Levitation Photographed

Travelers back from the East have for generations enlivened dinner parties with accounts of Hindu fakirs who floated unsupported in mid-air before the eyes of hundreds, or climbed a miraculous rope until they were lost to sight. Skeptical listeners, psychic researchers, men of science have scoffed at these marvels, called them a romantic variety of mass hypnotism. Last week armchair theorists got a shock when a set of photographs taken in broad daylight by two hard-headed Britishers reached the U. S. The pictures show a white-robed Indian Yogi reclining several feet above the ground in a sculpturesque attitude of repose. Except for his long-nailed right hand cupped over the top of a cloth-draped pole, there apparently was nothing to keep him from falling. Yet he maintained the horizontal for a good four minutes, according to a South India tea planter named P. T. Plunkett, who wrote an enthralled account of the seance to the Illustrated London News. Common theories that the trick is done by crowd suggestion had to be scrapped. Even the ablest exponent of Yoga cannot hypnotize a camera.

When Planter Plunkett was invited to a seance in the walled compound of his friend Pat Dove, he took along a camera and films. Long before Mr. Plunkett saw the Yogi, he could hear the monotonous roll of tom-toms. Coolies working in the adjacent field heard it too, and more than a hundred of them crept into the 80-by-80 ft. inclosure. Subbayah Pullavar, a gaunt, wiry Yogi, told Mr. Plunkett he had been "levitating" for 20 years, that his family had been doing it for hundreds. Mr. Plunkett was impressed by Subbayah's "long hair hanging down over his shoulders, a drooping mustache and a wild look in his eye." Asked if pictures of his work might be taken, Subbayah consented freely.

The show began at about 12:30 p. m. The sun was directly overhead "so that shadows played no part in the performance." In the middle of the compound four poles had been struck up to support a roof of branches. Subbayah traced a circle in water on the sands around this makeshift tent, forbade any man wearing leather shoes to step inside it.

Subbayah crawled in between the tent supports, lay down beside a draped stick set up in the ground. At the base of the stick he seated, with much show of tenderness, a malevolent-looking little doll. A helper hung clothtent-walls around Subbayah. Few minutes later the walls were stripped away. There was Subbayah, hanging shelflike to the top of the draped stick.

Wrote Planter Plunkett: "The accompanying pictures tell the story of what happened, and I need only mention what steps we took to see that there were no illusions. . . . We . . . photographed every position of the performer and from every angle. . . . I held a long stick, and from outside the circle passed the end of it over and under and around Subbayah's body. . . . I can vouch for the fact that he had no support whatsoever except for resting one hand lightly on top of the cloth-covered stick. He remained horizontal in the air for about four minutes. The tent was then put back. . . . Pat and I could see, through the thin wall of the tent, Subbayah still suspended in the air. After about a minute he appeared to sway, and then very slowly began to descend, still in a horizontal position. He took about five minutes to move from the top of the stick to the ground, a distance of about three feet. Evidently we were not meant to see this part of the performance, or it would all have been done in the open. The performer ... is under a trance or stupor, and becomes stiff as if in a state of rigor mortis. When Subbayah was back on the ground his assistants carried him over to us and asked if we would try to bend his limbs. Even with the assistance of three coolies we were unable to do so. After Subbayah had been massaged for five minutes and had cold water poured over his head and down his throat he returned to normal."

Scientists would deny that Subbayah's feat violates any physical or biological principle. Fakirs can induce cataleptic rigidity in a limb or in the whole body; fakirs are often unbelievably strong. When the tent walls close behind him, all that Subbayah conceivably has to do is to induce rigor, leaving one arm free to inch his body little by little up the stick. If the stick is off the vertical and slants away from his log-like body he can hang easily from its top, provided his centre of gravity is directly above the point where the stick enters the ground.

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