42 Human Levitation. |January, 
modern czethrobats, though he cannot will nor direct his 
levitations, he can prevent them. The allusive and matter- 
of-course way that their general fact here comes in, so that, 
but for this and one mention after his final disappearance, we 
should not guess the phenomenon to have occurred in all 
Hebrew history, is inimitable, and makes it far stronger 
than if particular cases had been described. Not even was 
it introduced by any such note as that respecting young 
Samson, “‘ And the spirit of the Lord began to move him at 
times in the camp.” It seems assumed that readers of this 
brief abstract from the annals will no more need telling that 
Elijah was frequently air-borne, than to be told what country 
the Pharaoh ruled; or than the sons of the prophets needed 
to explain when, after his ascension, they said to his suc- 
cessor (2 Kings, x11., 16), ‘‘ Behold now, there be with us fifty 
strong men; let them go, we pray thee, and seek thy 
master; lest, peradventure, the spirit of Yahveh hath taken 
him up, and cast him upon some mountain, or into some 
valley. And he said, Ye shall not send. And when they 
urged him till he was ashamed, he said, Send. They sent 
therefore fifty men; and they sought three days, but found 
him not. And...he said unto them, Did I not say unto 
you, Go not °” 
About three centuries after this, but in Europe, and not 
yet in quite such broad historic daylight as in Ahab’s Israel, 
we find the pair of levitants, Abaris and Pythagoras. If it 
were still mythic twilight, all or the main share of this and. 
any other marvellous feature, would be heaped upon the 
crown of the great seer and martyr, the greatest European 
of his age, or perhaps of any age, the founder of the most 
civilised religion of the next thousand years, whose votaries 
ceased to quote him by name, but only as “‘ He,” and main- 
tained that ‘‘ Three kinds of being are biped—birds, men, 
and our master.”” But the habitual air-walking is ascribed 
only to his humble friend Abaris, of whom nothing else is 
known; and but one single levitation to the great sage. Ac- 
cording to all his three biographers, it was universally held 
that once he had on the same day addressed a class of his 
disciples in the city of Metapont (near the modern Taranto), 
and another circle in Taormina, at the foot of Etna. Asin 
every modern case, we observe, it is only into the company 
of friends, either recorded to be at that moment speaking of 
him, or very presumably having him in mind, that the 
levitant is carried. That Pythagoras was a born thauma- 
turge, or first-rate ‘‘medium,” as it is now called, appears, 
apart from all legend, by the most remembered of his 
