Flight

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FLIGHT

FLIGHT . The image of a human being escaping the bonds of earthly life to float and soar about the skies unencumbered and free appears in religious myths, mystical tracts, ritual dramas, and imaginative expressions around the world, from the most archaic to the most contemporary of cultures. While of course their specific historical circumstances and motivations vary, one still feels that in some ways the imagination of the Paleolithic cave dweller who painted the figure of a man with a bird's head on the walls of the caves at Lascaux is not so different from the imagination that created the ancient Greek story of Icarus yearning to fly to the sun or that of the poets of Vedic India who sang praises of the long-haired ascetic who "flies through the air, looking on all shapes below, the friend to all the gods" (Ṛgveda 10.136.4). Perhaps, too, this imagination is not so different in the end from that which helped lift the Wright brothers into the air above Kitty Hawk.

Accounts of human flight are at times quite dramatic, as in the neo-Hebraic text the Apocalypse of Moses, which tells of Moses' ascension into the various heavens, each one inhabited by frightening and dreadful angels who breathe fire and lightning and whose sweat flows into a mighty burning river. Other tales of flight convey a mood of peacefulness, as in the nineteenth-century accounts of Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, a Carmelite nun who floated about the yard of her nunnery for hours at a time, sometimes perching softly in the treetops like a bird. Some accounts are quite charming, like the medieval Sanskrit text that tells neophyte yogins that a person trying to master the art of levitation may have some difficulty at first and so will bounce across the ground like a jumping frog, but after increased practice will fly about with ease (see Yogatattva Upaniṣad 53–55).

Rituals as well as myths also frequently include references to or enactment of aerial travel. Alchemists and Daoist priests in ancient China, for example, clothed themselves with feathered wings while performing various religious ceremonies so that they might fly about the skies with the immortals. Similarly, at one point in the Vedic Vajapeya rite the priest and the ritual's patron are instructed to climb the sacrificial pillar, at the top of which they spread their arms as if flapping their wings and proclaim, "We have come to the heavens, to the gods we have come! We have become immortal" (Taittīriya Saṃhitā 1.7.9). The Vedic ritual system as a whole is often described in ornithological terms. The performance of the Agnicayana (fire ritual), for example, revolves around the construction of an altar in the shape of a bird, suggesting that the ritual transports its oblations to the heavens the way a bird soars through the skies.

Dimensions of Magical Flight

Scholars have offered a variety of theories regarding the origin and meaning of humanity's fascination with magical flight. Some, such as Arthur Maurice Hocart, an anthropologist, have seen in this theme remnants of an archaic solar worship and reverence for the king (who was felt to be the sun, or the son of the sun), who was always carried about on the shoulders of his subjects and thus "flew" everywhere he went. Others, such as Geo Widengren, a scholar of Near Eastern religions, have seen in myths and rituals involving flight distinct elements of religious ideologies based on divine kingship; the protagonist exemplifying such ideologies (originally the king, but later also a prophet or savior) is said to ascend to the realm of the high god in order to receive the sanction to rule the earthly community below. Some theorists feel that the theme represents elements of initiation and rites of passage: The flight typifies the state of being in which the initiate stands between the old and the new modes of existence. Some psychologists, especially those influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, have argued that the desire to fly is really a subliminal desire for sexual power, and that the feelings accompanying such an experience are repressed aspects of sexual arousal. Students of other disciplines in the social sciences maintain that magical flight expresses a person's search for a legitimation of authority over other people, or a wish to be free of personal limitations.

There is no doubt that to fly is to have power, and some theorists have held that the search for power is the central motivation common to all religious experience and expression. Whether or not this means, however, that themes of magical flight in religious myths and rituals derive from specific modes of power (such as royal prestige, prophetic influence, personal gratification, or existential autonomy) will remain open to debate. The issue is complicated by the fact that many types of persons—sovereigns, saints, visionaries, magicians, priests, ascetics, mystics, lovers, philosophers—have been said to undergo such uplifting experiences. Since the 1950s Mircea Eliade has argued that it would be a mistake to conclude that the mythic theme of magical flight derives from only one source, or that it reflects only one stage in human cultural or personal development. According to Eliade, magical flight and its related symbolism (learning the language of birds, the cultivation of ecstasy, rapturous mystical images, and so on) reflect an experience of abolishing everyday ways of knowing the world, the desire for which is expressed in images of transcendence and freedom. Eliade further maintains that this desire is, in fact, constitutive of humanity itself. If this interpretation is correct, then symbols of magical flight not only derive from a moment in human history but also reveal a structure of human consciousness, an existential dimension to the human imagination that "must be ranked among the specific marks of man" (Eliade, 1960, p. 106).

