Notable levitation facts
A profound state of prayer, religious ecstasy is a condition for the appearance of the phenomenon of levitation. It is in this kind of state that the body suddenly loses weight and the person rises into the air. But apart from the cases when people rose into the air, overshadowed by the gifts of spirituality and grace, there are other situations when the manifestation of the phenomenon of levitation is marked not with good, but with a completely different, diametrical sign.
One of these cases happened relatively recently. A middle-aged woman, herself a practitioner of healing for some time, was, she believes, the victim of one of her patients. She, as they say in this case, was "washed off the cross." In other words, she was, as it were, taken out from under the canopy of baptism and given over to the power of dark forces. One of the ways to remove the spell, that is, to return a person to the bosom of the church, is done with the help of "reprimand" - special services and prayers read by a priest endowed with this gift.
Here is what she herself said about what followed:
- I was in Pechory, in the Pechora monastery. Those who were there, themselves were surprised what happened to me there. I flew right through the air there. In church, during the "general exhortation" they put a bottle of oil from miraculous icons to my head. And I felt so light, I became like a feather. And flew. The body was in a horizontal position, flying about a meter and a half from the floor. Everybody started to groan. The priest said: “Part! Don't touch her. " I heard everything, felt everything. But she could not move her arm or leg. So calmly landed. She got up - that's all. It is clear that in this case it is not about holiness and not about grace that can be discussed.
Once a poltergeist appeared at the Kommunarka state farm near Moscow, and furniture began to rise and move by itself. The culmination was the case when the boy Yura, the son of the hostess, became the object of influence. His mother and older sister told:
“We were going to the hospital,” the sister recalls. - I went out into the corridor. I saw Yura flying like a balloon.
- I say, - the mother adds, - Yura, what are you doing. - He: I arrived. - I say: How did you arrive? - He's so. I flew up the stairs, from the bottom up. Someone carried me and brought me here.
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So, in the general row where the phenomenon of levitation can manifest itself, saints, yogis, shamans, dark forces, and poltergeists. In other words, the situations when this phenomenon appears are so diverse that it seems impossible to name any general pattern that would unite them. Does this mean, however, that there is no such generality at all? Or, in spite of our powerlessness to name it, such a pattern still exists, but it is beyond our experience and our understanding of what is happening? The second seems to me more likely. This assumption gives me a reason to mention another fact of levitation. This happened to a man who was not marked at all, seemingly, with any paranormal abilities, nor gifts of grace, nor a graceless sign. He tells himself, having experienced this experience:
“In 1837,” he recalled, “I was 8 years old. I was then an extremely impressionable and nervous child, but in general I had excellent health. One summer in June, when the whole family was already living in the village of Speshnevo, Sengileevsky district of the Simbirsk province, I slept in my nursery, which was on the second floor of a very large house, while the doors from this room opened onto an unlocked and open balcony facing with its facade into the garden, near which the Sviyaga River flowed.
That night it was rather dark and stuffy, a thunderstorm was gathering, distant peals of thunder were heard and a strong lightning shone. Awakened by the thunderclaps, I sat down on my bed and suddenly, when lightning illuminated the room, to my horror I saw that two steps from my bed on the balcony, holding the handle of the glass door, was a tall gray-haired bald old man, with a gray beard, in a long blue shirt and barefoot. Struck by an instantly invincible panic fear, I ran headlong, down the stairs, into the garden, and ran towards the river. Awakened by the sound of my footsteps, Vasily Kondakov, a footman, who was sleeping in the hallway, and another servant, ran after me. What happened to me further, I do not remember, but those who ran after me found me unconscious on the other side of the Sviyaga River, having swum across it. Sviyaga in the said place, 12 sazhens wide and up to sazhens deep, while the nearest bridge is three versts from the house. I lay in the broom bushes - as I was from sleep, in one shirt and absolutely dry.
They brought me back to consciousness very soon by injecting water, and what happened to me had no further consequences for my health. This highly mysterious incident was recorded in my father's calendar and marked in 1837, June 18th, 24 minutes after midnight. The people who ran after me, Vasily Kondakov and Fyodor Plotnikov, and especially the gardener Nikolai Ermakov and the blacksmith Arkhipov, who swam across the Sviyaga, swore by oath that they clearly saw how I was quickly carried through the air across the river almost on a par with water. They just could not determine the exact place where I fell, but they found me in the bushes no more than 10 minutes later along the crossing over Sviyaga, as the continuously shining lightning well illuminated the entire nearby area.
As far as can be judged, in this case, this spontaneous levitation was provoked by intense fear. Fear, emotional stress, causes (presumably) weight loss, such a sudden weight loss is possible in children.
Here is another case of spontaneous levitation that has already occurred in our times. I was told about a teacher who came with her class on an excursion to Kiev. At the descent to the Dnieper, on Vladimirskaya Gorka, when she was at the top of the stairs, and the students at the bottom, they started waving to her and calling her to come down to them as soon as possible. And then everyone saw an elderly woman with a fluttering skirt flying through the air. Later, to my correspondent, who met with her, she said that before that this happened to her only once, in childhood. She and her mother collected brushwood in the ravine, on different sides. She really wanted to be next to her mother on the other side, but the ravine was deep, she did not know how to do it, and suddenly - for a moment, it was dark in her eyes, and a second later she was already on the other side of the ravine. Her mother, who in the place where they lived,many considered a witch, scolded her and told her never to do that again: "If people find out that you can do it, everyone will hate you." Apparently, the mother knew what she was saying. In any case, when she grew up, nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Or maybe there was simply no situation where it could happen.
The fact that people with explicit or latent paranormal abilities are prone to spontaneous weight loss has been popularly noticed for a long time. It was on this basis that those suspected of witchcraft were identified in medieval Europe. The Slavs have resorted to the same method since ancient times, while this tradition turned out to be quite tenacious. Back in the 19th century in Ukraine, in some villages, in order to identify the witches who caused the drought, women were tied up in the water. Those who submerged and began to drown were considered innocent. If one did not drown in such a position, this was considered an accurate evidence that she was a witch.
1838 - the Kiev court considered the case of such a forced universal "bathing" of women. Obviously, the court was well aware of the attitude of the people to this method of identifying those whose abilities could harm others. Perhaps that is why, when making a decision, the court ruled to leave the guilty without punishment for the reason, as stated in the decision, "their simplicity." True, the later higher authority decided to punish the guilty with ten lashes through the police officers, "in order to deter others from such an outrage."
This technique itself, revealing carriers of paranormal abilities, probably has its own meaning. No wonder the peoples have used it for many centuries. As you can see, this test triggers the same mechanism as in children who fall from a great height when they (presumably) lose weight. Just as a child falling down is in the grip of fear, so a woman, tied hand and foot and thrown into the water, must experience animal, blind fear, fear of real death. This subhuman, superhuman, biological fear of death probably includes the very unknown mechanism that causes weight loss.
A. Gorbovsky