Madame Blavatsky on Aethrobacy and Fakirs

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 7 pages

From The Theosophist of February 1880. Aethrobacy — levitation — is presented as the effect of altered polarity and not of miraculous intervention. Christian ascetics, through contemplation and self-denial, acquire powers which their own tradition attributes to God but which the file holds to be real and the result of physiological change in the body; the ascetic who sees with the spiritual eye in the Astral Light and hears sounds inaudible to others is said to be living in the Unseen Universe, and the levitation is of a piece with that.

The argument put to the sceptic is a challenge about the state of physics rather than a claim about fakirs. Blavatsky questions the assumption that behind the law drawing bodies toward the earth's centre there is not another law, equally immutable, which under certain conditions appears to counteract it — noting that bodies oppositely electrified attract one another and similarly electrified repel. Her conclusion is put as a condition: until gravitation is understood to be simply magnetic attraction and repulsion, and until the part played by magnetism in the endless correlation of forces in the ether of space is understood, it is neither fair nor wise to deny the levitation of either fakir or table. The file includes levitation photography by Ion Paciu.

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