The point is well taken. Studies in the history of religions have repeatedly emphasized that Homo sapiens is homo symbolicus, defined in part by the ability to make and be moved by symbols, especially symbols of various extraordinary modes of being. At the start of the twentieth century James G. Frazer and Julius von Negelein, among others, noted that religions from around the world have used the image of the bird to signify the human soul, suggesting that celestial and aerial symbols often represent sublime emotions and spiritual ideals. One might recognize such themes in Augustine's account in his Confessions of his experience at Ostia when he and his mother, both radiant with spiritual love, soar up to the heavens from where the celestial bodies shine onto the earth. One finds similar themes in traditional Islamic accounts of Muḥammad's Miʿrāj, in which the Prophet ascends through the seven heavens of the vertical cosmos to learn sacred lessons from his predecessors in the prophetic lineage who now live in each heaven and draw near to the throne of Allah. This ascension has become a mythic and poetic paradigm for the practices and ideals of Ṣūfī mysticism. Tales of a person's flight through the skies frequently include an emotional tone of longing to be free of the bonds that tie humanity to the ways of the world. A similar longing perhaps enlivened the imagination of the Hebrew psalmist who sang, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then I would fly away and be at rest" (Ps. 55:6).

Protagonists who fly through the air do so for more than emotional and mystical reasons. They may assert their ability to rise above the laws of the physical world and thus to gain control over what may be experienced as an oppressive universe. This may be inferred from the South Asian use of such Sanskrit terms as kaivalya ("autonomy") to describe one of the goals of yogic practice, which is marked by such autonomous acts as flying through the air (see Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, chap. 4 and its commentaries). Similarly, the Theravāda Buddhist tradition teaches that an adept monk can fly cross-legged through the atmosphere "like a bird in flight" (see Majjhima Nikāya 1.33, etc.).

At other times, the world is understood to reflect the beauty and wisdom of the divine plan; to fly about it, then, is to see more of it than is normally possible. This may be part of what the Persian Ṣūfī Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭar longed to do when, in his epic poem The Conference of Birds, he expresses a wish to fly through the air to all regions of the earth in order "to enjoy all beauties."

At other times, people may want to fly in order to see into the future (movement through vertical space is often associated with movement through time); to escort dead people to their new lives in the unknown world; to obtain valuable medicinal or cultic knowledge from various spiritual beings; or to locate souls that have become lost in the different layers of the universe. While the religious specialist most adept at such divination is the shaman of north-central Asia, the ecstatic experience characterized by such flights appears throughout the world.

The ability to fly through the air therefore often includes an ethical or normative dimension, for the protagonist who can travel to the future, as well as to other worlds, can see what kinds of lives people on earth can expect to have in other realms after they die. Subsequent to such a flight, the aerial traveler can return to earth to tell people how to act so that they may live in the more comfortable or prestigious afterworlds. Such is the case, for example, in the Zoroastrian tale told in the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, in which the priest Virāf falls into an ecstatic sleep after drinking a cup of mang and travels through the heavens and hells that are the respective postmortal homes of the pious and the infidel members of the priestly community. Having gained this knowledge, he then returns to his colleagues on earth and tells them what he has learned so that they can adjust their religious practices accordingly.

Types of Magical Flight

The various scenarios in the world's myths and rituals involving extraordinary aerial flight are so numerous that one could distinguish any number of forms and interpret their individual meanings in an equal number of ways. To arrive at a universal typology of flight, then, is to generalize in a way that might make even thoroughgoing structuralists somewhat wary. The following schema is intended to be comprehensive, but does not pretend to include all variations.

Autonomous this-worldly flight (levitation)

Hagiographies from religious traditions around the world often include depictions of various saints, mediators, devotees, and other exemplary figures who are able at certain times to float up off the ground without visible assistance and without injury. Sometimes these experiences are intentional and desirable, as is implied in a lesson from the Yogatattva Upaniṣad (117): "Thrusting the tongue into the back of the throat and focusing one's eyes on the spot between the eyebrows, one sits in the posture in which one gains the power to float up into the air." At other times, these experiences seem to catch the community by surprise, as in a story about Alfonso Liguori, who, while giving a sermon one day, offered himself to an image of the Virgin and, stretching out his arms (like a bird?), floated several feet off the platform, whereupon the two thousand people listening were amazed and filled with admiration. While most traditional hagiographies express wonder at such events, many also include implicit or explicit criticism of people who willingly drift about in the air in front of others, since such behavior is either physically dangerous or distracting to the normal person's religious concentration or constitutes an arrogant display of spiritual authority. The Ṣūfī tradition, for example, criticizes those who undertake a magical levitation in order to enact a miracle or gain a vision, for to do so is comparable to making the pilgrimage to Mecca merely for the sake of business or pleasure.

The Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum uses such descriptive terms as a terra levabatur ("raised above the surface of the earth"), corporalite elevatus est ("he or she was elevated bodily"), and raptus ("taken up") to describe those events in Roman Catholic history in which a person is reported to have floated up off the ground while deep in prayer, during moments of deep emotion, or while performing devotions. Since the classical period in India, Sanskrit texts have used such technical terms as laghuman ("lightness"), utkramaṇa ("stepping upward"), and gauravahīnatā ("gravity destroying") to describe the power a yogin gains while learning to meditate properly. Islam distinguishes two types of mystics, those who are passively "drawn upward" (majdhūb ) and those who actively stride (sālik ) upward through the spheres by their own arduous reflection and effort. But such technical terms, among any number of others from the literatures of the world's religions, seem too specialized for comparative use. The English and French word levitation has been used since the nineteenth century by European hagiographers to describe such events in their respective traditions. While the term seems somewhat clumsy, it might suit the comparativist who has recognized such themes in other religions as well.

Levitations may be intentional or unintentional, repeated or unique, momentary or long-lasting. They may take the person over an extensive geography or they may involve rising just an inch or two above the ground. In any case, the adept remains independent of external assistance and, while he or she may be said to alter the physical laws of the world, never leaves the physical structure of the cosmos.

Although levitations are often depicted as strange and astounding events that arrest people's attention and thrill the storytellers, they are of themselves rarely if ever soteriologically transformative and do not constitute an ultimately valuable experience. Rather, tales of levitation mark the esteem that the particular tradition holds for the central figure, or they serve as a means by which the tradition recognizes those specific practices and attitudes (spiritual integrity, strength of will, loving purity and devotion, self-discipline, obedience to the divine, etc.) that it holds to be most valuable.

Dependent this-worldly flight

To the category of dependent magical flights belong those instances in which a person is lifted up off the ground by a flying animal, spirit, or divine creature of some sort and is escorted through the skies over a wide area of the earth and sometimes at great height. These flights are similar to autonomous levitations in that the protagonists never leave the realm of the atmosphere and thus remain within the worldly cosmos, the realm of human activity and community. They differ from levitations in that the protagonists are dependent on another being or outside agent to bring them into the skies.

Sometimes these flights allow a hero to escape in a horizontal direction and at great speed from a situation of great anxiety or terror, often from death personified. Accordingly, the emotional tone of such stories is fervent and fearful. Folklorists have used the German term magische Flucht to describe such a flight from a frightening predicament and have found the theme in cultures all over the world. Eliade has noted that "it is important to distinguish one essential element [in such horizontal high-speed flights]: the desperate effort to be rid of a monstrous presence, to free oneself" (Eliade, 1960, p. 104).

At other times, this-worldly flights escorted by a supernatural being reflect less frightening feelings and signify less anxious situations. Sometimes they bring the central character to a new and highly desirable land or a more satisfying life in a distant earthly paradise. Sometimes they free him or her from the drudgery of daily chores long enough to add new wonder to their understanding of the world. Sometimes they show the character the superiority of his or her religious tradition over another, for to fly over the heads of the followers of another tradition is to be better than they are.

In general, tales of escorted this-worldly flights either express a notion that escape or existential change is possible no matter how bleak things look, or help the members of the religious community reaffirm the worthiness of their tradition and encourage people from other traditions to become part of their own. As such, many tales of an escorted this-worldly flight serve conversion as well as self-affirming functions.

Otherworldly flights (ascensions)

A third general category of magical flights involves a protagonist's journey to dimensions or levels of the sacred cosmos other than the earthly one. These journeys may be solitary and autonomous or they may be guided by supernatural beings. In either case, otherworldly flights, or ascensions, necessarily involve a radical transformation of one's being, a change in ontological status so powerful that one moves from one mode of existence to another. This transformation is typically depicted as being of ultimate value and is considered soteriologically efficacious. Such experiences reward specific people for their commitment to religious practices, their transformative state of mind, or their embodiment of respected personality traits. The central axis of these aerial journeys tends to be a vertical one, although there are instances of horizontal travels to other worlds as well. Whereas stories of the magische Flucht type of this-worldly flight evoke emotions of release, freedom, safety, or personal power, narratives of ascent evoke emotions arising from the transcendence of this world and a concurrent disjunction with normal reality and personal existential situations. If this-worldly flight gets one out of the grasp of something horrible or above the heads of everybody else in the world, ascension gets one out of the world altogether.

