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 taken as a visible sign of an invisible event in the soul. The Latin language of the sources keeps the two apart, and the distinction is the whole grammar of the subject. Raptus — rapture, the seizure of the spirit caught up toward God — is the inward event. Sublevatio corporis — the lifting of the body — is the outward thing that was said sometimes to accompany it. A mystic might be rapt without rising; the rising, when it came, was understood as the spirit’s condition spilling over into the flesh, the lesser made visible because the greater could not be seen. The accounts never confuse the two, and the theology that examined them ranked them as unequal from the start.

Teresa of Ávila in the portrait painted from life by Fray Juan de la Miseria, c. 1576 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Raptus before sublevatio: Paul’s uncertainty

The vocabulary is older than the spectacle, and it carries a deliberate hesitation at its root. Raptus enters Christian thought through Paul of Tarsus, who writes in his second letter to the Corinthians of a man — himself, in the third person — caught up to the third heaven, and confesses that he cannot say whether it happened in the body or out of it; God knows, he says, and he does not (2 Corinthians 12). The phrase he uses, rendered in Greek as a seizing or snatching away, gave the Latin West its word for the experience. What is striking is that the founding text of Christian rapture leaves the body’s part unresolved on purpose. Paul does not claim his flesh ascended; he declines to rule it out; and the not-knowing is offered as proof of the event’s height rather than as a defect in the report.

The seizure of Paul on the road to Damascus, the event behind the language of raptus — Caravaggio, c. 1600–1601, Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Medieval and early-modern mystical theology took that uncertainty as its theme. Rapture was defined as a degree of contemplative union — a height of prayer in which the ordinary working of the senses is suspended and the will is held fast by God, beyond the soul’s power to summon or refuse. The contemplative writers who mapped these states (the broader doctrine belongs to Christian mysticism and to mysticism as such) treated union as the substance and every bodily effect as a by-product. Whether the body shared in the seizure at all remained Paul’s open question, carried forward for fifteen centuries. It is exactly at that edge — between an inward rapture and a physical one, between the spirit caught up and the body lifted — that the levitation accounts sit. They do not resolve Paul’s uncertainty so much as dramatize it: here, the sources say, is a case where the body did seem to go too, and even then the witnesses are careful to say what the meaning was, and the meaning was never the height of the floor.

Two figures: Teresa’s reluctance, Joseph’s flights

Two figures anchor the tradition, and they anchor it from opposite directions — one from within, in the first person, and one from without, in the testimony of crowds.

Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Carmelite reformer (1515–1582), supplies the indispensable interior account. In her Vida, the autobiography written under obedience to her confessors, she distinguishes a family of states — unión, arrobamiento (rapture), elevamiento (elevation), the flight of the spirit, arrebatamiento (ravishment) — and calls them finally one thing seen at different intensities. What she records of the bodily lifting is not triumph but struggle. She describes being raised by a force beneath her so strong she has nothing to compare it to; she describes resisting it as though wrestling a giant, sometimes prevailing and often not; she confesses fear at seeing her own body leave the ground, and she asked her sisters to hold her down, especially when an ecstasy threatened to come upon her in public. She begged God to take the gift away. Her discomfort is theologically exact and not incidental: it instantiates the rule that the grace is received, unwilled, even unwanted — the mystic is acted upon, never the agent — and her holy reluctance became a model the later literature reproduced. One of her nuns, Anne of the Incarnation, later deposed to having seen Teresa raised a foot and a half from the floor and held there. The detail that matters in Teresa’s own telling is that the rising embarrassed her; she wanted the union and not the sign of it.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble group (1647–1652) in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, depicting the rapture she described — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Joseph of Cupertino, the seventeenth-century Conventual Franciscan (1603–1663), is the densest locus of the whole tradition, and the one around whom the claim gathered most thickly. A friar of famously slight learning — he was nicknamed the Gaper for his open-mouthed abstraction — he became, in the accounts, the most prolific levitator in the Catholic record, said to rise into the air during Mass, at the sound of sacred music, at the sight of holy images, with a cry, and to remain aloft. His case is distinguished above all by its documentation. He was examined by the Inquisition during his life and not condemned; after his death his cause was pursued through the canonization processus, the formal evidentiary machinery of sworn depositions, which gathered testimony from clergy, nobles, and physicians who claimed to have watched him rise. Among the witnesses by tradition was the visiting Lutheran duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg, whose turn to Rome is linked in the sources to what he saw. He was beatified in 1753 under Benedict XIV and canonized in 1767 by Clement XIII, and in modern devotion he was named patron of fliers — of aviators, pilots, and astronauts — the friar who left the ground made guardian of those who do. The early life that fixed his fame in print is Angelo Pastrovicchi’s, the eighteenth-century vita whose dating wavers across editions (1753, 1767, 1773 are all given) and which appeared in English, translated by the Capuchin Francis Laing, in 1918.

Joseph of Cupertino shown lifted from the ground, in an eighteenth-century engraving — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Teresa and Joseph are the two poles, but the type runs through the centuries between and after them, never as the substance of a cause and always as a recurring detail in the lives of the contemplatives: Catherine of Siena, Philip Neri, said to rise during prayer, Peter of Alcántara, the redemptorist Alphonsus Liguori, and, into the modern period, figures such as the Passionist Gemma Galgani. The roster is deliberately partial; its point is not a census but the persistence of a single hagiographic shape — the body lifted at the height of prayer — reproduced across a long stretch of Catholic devotion and always told in the same subordinate key.

