Good old Elon Musk has been making news lately with his hyper loop high speed transportation idea. It’s not like he actually invented the idea, though. The idea for running a magnetic levitation train through a vacuum tunnel has been around a long time, decades at least. Maglev transportation was talked about in the early 1900’s. Before 1950, anyways.

You can also levitate stuff with sound, light, air, electrostatics, electromagnetism, both diamagnetically and electrodynamically, or, if you just want to levitate really tiny things, you can just use the Casimir force.

But that’s all proper sciencey levitation. Anybody can do that kind. The other kind needs special skills, occult skills.

Take walking on water, for example. Liquid water, not the frozen kind. You’re not sinking so you must be levitating. We all know Jesus did it, but he was a late comer to it. Pythagoras and the Buddha did it a good 500 years before the son of god got around to pulling it off. Jesus presumably used god power, but how did the other two get away with it? Well, Pythagoras was said to be the son of Zeus and the Hindus say Buddha was an incarnation of their god Vishnu, so I’d say they used the same propulsion methods that Jesus did.

Then there’s yogic levitation. You can learn it at the Maharishi School in Fairfield, Iowa. That’s only $1895 for an eight day course, which includes learning the basic Transcendental Meditation© technique, but does not include room and board. The school was founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles and the Moody Blues, among others. You can watch videos demonstrating their yogic flying abilities on YouTube. They look like they are bouncing on their butts in lotus posture, but who am I to judge?

Levitation used to be popular among Roman Catholic saints. St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, merchants, and, more recently, ecology, was frequently seen suspended above the earth, often to a height of three or four cubits. St. Alphonsus Liguori, when preaching at Foggia, was lifted before the eyes of the whole congregation several feet from the ground. St. Teresa of Avila claimed to have floated up about a foot and a half while in prayer, but nobody saw her do it. She’s a saint, so we have to believe her.

Catholic saints have slacked off in the levitating department in recent centuries, although the recently sainted, lately departed, Padre Pio is said to have been seen floating about. He could bilocate, too, but then he did have stigmata. That’s bleeding holes in his hands and feet from identifying with the crucified Christ and not be be confused with astigmatism. I have astigmatism and it just makes me wear glasses. I also have presbyopia, which makes my glasses bifocals, and has little to do with Presbyterians.

I’m going to leave off here. We needn’t sully religiously induced levitation with demonically produced flitting about, ala Linda Blair. That would be levitatious and I wouldn’t want to introduce levity into such a serious topic.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: