Originally published 15 May 1995
Come, Josephine, we don’t need a machine. Sit with me here on the floor. Cross your legs into the lotus position. Close your eyes. Chant this mystic mantra:
“Higgily, piggily, diggildy, dare. Here we go soaring up in the air.”
It’s a little something I picked up from Shoko Asahara, guru of the Aum Supreme Truth cult, suspected of involvement in a Japanese subway gas attack. Did you catch the photograph of him levitating, cross-legged, six inches above the ground? It was in several news magazines.
In the photograph, Asahara has a pained look on his face, as if from the exertion of bouncing off the floor. But the implication is otherwise — that he’s floating, serenely, above it all.
Shoko Asahara isn’t the first cult master to promise the ability to fly. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles, was also into levitation. I remember a “yogic flying” competition staged by the Maharishi’s followers in Washington, D.C. some years ago. They demonstrated their mastery of Stage 1 of levitation, a bounce from the lotus position called “hopping.”
Apparently, they had not yet moved on to Stage 2, “hovering,” and Stage 3, “free flight.”
In 1977, when the Maharishi went to India with his disciples, an Indian skeptics group offered him 10,000 rupees (about $1,000) to fly from Old to New Delhi, a distance of about two miles. He agreed, but then backed out when the time came to soar up or shut up. Yogic transportation is a spiritual activity, he claimed, not for secular demonstration.
Levitation has a long mythic association with the spiritual life. Holy men and women of many religions have been reputed to levitate, including hundreds of saints from the Roman Catholic Church, and these stories undoubtedly play a salutary role in the lives of the faithful.
Perhaps the most consistently airborne saint was Joseph of Cupertino (Italy, not California), who reportedly made dozens of flights in or about his church, once landing amid lighted candles and becoming badly burned. Many people claimed to have witnessed Joseph defy the law of gravity, but since it all happened a very long time ago there’s not much we can do to check the reliability of their reports.
Unholy people, such as witches and warlocks, also flew, presumably with demonic propulsion. It is worth noting that in our more scientific age, saints, witches, and warlocks no longer fly.
In recent times, levitation has been most frequently claimed by spiritualists, dabblers in the paranormal, and members of fringe cults. Many well-known mediums established reputations as flyers, including D. D. Home, W. Stanton Moses, Eusapia Paladino, and Willy Schneider. Their demonstrations often took place in darkened rooms. Apparently, darkness enhances the ability to levitate.
What does science make of all this mystic soaring? Is the law of gravity subject to amendment? Are there spiritual powers that can make Newton’s apple ascend to the tree?
Not likely. Levitation is a scientific problem for psychologists, not physicists.
Sigmund Freud wrote about the desire to fly in his essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo was passionately interested in flying. He studied the anatomy and flight of birds, and designed several kinds of flying machines, including something akin to the helicopter.
One of Leonardo’s earliest “memories” was of being visited in his cradle by a bird. The bird opened Leonardo’s mouth with its tail, and thrashed the infant on the lips. It is not difficult to guess what Freud made of this.
The flying fantasy, says Freud, is a disguise for the infantile wish to be capable of sexual performance. He buttresses his case by compiling instances of words in various languages that associate birds and flying with sexual organs or sexual activity.
For example, Freud tells us that the commonest expression in German for male sexual activity is vogeln “to bird,” and in Italian the male organ is called l’uccello “the bird.”
I don’t want to make too much of Freud, but his is the only analysis I know of that might help us understand the popularity of levitation.
As we approach the end of the millennium, we can expect a rising crescendo of cultic activity, including hoards of apocalyptic birdmen and birdwomen claiming the ability to fly.
Imagine great cadres of levitators, serenely disposed in the lotus position, overflying our cities, darkening the sun like vast flocks of passenger pigeons. Imagine kamikaze levitators, cultic leaflets in hands, diving into our homes and places of work. Imagine a great end-of-the-millennium air show, with thousands of yogic flyers doing barrel-rolls and loop-the-loops, and skywriting for all to see dire warnings of Armageddon.
Be glad we have the laws of physics to keep them on the ground.
