Mystical Levitation

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Mystical levitation is the reported rising of the body from the ground during religious ecstasy — a phenomenon recorded again and again in Christian hagiography, where it is offered as a visible sign of an invisible event in the soul. The Latin language of the sources keeps the two apart: raptus, the rapture or seizure of the spirit caught up toward God, and sublevatio corporis, the lifting of the body that was said sometimes to accompany it.

The vocabulary is older than the spectacle. Raptus enters Christian thought through Paul, who writes of being “caught up” to the third heaven and confesses he cannot say whether it happened in the body or out of it (2 Corinthians 12). Medieval and early-modern mystical theology took that uncertainty as its theme: rapture was understood as a height of contemplative union in which the ordinary working of the senses is suspended and the will is held fast by God. Whether the body shared in it at all was a further question — and it is at that edge, between an inward seizure and a physical one, that the levitation accounts sit.

Two figures anchor the tradition. Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Carmelite reformer, describes in her own writing an ecstasy so overpowering she felt herself lifted and, by her account, asked her sisters to hold her down; she treated the experience warily, more burden than honor. Joseph of Cupertino, a seventeenth-century Franciscan, became the figure around whom the claim gathered most densely — witnesses at his canonization proceedings testified that he rose into the air during Mass and at the sight of sacred images, earning him, in later devotion, the title of patron of flyers. Around such cases the Church itself was cautious: ecstatic phenomena were scrutinized, and the capacity of levitation to be counterfeited, or to come from a source other than God, was a standing worry of those who examined them.

What the sources offer is testimony, not measurement. The accounts are devotional documents, recorded by admirers and shaped by the conventions of sainthood, and historians read them as such — evidence of what a community believed it saw and of how it understood holiness, rather than of what physically occurred. Practitioners and witnesses held the rising to be a real effect of grace overflowing the body; the tradition itself never made it the measure of sanctity, ranking the hidden union far above any sign of it. The phenomenon is reported, too, well beyond Christianity — of yogins, of Sufi saints, of figures across the contemplative traditions — and the resemblance is worth noting without being pressed: each setting reads the rising in its own terms, as confirmation of a height already described in its own vocabulary. The claim has remained exactly where the early theologians left it, a sign whose meaning was always taken to lie above it.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism