I have devoted a page of this site to "Scalar Thermics", wherein the beginnings of what man can do not only for the generation of energy, but for offsetting the need for its generation by even more intelligent conservation. Such matters, however, as the ancients having made routine use of such technology to support their otherwise largely-inexplicable existence, are in themselves hard to find authentic references to, and as allegorized mythological themes, may be amongst the hardest to pinpoint.

It is probably in fact that we find our best evidence of the possibility of such ancient technologies in the form of related phenomena of radiant energy, in the form of a rich legacy of anecdotes about perpetual lamps and other legends of "physics-defying" sources of light. More than ever before in modern history, we have the accumulated physics concepts to attempt a successful interpretation of these phenomena, perhaps even in the most literal manner of evaluating these ancient anecdotes.

The sort of collection that is appropriate to consider could easily begin with Andrew Tomas' classic and indispensable, "We Are Not The First", for a good deal of the chapter, "Electricity in the Remote Past", is devoted to such occurrences.

It's worth repeating here what ultimately must go on this site's page "Lords of the Lightning", describing some incidents of ancient mastery of electricity, namely Tomas' acquaintance with the Agastya Samhita, an old document of India which describes the Hindu "Gods" Mitra and Varuna as "cathode and anode", while it clearly defines Pranavayu and Udanavayu as oxygen and hydrogen, respectively.

Along with Zeus and his electrophoretic aegis, and "the backbone of Osiris" which is virtually unmistakable as a highly sophisticated ancient Egyptian battery, this is further support for the cautious stance that when we attempt to ponder what the ancient "religions" were up to, we should walk very softly and presume very little. While neo-paganism and other similar modern occult traditions may have phenomenal legitimacy, it's not always easy to justify in any absolute sense that the ancients were not working with natural forces rather than supplicating them in anthromorphicized forms.

What it seems far easier to demonstrate based on an often dubious history, is that the ancients were familiar with technologies that even exceed modern standards. Many, of course will be hard-pressed to imagine these achievements within the lacking social frameworks that historians project onto those times. This of course is exactly the problem- it requires the ability to recognize that those social fabrics were not as we are told they were, any more than we can rely on biased accounts of what happens in our own times.

Decidedly on the matter of both subjects, the incandescent light we are told is the brainchild of Thomas Edison may very well be an invention of Nikola Tesla, who clearly did invent the fluorescent light, sold to Edison as a work for hire. Understanding even modern occurrences requires an understanding of the social framework- in this case, that patent and copyright laws allow the purchaser of the rights to falsely misrepresent themselves as the creator of these "works for hire". In other words, this inferior technology was sold to the greedy Edison to finance Tesla's experiments in superior technologies, purchased by Edison in part for the bragging rights, and probably much to Telsa's shock and horror, Edison actually was willing to make the absurd gesture of aggressively persuing the marketing of a technology that had been already made largely obsolete by its true inventor.

You're certainly in for the very same sort of surprise if you still believe Marconi to be the inventor of radio; that too was Tesla's invention, and there's probably a great deal more you don't know if you've idly expected the dogmaticists of education, industry and government to swear their loyalty to you personally to tell it like is.

I've personally found on occasion certain power companies who pride themselves on their reputation of openness with their customers to the point of offering them access to virtually any document pertaining to public power they should happen to request. Of course, when they were asked for documents pertaining to technology that could put them out of business, they were mysterious unable to provide the articles in question, specifically the proceedings from a conference on street lighting and traffic in Pretoria, South Africa, 1963, in which it was purported that C. S. Downey discussed "a system of artificial illumination equal, if not superior, to the 20th century", as he referred to "a village in the jungle near Mount Wilhelmina, in the Western half of New Guinea, or Irian".

This is but one of the references to ancient lighting to be found in Tomas' chapter. Continues Tomas, "Traders who penetrated this small hamlet lost amid high mountains said they 'were terrified to see many moon suspended in the air and shining with great brightness all night long'. These artificial moons were huge stone balls mounted on pillars. After sunset they began to glow with a strange neonlike light, illuminating all the streets."

Other references to "glowing stones" are featured, and they are only a relatively few amongst the many to be found in literature. Tomas, p 94, declares:

"Lucian (A.D. 120-180), the Greek satirist, gave a detailed account of his travels. In Heirapolis, Syria, he saw a shining jewel in the forehead of the goddess Hera which brilliantly illuminated the whole temple at night. In the same locale the temple of Hadad or Jupiter in Baalbek was provided with another type of lighting- glowing stones."

On page 97, Tomas reveals:

"Tales of similar shining stones come to us form the other side of the Pacific- South America. Barco Centenera, a memoirist of the conquistadors, wrote about their discovery of the city of Gran Moxo near the source of the Paraguay River in the Matto Grosso. In a work date 1601 he paints the picture of this island city and says: 'On the summit of a 7 [and] 3/4 meter pillar was a great moon which illuminated all the lake, dispelling darkness'.

Fifty years ago Colonel P. H. Fawcett was told by the natives of the Matto Grosso that mysterious cold lights had been seen by them in the lost cities of the jungles. Writing to the British author, Lewis Spence, he said: 'These people have a source of illumination which is strange to us- in fact, they are a remnant of a civilization which has gone and which has retained old knowledge'. Fawcett was in search of the ruins of that vanish civilization, and he made claim to having seen a lost city in the jungle. We can believe in Colonel Fawcett's sincerity because he sacrificed hi life in that expedition."

Neither did the subject escape the attention of Warren Smith, yet another author rewarded for his contributions with relative obscurity, in spite of the considerable service performed simply by recapitulating ever-increasingly obscure documents... documents which the status quo must rejoice in the fading of, lest they have to resort to public book burning to erase these accounts from the public memory. Erich Von Daniken, who, in spite of the constant criticism he receives, remains a powerful example of someone very gifted at noticing historical and archaeological anomalies, also relays anecdotes of the ancient glowing stones in his works.

Even more familiar and more common are the mysterious ever-burning lamps of the ancients, a subject which the Theosophists, Helena Blavatsky herself in particular, also attended, with considerable signs of enthusiasm. It was also referred to by Athanasius Kircher, one of the alchemists who was familiar with the feat of resurrection known as palingenics or palingenesis.

The original chapter by Tomas referred to here reveals:

"Numa Pompilus, the second king of Rome, had a perpetual light shining in the dome of his temple. Plutarch wrote of a lamp which burned at the entrance of a temple to Jupiter-Ammon, and its priests claimed it had burned since antiquity...

A beautiful golden lamp in the temple of Minerva which could burn for a year was described by Pausanius (second century A.D.). St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) left a description of a wonder lamp in one of his works. It was located in Egypt in a temple dedicated to Isis, and Saint Augustine says that neither wind nor water could extinguish it. An ever burning-lam was found at Antioch during the rein of Justinian of Byzantium (sixth century A.D.). An inscription indicated that it must have been burning for more than five hundred years.

During the middle ages a third-century perpetual lamp was found in England and it had burned for several centuries.

When the sepulchre of Pallas, son of Evander, immortalized by Virgil in his Aeneid, was opened near Rome in 1401, the tome was found to be illuminated by a perpetual lantern which had been alight for more than 2,000 years.

A sarcophagus containing the body of a young woman of patrician stock was found on the Via Appia near Rome in April, 1485. When the dark ointment preserving the body from decomposition had been removed, the girl looked lifelike with red lips, dark hair, and shapely figure. It was exhibited in Rome and seen by 20,000 people. When the sealed mausoleum was opened, a lighted lamp amazed the men who broke in. It must have been burning for 1,500 years!

In his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, (Rome 1652) the Jesiut Kircher refers to lighted lamps found in the subterranean vaults of Memphis...[Discoveries of] ever-burning lamps in the temples of India and the age-old tradition of the magic lamps of the Nagas-the serpent gods and goddesses who live in underground abodes in the Himalayas. On the background of the Agastya Samhita text... this... speculation is not extravagant. History shows that the priests of India, Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as their confreres on the other side of the Atlantic...were custodians of science...

Tibet is also known to have had miraculous lamps that burned for long periods. Father Evariste-Regis Huc (1813-1860), who traveled extensively in Asia in the nineteenth century, left a description of one of the ever-burning lamps which he had seen himself in that country."

There are places today, of course, where tourists can see ever burning lights in the form of natural gas that rises from the earth in sufficient quantity to sustain very modest blazes. It would be the most grievous sort of error, however, to mistake for empiricism the casual dismissal of all of these eternal flames as the same phenomena, in spite of the plausibility of such a premise. The knowledge of the ancients is not to be underestimated. The reason, in fact, that I am willing to finally include such relatively tenuous accounts in these pages is because they are ultimately part of a much greater tapestry of ancient wonders that clearly highlights the fact that these technologies are very likely to be far beyond that of the indoor lights of our own "horse-and-buggy" days, and the act of speculation alone is a profoundly valuable framework for stimulating creativity.