The Church’s caution: a sign that could be counterfeited

Around such cases the institution that recorded them was markedly cautious — more cautious, often, than the devout crowds. Ecstasy was understood to be a state that could be feigned, induced, mistaken for itself, or sourced elsewhere than in God: the possibility that an apparent rapture came from illness, from imagination, or from a deceiving spirit was a standing worry of those charged with examining it. The discernment of spirits — the testing of whether an extraordinary state was divine, natural, or diabolical in origin — was an established discipline, and a visible marvel like levitation made the testing more urgent, not less, because the more spectacular the sign the more it could mislead.

This wariness shaped the canonization machinery that processed the most famous cases. In the procedural literature of saint-making, codified by Prospero Lambertini — the promotor fidei, the office popularly called the Devil’s Advocate, before he became Benedict XIV — bodily levitation was not itself counted among the miracles a cause formally required. It entered the record as corroborating testimony to heroic sanctity, a circumstance that strengthened the picture of a holy life without ever being the proof on which the verdict turned. The hierarchy was deliberate: the Church canonized for virtue and for attested miracles of a stricter kind, and let the flights stand as witness, not as warrant. The systematic mystical theology of the period drew the same line. Manuals such as Augustin Poulain’s The Graces of Interior Prayer classified the physical phenomena of the mystical state — the lights, the wounds, the elevations — as accompaniments of union, real where they occurred but never its measure; the grace was the union, and the union was hidden.

Testimony, not measurement

What the sources offer, then, is testimony, not measurement. The accounts are devotional documents — recorded by admirers, written within the conventions of sainthood, gathered for the purpose of demonstrating holiness — and historians read them as exactly that: evidence of what a community held itself to have seen, and of how it understood sanctity, rather than of what occurred in the air. The recent historiography makes the point its method. Carlos Eire, treating Teresa and Joseph as the two early-modern test cases, frames the field as a history of the impossible — meaning a history of testimonies about impossible events, and concedes that whether anyone in fact flew lies outside what the historian can settle; the live question for him is how levitation came to be a credible feature of the early-modern world, what cultural and devotional conditions made the sight reportable and the report believable. The both-and discipline of this scholarship holds the tradition-internal claim and the source-critical reading in the same hand: it neither endorses the physical event nor reduces every account to fraud, and it marks where the documentary chain is weak. Within that frame the witnesses and the rapt themselves held the rising to be a real overflow of grace into the body — and held, just as firmly, that it was the least of the matter. The deflationary readings sit alongside the devotional ones without dissolving them: skeptical and psychological accounts attribute the sensation of rising to the reorganization of bodily awareness in deep absorption — Teresa’s own language of the soul forgetting to animate the body is read as consistent with that — and attribute the reports of others to the credit a venerated figure draws to himself, to the conventions of the genre, and to the difficulty of clear observation in a dim chapel. These explanations account for the experience and the testimony without requiring the event; and the tradition’s own theology, in ranking the hidden union above the visible sign, had already conceded that the sign was never the thing to be weighed.

The phenomenon is reported well beyond the cloisters of Catholic Europe. A parallel stream of Indian guru and devotee testimony frames the rising not as a received grace but as laghimā, a cultivated lightness — one of the attainments cataloged in the literature of yoga, and there too hedged with warning, prized as a sign of progress and distrusted as a snare. In the hagiography of Sufism the comparable wonders fall under karāmāt, the charisms God grants his friends, closer in logic to the Catholic raptus — gift, not technique — than to the yogic attainment. The comparison across contemplative traditions is worth drawing carefully, because the doctrinal content each tradition pours into the shared image of verticality differs: grace received, power attained, charism bestowed are three different things wearing one shape, and the Catholic accounts must be read in Catholic terms rather than flattened into a single universal feat.

Sources and scholarship

The Catholic register is the most fully documented of all the levitation traditions precisely because it was processed through formal evidentiary machinery — the canonization inquests with their sworn depositions, and the scholarly-apologetic literature that grew around them.

The first-person foundation is Teresa’s own Vida, especially its chapters on the degrees of prayer, where she distinguishes union from rapture and records her resistance to the bodily lifting; her reluctance is the subject of a careful modern reconstruction, The Reluctant Levitator: Teresa of Ávila’s Humble Raptures, which traces her ambivalence and the deposition of Anne of the Incarnation. For Joseph of Cupertino the early printed life is Pastrovicchi’s eighteenth-century vita, englished by Francis Laing as St. Joseph of Cupertino (1918); the older reference summary of his cause, with its dates and the bones of the testimony, stands in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on the saint. The systematic frame within which these phenomena were classified is the mystical theology of Augustin Poulain’s Des grâces d’oraison (1901), translated as The Graces of Interior Prayer, which set the physical signs in their proper, subordinate place beneath contemplative union.

The critical-historical literature has a recognizable lineage. Joseph Görres’s Die christliche Mystik (1836–1842) is the great Romantic-Catholic compendium of the material. Olivier Leroy’s La Lévitation (1928) was the first dedicated critical monograph, treating Joseph of Cupertino as its central case. The most judicious survey is Herbert Thurston’s The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism — assembled from his essays and published posthumously in 1952, the work of a learned Jesuit who was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and famously deflationary about many of the cases he examined. (He should not be confused with the stage illusionist Howard Thurston, a different man of the same surname.) The current standard is Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023), which brackets the truth-question and reads the early-modern sources as cultural and devotional documents. The methodological stance these authors share — reporting the hagiographic claim and subjecting it to source criticism, without the leap to physical proof or the blanket dismissal — is the stance the subject demands.

The accounts of Teresa and Joseph kept, throughout, the order the early theologians set down: the body that rose was always pointing past itself, and what the tradition undertook to measure was never the height it reached but the union it could not show. The flights were witnessed; the union was not; and it was the union, hidden and unwitnessable, that the whole apparatus of testimony, caution, and canonization was built to weigh.

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