St. Theresa, a Carmelite nun, is one of the first officially documented levitators. 230 Catholic priests witnessed her flight. She described her unusual gift (as she called it) in her autobiography dated from 1565.

“Levitation comes like a blow, sudden and sharp,” she writes “and before you collect your thoughts and come to your senses, you feel taken away by a cloud and a grand eagle…I was aware of myself hanging in the air… I must say that when the levitation ended, I felt unusual lightness in my body as if I was weightless.”

The best-known ‘flying man’ is Joseph Desa (1603-1663), named Saint Joseph of Cupertino after his native village in South Italy. He had been unusually pious since his childhood and tortured himself to reach religious ecstasy. After he joined the Order of St. Francis, he started to levitate in a state of ecstasy. It once occurred in front of the Head of the Catholic Church. Joseph came to Rome and was granted an audience with Pope Urban VIII. When he first saw that, he was so exalted that he soared in the air until the Head of the Order of St. Francis had brought Joseph to senses.

Scientists of that time observed his levitations more than a hundred times and left behind official evidence of their research. The flights embarrassed the faithful. They ordered him to move out from Assisi to a remote monastery in 1653. Afterwards, he continued his journey moving from one monastery to another. Finally, Joseph was transferred to the monastery in Osimo, where he fell ill seriously in the summer of 1663 and died the same year in September. He was canonized in four years.

According to church records, there were about 300 people who exercised the art of levitation in front of the eyes of the faithful. Seraphim Sarovsky and John, an archbishop from Novgorod and Pskov, belong to Russian levitators. Moscow chronicles tell of Basil the Blessed, who was carried by unknown power over the Moskva River in front of crowds of people.

The most prominent levitator of the 19th century was Daniel Douglas Hewm. The editor of an American newspaper described his first well-known flight as follows: “Hewm suddenly began taking off the ground, which came as a surprise to all the people around. I took his hand and saw his legs. He was lifting a foot away from the ground. It was a confounding variety of feelings – alternate fear and rapture made Hewm quake and he seemed speechless at that moment. Some time later he got down and then up again. For the third time he reached the ceiling and touched it with his hands and feet.”

Later on Hewm learned to levitate at will. For forty years he showed his gift to thousands of spectators, among whom there were such famous people as William M. Thackeray, Mark Twain, Napoleon III, well-known politicians, doctors and scientists. He was never accused of swindling.

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