Mystical systems
Bilocation
Direct answer
Bilocation is the reported presence of one person in two places at the same time, told chiefly of Catholic saints and treated in psychical research as a kind of apparition.
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At a glance
- Also called
- being in two places at once
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Astral Projection, Out-of-Body Experience, Astral Body, Doppelgänger
Bilocation is the reported presence of one person in two places at the same time, told chiefly of Catholic saints and treated in psychical research as a kind of apparition.
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What is bilocation?
Bilocation means being in two locations at once. In the classic stories a holy person is seen at prayer in a cell and, in the same hour, is seen and spoken with far away, often at a sickbed or a deathbed. What sets the claim apart is that the second figure is said to be solid and active: witnesses report conversation, touch and sometimes objects left behind.
Catholic theologians have been careful with it. Thomas Aquinas held that a body cannot be in two places by its own dimensions, so later writers explained the second appearance as a vision or as a likeness formed by an angel. The Church does not require belief in any instance. Writers on astral projection claim the reports as cases of the projected double becoming visible, an interpretation the witnesses themselves did not make.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Astral projection.
What sets Bilocation apart
The claim needs two sets of witnesses. One group must place the person here and another must place the same person there in the same hour, and the story stands or falls on matching the times. That requirement separates it from a vision, which has one witness, and from projection, which is reported by the traveller alone. The first body is usually described as still, entranced or asleep, and the distant one as speaking and acting.
- Word: Latin bi, two, and locatio, placing
- Cited case: Alphonsus Liguori and the death of Clement XIV, 1774
- New World case: Mary of Ágreda, the Lady in Blue, 1620s
- Recent figure: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, 1887 to 1968
- Lay reports: Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 1886
Often mistaken for something else: Teleportation would move one body from place to place; bilocation claims the body stays where it is and is also present somewhere else.
The story behind Bilocation
The best known cases belong to saints' lives. Alphonsus Liguori was said to have attended the dying Pope Clement XIV in Rome in 1774 while lying in a trance at Arienzo. The Spanish abbess Mary of Ágreda told her confessors in the 1620s that she had visited peoples of New Mexico without leaving her convent. Many such stories are told of Padre Pio, who died in 1968. Phantasms of the Living (1886), by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, collected lay reports of similar apparitions.
Why Bilocation matters
Bilocation is the strongest form of the claim that a person can act at a distance from the body, and so a test case for how such reports are weighed.
How to read Bilocation
The word is used in saints' lives and in parapsychology; loosely, people say it of anyone who seems to be everywhere at once.
Bilocation in practice: an example
In the Liguori story, his attendants found him motionless in a chair for many hours, and on waking he said he had been with the pope.
Where readings of Bilocation go wrong
The cases rest on testimony gathered by admirers, often years later, and none was recorded under conditions that rule out error.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- bilocation meaning, what is bilocation, being in two places at once, bilocation saints, padre pio bilocation
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is bilocation?
It is the claimed appearance of a single person in two separate places at the same moment. Most accounts come from the lives of Christian saints and from collections of apparition reports.
Is bilocation the same as astral projection?
No. In astral projection a person reports travelling in awareness while the body rests, usually unseen. Bilocation is a claim by other people that they met the person bodily in a second place.
Does the Catholic Church teach that bilocation is real?
It allows that God could bring about such an event but defines no case as a matter of faith. Reports are examined in canonisation inquiries and are not themselves proof of holiness.
