LEVITATION. - A term designating the phenomena of the raising, displacement and suspension in the air of heavy objects, and more often of the human body without visible support and without any controllable physical action.
Many cases are reported in hagiographic history. One of the most important is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino (1603-63), in whose beatification proceedings more than 70 cases of bodily rapture are cited, occurring in the town of Cupertino alone or in its surroundings: he was seen flying from the middle of the church to the pulpit over a distance of about 25 meters, sometimes carrying the confessor and other persons with him. Pope Urban VIII was a witness to one of these levitations, and so too was the great admiral of Castile (in 1645) and John Frederick of Brunswick (in 1649), who under the impression of this fact and of the holiness of the Servant of God abjured the Lutheran heresy. Other historically verified levitations are those of St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Peter of Alcántara, St. Francis Xavier, St. Andrew Fournet, of the venerable Francis Suárez and others. Among the levitations of objects, ecclesiastical history reports several of statues, images, crucifixes, etc. Among those established by official inquiries, the famous miracle of the monstrance of Favernay, which remained suspended for almost two days during a fire in the church (26-27 May 1608), and the miracle of the Blessed Sacrament at Turin, which gave rise to the church of Corpus Domini. The transport of the Holy House of Loreto is also attributed to this kind of levitation.
The phenomenon of levitation is attested moreover in Buddhist, Mohammedan and Taoist tradition, and in mediumistic occurrences. There are also physiological or pathological pseudo-levitations, which properly speaking are not levitations but illusions of the patients. Nor should certain forms of somnambulism and acrobatic hysteria be confused with levitation; these keep the sick in extraordinary positions and are a result of the images of their imagination, which command impulses and acts of exceptional agility.
Among levitations of demonic origin, there are known the one reported by Sulpicius Severus in the life of St. Martin, of a possessed man seen by the Saint raised and held motionless in the air, and that of the possessed woman Francesca Fontaine, which occurred at Louviers in 1591, whose records are preserved at the National Library of Paris (ms. 24/122, French collection).
The theological, medical and metapsychical sciences (v.) study the phenomena of levitation and their interpretation. Present-day theories assign notable differences between levitations of religious and non-religious origin, and explain the phenomena now by an angelic or divine intervention, now by a diabolical one, whether manifest or concealed under spiritualistic or metapsychical appearances; without excluding poorly understood aptitudes of the human being, who in certain conditions of soul could modify bodily qualities, especially during the graces of mystical union, ecstatic and non-ecstatic.
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Arnaldo M. Lanz