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.