Myths of vertical travel to the heavens above the skies are often associated with the protagonist's previous or subsequent descent along the same axis to the hells or otherworlds below. Therefore, ascensions, like other religious forms of magical flight, often include divinatory and ethical elements. However, unlike levitations and this-worldly flights (which involve travel across the geographies of the terrestrial world), an ascension takes one beyond the dimensions of human space and history, since vertical movement is often synonymous with movement through, or the abolition of, time. Ascensions are typologically different from levitations and this-worldly flights in that ascensions often include apocalyptic or eschatological themes. Thus, although they appear in other traditions as well, it is in Zoroastrianism, apocalyptic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that myths of ascension are most prevalent, for it is in these traditions that the end of history is most consistently associated with the ascension of a savior into the vertical heavens above the terrestrial realm.

Figures from the world's religions who ascend to other worlds—prophets, visionaries, saints, founders, perfected beings, and so on—sometimes return to earth with new power or knowledge that is of soteriological benefit to the community as a whole. Such an ascending and returning mediator might well function, then, as a shaman. In other instances, he or she remains in the sacred world above, never to return. Such a person might then serve as a model for others in their religious practices and attitudes, or as an example of a new and transformed being.

Bibliography

The best place to begin further reading on flight and flight symbolism is with three works by Mircea Eliade: Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York, 1960), pp. 99–122; Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958), pp. 102–108; and Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 2d ed., rev. & enl. (New York, 1964), pp. 190–198, 477–507, and elsewhere. As always, Eliade's works are useful for their extensive bibliographies as well as their typological insights.

Students interested in the varieties of magical flight (more specifically, varieties of the magische Flucht of this essay's typology) in the world's folktales should look to Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 2d ed., rev. & enl., 6 vols. (Bloomington, Ind., and Helsinki, 1955–1958). Sample motifs include the following: D670, Magic Flight; E372, Soul in Form of Bird; F61, Person Wafted to Sky; F62, Bird Carries Person to or from Upper World; F1021, Extraordinary Flights through the Air. Folklorists would also want to see Antti Aarne's Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, translated and enlarged by Stith Thompson as The Types of the Folk-Tale (1928; reprint, New York, 1971), entries 313–314, "The Magic Flight," or Aarne's Die magische Flucht (Helsinki, 1930).

Those who wish to find traditional accounts of levitations, magical flights, and ascensions in the lives of Christian saints have no better place to turn than the Acta Sanctorum, a mammoth collection (64 volumes) of hagiographies edited by the Bollandists in a project that was begun in the seventeenth century by Johannes Bollandus and was carried on by Godefridus Henschenius and subsequent editors from the Society of Jesus in Belgium (Brussels, 1643–1931). A less imposing collection, and one centering exclusively on aerial events in the lives of the saints, is Olivier LeRoy's pedantic yet still somewhat amused Levitation: An Examination of the Evidence and Explanations (London, 1928). For accounts of celestial travel, usually by the soul after death, in antiquity, see Josef Kroll's Die Himmelfarht der Seele in der Antike (Cologne, 1931). A recent work that in a way complements LeRoy and Kroll is Ioan P. Culianu's "Le vol magique dans l'antiquité tardive," Revue de l'histoire des religions 198 (January–March 1981): 57–66; a short study of instances in late antiquity when people who are supposed to be able to fly fail to do so.

For views of the soul as a bird, see James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, part 2, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 3d ed., rev. & enl. (London, 1911), or Julius von Negelein's "Seele als Vogel," Globus 74 (1901): 357–361, 381–384. Arthur Maurice Hocart's notion that magical flight derives from an ancient solar worship appears in his "Flying through the Air," Indian Quarterly (1923): 28–31 (also in Indian Antiquary 52 [1923]: 80–82). Readers will find Geo Widengren's ideas on divine kingship and the aerial motif in his The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book (King and Savior III ) (Uppsala, 1950) and Muḥammed, the Apostle of God, and His Ascension (Uppsala, 1955).

For a study of Zoroastrian notions of ascension, see Martin Haug's Über das Ardâi Virâf nameh (Munich, 1879). For a collection and discussion of Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Greek, Roman, and Persian apocalyptic tales of ascension, see Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, edited by John J. Collins, special issue of Semeia 14 (1975).