Levitation
The illusion of a body floating in the air, a stage classic and a long-reported feat of saints and yogis.
Also: floating lady, ethereal suspension, rising woman, stage levitation
Levitation, rising without support, is a claim in many religious traditions: Christian accounts include Joseph of Cupertino, a seventeenth-century Franciscan said to rise in prayer, and yogic literature lists it among powers. As an illusion, it entered stage magic in the 1800s. Robert-Houdin's Ethereal Suspension of the 1840s drew on the news of ether anaesthesia, and in 1867 John Nevil Maskelyne in London staged a levitation of his wife. Later magicians, including Harry Kellar and Howard Thurston, presented floating figures. David Copperfield made the effect a television spectacle in the 1980s. The audience of a levitation act knows it is entertainment, and performers keep the method private.