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A Number of Twentieth-Century Fantastic Texts Foreground Such An CHAPTER 14 THE INCREDIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING A number of twentieth-century fantastic texts foreground such an occult or preternatural phenomenon as levitation, focusing on flying men and women as well as on other attempts to challenge the law of gravity. In his anthropological study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Mircea Eliade discusses what he terms “magical flight” and relates it to the notion of shamanism: “Siberian, Eskimo, and North American shamans fly. All over the world the same magical power is credited to sorcerers and medicine men.”1 Levitation is treated at some length in Olivier Leroy’s classic study La Lévitation: Contribution historique et critique à l’étude du merveilleux (1928), where the focus is more specifically on the hagiographical tradition, that is on accounts of Christian saints capable of soaring above the ground. In Leroy’s La Lévitation the phenomenon itself is defined as follows: According to a quasi-general, ancient and uninterrupted tradition, the human body is, as far as certain individuals are concerned, capable of rising into the air at certain moments and sometimes likewise of moving, without any visible support, through the said element without any controllable action on the part of a physical force. Nowadays this phenomenon is called levitation.2 1 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (in French 1951), trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Paperback Printing, rpt. 1974, 477. 2 Olivier Leroy, La Lévitation: Contribution historique et critique à l’étude du merveilleux, Juvisy Seine-et-Oise: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1928, 5 (my translation, Leroy’s emphasis): “Suivant une tradition quasi générale, ancienne et ininterrompue, le corps humain serait capable, chez certains individus, à de certains moments, de se soulever dans l’air, et parfois de s’y mouvoir, sans appui visible, sans action contrôlable d’aucune force physique. On appelle aujourd’hui ce phénomène 402 Walking Shadows Certain circus artists and other performers also attempt to counteract gravitation in various ways, to behave as if they are virtually weightless – even if they do not literally pretend to possess any kind of supernatural ability in that respect (note contrariwise Leroy’s reference, in the subtitle of his study, to the category of the marvellous, a category that recalls the structural characteristics of fantastic fiction, as they are discussed by Tzvetan Todorov).3 According to Mircea Eliade, the notion of magical flight is associated with ecstatic experience and with the general idea of the soul’s non-terrestrial, purely spiritual qualities: Magical flight is the expression both of the soul’s autonomy and of ecstasy. The fact explains how this myth could be incorporated into such different cultural complexes: sorcery, mythology of dream, solar cults and imperial apotheoses, techniques of ecstasy, funerary symbolisms, and many others.4 Even if the ability to levitate is attributed to a number of Christian saints, we must also bear in mind that this supernatural gift is not solely associated with the divine pole, insofar as “a universal belief, amply documented in Europe, [likewise] gives wizards and witches the ability to fly through the air”,5 which implies that magical flight is simultaneously associated with a daemonic sphere. As far as the kind of magical flight just discussed is concerned, there appears to be a link to anthropological sources, and according to Carlo Ginzburg in his scholarly study of the witches’ sabbath Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, “The folkloric nucleus of the Sabbath – magic flight and metamorphosis – seems to derive from a remote Eurasian substratum”.6 The bird-like quality of the female soul – sometimes associated with daemonry and witchcraft – is also thematized in Karen Blixen’s / lévitation” (Leroy’s emphasis). 3 Todorov, The Fantastic, 53-57; Todorov, Introduction, 59-62. 4 Eliade, Shamanism, 479. 5 Ibid., 478. 6 See Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Penguin, 1992, 136, where Eliade refers to the shamans of Siberia and Lapland; see also Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (1989), Turin: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi Storia, 2008, 114-15: “Il nucleo folklorico del sabba – volo magico e metamorfosi – sembra derivare da un remoto sostrato eurasiatico.”.
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