immensely difficult to gain expertise in it. But many of those who specialize in witchcraft often ignore levitation, a key trait associated with witches, choosing instead to focus on other issues, especially those concerning social, economic, and political factors. So, one needs to ask, why is the study of witchcraft so popular, even though it entails dealing with reports of “evil” human flight, while the study of “holy” levitation is so disdainfully overlooked? Is belief in flying witches worthier of attention than belief in flying saints? This book argues that both deserve equal attention.
In addition to being a light subject that instantly gives rise to punning and joking, levitation also has a shady reputation to overcome, and not just because of its association with demoniacs, witches, and magicians. Levitations are among the most ambiguous of mystical phenomena in Catholic Christianity for two reasons: because of the belief that they can be caused by the devil rather than God and because of the fact that they can also be faked, and have been regularly faked for millennia by all sorts of wizards and hucksters. Contrived acts of levitation performed under tightly controlled conditions can seem real indeed when those performing them are experts at creating illusions and at fooling their audience’s senses. It matters little if the illusion is performed on a stage as entertainment or in a chapel or some dimly lit parlor as deceit. A well-faked levitation is still an illusion rather than a miracle. This fact casts a huge dark shadow over all levitations, for it is widely known that anyone who devotes enough time and effort to creating such an illusion might be able to pull it off.
Reports of bilocations are even more vulnerable to dismissal than levitations, simply because no single witness can attest to the simultaneous presence of anyone in two different locations. To fake a bilocation seems easy enough. All one needs to do is to recruit or bribe expert liars at both locations. Consequently, believing in reports of bilocations requires a more intense leap of faith than believing in levitations.
Nonetheless, religious levitations—that is, those ascribed to supernatural or spiritual causes—can also raise all sorts of questions about the possibility of deceit, especially when they happen in intimate indoor settings. But when they occur unexpectedly in locations where rigging up contraptions to perform a trick or to create mass hallucinations seems more impossible than a miracle, then other sorts of questions pop up concerning their feasibility. In such levitations we are faced with two impossibilities simultaneously, that of the phenomenon itself and that of the lack of hidden contrivances or sensory illusions. And, much more so than bilocation, it is precisely these kinds of levitations—those where deceit itself seems impossible—that are the most puzzling of all and serve as the best of entryways into the history of the impossible.
The likelihood of deceit haunts levitations and bilocations in yet another way, figuratively and literally, for not too long ago these phenomena became intensely linked with ghosts and spirits rather than God or the devil. This happened due to a rise in popularity of the quasi-religious occult movement known as Spiritualism, which spread like wildfire across North and South America, Europe, and other corners of the Western world between the 1860s and the 1920s. Spiritualism had its detractors, for sure, especially among the Christian clergy, professional illusionists, and an array of skeptics, but it was not restricted to quirky outcasts on the margins of respectability. Quite the contrary. As hard as it might be to imagine nowadays, Spiritualism attracted a broad spectrum of devotees, some of whom belonged to the upper echelons of society, such as the eminent chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes; novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the hyperrational and immensely popular fictional character Sherlock Holmes; evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin’s closest collaborator and competitor; the Nobel laureates Pierre and Marie Curie, pioneers in the study of radiation; and Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of American president Abraham Lincoln, who attended the séances she held regularly at the White House.
The term “levitation” was coined by spiritualists in the nineteenth century. Although accounts of hovering or flying men and women stretch back to antiquity, no specific term had ever been applied to the phenomenon. But, given its centrality in spiritualist ritual, especially during séances at which mediums levitated objects, their own bodies, or those of others—ostensibly through the agency of spirits—the amazing feat needed a name, and “levitation” seemed to suit the cult’s quasi-scientific needs perfectly. Derived as it was from the Latin levitas, or “lightness,” the exact opposite of “gravitas,” or “heaviness,” the newly minted term had a distinctly Newtonian feel to it, evoking his law of universal gravitation and empirical objectivity while conveying a sense of the mysteriously spiritual and otherworldly. “Bilocation” was another quasi-scientific term favored by spiritualists, who believed that the human body had an “astral double,” a spiritual component that could leave the physical body and appear elsewhere.
Spiritualism never disappeared completely. In fact, the ever-popular Ouija board, still a best-selling game, made and marketed as a toy by Hasbro, the same company that makes Monopoly, is a spiritualist device. But as Spiritualism’s heyday waned, so did interest in levitation and bilocation. By 1928, when Olivier Leroy published the one and only comprehensive history of levitation written in the twentieth century, the popularity of Spiritualism was already fading fast. And no comparable effort was ever made to cover the history of bilocation. Doyle, who died in 1930, seemed to embody the cult’s decline in his final years. His zealous defense of communication with the dead and of photographs of ghosts and fairies had by then become more of a disposable Victorian curiosity than a set of beliefs to embrace, and since levitation and bilocation were part of the spiritualist package deal, they, too, gradually vanished, except in occultist circles, into the cobwebbed attic of the public’s imagination.
EDITORIAL NOTE: this essay is excerpted from They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2024). The McGrath Institute for Church Life will host a lunch colloquium with Prof. Eire on October 11, 2024. Prof. Eire will also be delivering a Saturday with the Saints lecture on October 12.