I love the name: levitators. I’m put in mind of ascetic nuns in flying helmets and goggles, and you certainly couldn’t get much more ascetic than Sister Maria de Agueda (the legendary Blue Nun) and Sister Luisa de la Ascension better known as the Nun of Carrion—Chuckles to her friends.
Sister Maria fasted constantly, wore a hairshirt under her habit, along with a girdle studded with spiked rings and a vest of chain mail. To add to her misery she wrapped her body in chains and fetters, scourged herself daily and wore a crucifix riddled with spikes that she pressed into herself as she prayed. Cheerful little soul.
In 1620, aged 18, Sister Maria de Agueda experienced her first levitation. From then on, they continued almost daily, invariably after taking Communion when she would fall into a trance and rise into the air – this in full view of the entire convent.
“Her body was elevated a short distance above the ground; its natural heaviness so diminished, that it seemed weightless and could be blown around with just one puff of breath as if it were merely a leaf from a tree or light feather.”
Visitors came from afar to marvel; Maria, in her catatonic rapture oblivious to it all. She was prodded and poked and blown at. Worse, the window allowing ordinary villagers to communicate with the nuns was opened wide so that the world and its wife could witness the miracle. Poor old Maria was pushed right up to the window so that local peasants could poke, and pinch, and pry.
This lasted for three years, Maria knowing nothing of what was going on.
When Maria discovered what was happening – a local simpleton blurting out the fact—she tried to stop it. She avoided Communion and when ordered to do so, took it in private in her cell behind a locked door. Unfortunately, her fellow sisters found a way in and the practice continued, Maria in trance being oblivious. Eventually she collapsed in tears before a visiting Franciscan provincial and begged him to make it all stop. His solution was simple. Beg for God to make it stop. She’d already begged— many times—but on being ‘ordered’ to do so by her spiritual superior the prayer this time worked. Maria never levitated again – much to the dismay of her fellow nuns!
They responded quite viciously: God wouldn’t have stopped such a miracle— the levitations must have been diabolical—else she had committed a great but secret crime and God had punished her by ending the gift of levitation.
Sister Luisa de la Ascension also impressed her fellow nuns by extreme asceticism. She ate very little and took her food from the floor. Somewhere around 1595, she stopped eating all together apart from the daily Communion wafer. In addition, she scourged herself every day until the blood ran, wore tight rings around her neck, the almost obligatory hair shirt, and a metal spiked breastplate. Sometimes she would prostrate herself before a door and allow the other nuns to walk over her. At night she would lie on a life-sized wooden cross and drag it about on her knees during the day.
To add to her prowess as an ascetic, she claimed her piety attracted demons who attacked her daily, tearing her hair and tossing her about the room. So impressed were her fellow nuns, that she was asked to succour the dying. This was on the basis that her presence would distract predatory demons who would go for her instead of seizing the soul of the dying nun.
Her levitation skills were not as advanced as some, but Sister Luisa de la Ascension had another string to her bow—one she shared with Sister Maria and a select few, and which we’ll explore in the final episode next week.
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