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Albert De Rochas D'Aiglun - Levitation of the human body

In 1897, I published a brochure (Paris, Leymarie. 1 vol. in-8o of 40 pages with engraving) in which I reported more or less summarily the cases of levitation I had been able to collect.  I have quoted, according to ecclesiastical histories, more than sixty saints or blessed among whom the phenomenon was frequently repeated. There are also many examples of this among mystics in the East, as well as in the West.

"Maximin, in the intoxication of the joy of his advancement, could no longer stand still and thought he had the faculty of the Brahmins to walk in the air, for it seemed that the earth was no longer worthy to bear him." (Ammian Marcellin, History of the Reign of Valentinian, year 730).

According to Philostratus (Vita Ap.), Apollonius of Tyana had seen the Brahmins floating in the air. Carl du Prel says in his Physics of Magic (t. II, ch. VII) that he had the opportunity in 1856 to see Mary Moerl; she was kneeling in prayer, on her bed, but her hand could be passed below her knees.

In my youth, I myself knew a holy woman who lived in the village of Cou, near Privas, in the Ardèche region; she enjoyed extraordinary faculties, of which I recently gave a brief account in the Annals of Psychic Sciences. A lady of my friends who was very close to her described them in detail in unpublished memoirs, from which I extract the following:

"Victoire passed by me for several hours. While talking to me about the graces that God and the Blessed Virgin granted her, I saw her with a deep astonishment, remaining fixed but animated eyes and gradually rising from above the chair where she was sitting, extending her arms forward, having her body leaning in this same position and thus remaining suspended, her right leg bent under her, the other touching the ground only by her toe. It is in this position, impossible for anyone in a natural state, that I saw Victoire whenever she was in her moments of ecstatic rapture when I had the happiness of having her very regularly twice a week near me who was then her almost only friend. She would take two or three ecstasies during her visits, which lasted ten to fifteen or twenty minutes each. I have seen it in this state more than a thousand times, especially during the first six years of our knowledge.”

 Nowadays, we have been able to observe it with all the desirable guarantees in certain mediums; I myself have witnessed it twice.

The fact can therefore be considered certain; only the explanation remains to be found.

Sometimes it could be attributed to a simple physical force developing in the subject's body under the influence of moral causes and acting as a magnetic or odic current that repels a similar current existing in the ground (See the brochure cited above, pp. 68 and 82); sometimes it seems to be due to an intelligent and invisible entity that raises the subject, as an ordinary man would do.