LEVITATION The Church, having condemned magical flight in pagan and witchcraft religions as diabolistic, has never encouraged such exhibitions among its own saints. It has therefore cut itself off from a branch of knowledge which less inhibited religions seem to have mastered, the art of controlled levitation. If the thing happens spontaneously, under certain conditions, it can presumably be reproduced at will. The usual explanation now applied to the witches' claim to flight is that they experienced the sensation of flight through drugs, trances and the power of suggestion, while actually remaining earthbound. Mystics often describe their ascents into the world of prophetic imagination as a flight to heaven. Yet modern tribal shamens consider physical flight to be an occasional consequence or extention of flights of ecstasy; they value its occurances as reminders of the greater powers of their predecessors, who could invoke at will the necessary conditions for levitation of the body. Unless we reject all the documented accounts from every religious tradition of levitating saints and ascetics, we can scacely deny that some witches may have possessed the same gifts, powers or afflictions. And while the Christian levitators were encouraged to suppress in themselves all tendencies towards arial exhibitionism, the witches were not so inhibited.