Teresa of Ávila and the Peril of Levitation: Fear, Faith, and Female Sanctity

But what sent these enchanted people into the sky? Was it God—were they saints? Or were they animated by demons, flying in an evil sort of way, like witches? Worse, were they committing fraud, concealing their stilts or suspension by ropes, bouncing from an invisible premodern trampoline? The Catholic Church was reforming itself, too, and they had to be sure they weren’t allowing the faithful to pray to a charlatan. The writings of holy people were examined for evidence of their sanctity, and even Teresa of Ávila wasn’t immune from the Inquisition’s suspicion. She wrote her spiritual autobiography knowing that the text would be vetted for orthodoxy and authenticity. Her descriptions of how it felt to levitate give us a sense of what it was like for a woman to negotiate such pressures. She describes becoming insensate, “as if the soul has forgotten to animate the body.” Her eyes were open but unseeing; “I come close to losing my pulse altogether.” And then: she flew. Teresa described an out-of-body experience, a “new estrangement”: “I must confess,” she wrote, “that it produced an exceedingly great fear in me at first—a terrible fear, in fact—because one sees one’s body being lifted up from the ground.”

Maglaque, Erin. “Wings of Desire.” The New York Review of Books, April 4, 2024. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/04/04/wings-of-desire-they-flew-carlos-eire/.