Nor should we make the mistake of expecting the accounts to be necessarily sensible, and especially not for them to be consistent. Part of the particular charm and merit of this genera of account is that there is disparity, yet still within a particularly narrow frame of reference, that not only encourages a great deal of thought here, but which ultimately implies that a great number of approaches to the particular problem, and applications of the solutions, were attempted by the ancients.

Helena Blavatsky's "Isis Unveiled" (v.I, pp. 224-232 & 522) likewise reveals a wealth of ancient accounts of, as they are named in her index, "Inextinguishable lamps":

"...the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to wxintinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, 'there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning"' says this missionary in his description of the place. The Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of these lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines...

Among the ridiculed claim of alchemy is that of the perpetual lamps. If we tell the reader that we have seen such, we may be asked- in case that the sincerity of our personal belief is not questioned0 how can we tell that the lamps we have observed are perpetual, as the period of our observation was limited? Simply that, as we know the ingredients employed, and the manner of their construction, and the natural law applicable to the case, we are confident that our statement can be corroborated upon investigation in the proper quarter... Meanwhile, however, we will quote a few of the 173 authorities who have written upon the subject.... It will not be denied that, if there is a natural law by which a lamp can be made without replenishment to burn ten years, there is no reason why the same law could not cause the combustion to continue one hundred or one thousand years.

Among the many well-known personages who firmly believed and strenuously asserted that such sepulchral lamps burned for several hundred years, and would have continued to burn may be forever, had they not been extinguished, or the vessels broken by some accident, we may reckon the following names: Clemens Alexandrius, Hermolaus Barbarus, Appian, Burattinus, Citesias, Coelius, Foxius, Costaeus, Casalius, Cedrenus, Delrius, Ericius, Gesnerus, Jacobonus, Leander, Libiavius, Lazius, P. della Mirandola, Philalethes, Licetus, Maiolus, Maturantius, Baptista Porta, Pancirollus, Ruscellius, Scardeonius, Lucovicus Vives, Volateranus, Paracelsus, several Arabian alchemists, and finally, Pliny, Solinus, Kircher, and Albertus Magnus.

The discovery is claimed by the ancient Egyptians, those sons of the land of Chemistry [footnote: Psalm cv. 23: "The Land of Ham" or chem... whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.] At least, they were a people who used these lamps more than any other nation, on account of their religious doctrines. The astral soul of the mummy was believed to be lingering about the body for the whole space of the three thousand years of the circle of necessity. Attatched to it by a magnetic thread, which could be broken but by its own exertion, the Egyptians hoped that the ever-burning lamp, symbol of their incorruptible and immortal spirit, would at last decide the more material soul to part with its earthly dwelling, and unite forever with its divine SELF... Such lamps are often found in the subterranean caves of the dead, and Licetus has written a large folio to prove that in his time, whenever a sepulchre was found within the tomb, but was instantly extinguished on account of the desecration. T. Livius, Burattinus, and Michael Schatta, in their letters to Kircher [], affirm they found many lamps in the subterranean caverns of old Memphis. Pausanius speaks of the golden lamp in the temple of Minerva at Athens, which he says was the workmanship of Callimachus, and burnt a whole year. Plutarch affirms that he saw one in the temple of Jupiter Amun, and that the priests assured him that it had burnt continually for years, and though it stood in the open air, neither wind nor water could extinguish it. St. Augustine, the Catholic authority, also describes a lamp in the fane of Venus, of the same nature as the others, unextinguishable either by the strongest wind or water. A lamp was found at Edessa, says Kedrenus, 'which, being hidden at the top of a certain gate, burned 500 years; But of all such lamps, the one mentioned by Olybius Maximus of Padua is by far the most wonderful. It was found near Atteste, and Scardeonius [] gives a glowing description of it: 'In a large earthen urn was contained a lesser, and in that a burning lamp, which had continued so for 1500 years, by means of a most pure liquor contained in two bottles, one of gold and one of silver. These are in the custody of Franciscus Maturantius, and are by him valued at an exceeding rate.'

Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of 'miracles', the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the matter, made by 'heathen' art, was supported by the wiles the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were order in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the 'power of God', who 'hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light'. As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, 'who deceives us in a thousand ways'. What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted by all good Christians during the Papacy of Paul III, when upon opening a tomb in the Appian Way, at Rome, there was found the entire body of a young girl swimming in a bright liquor which had so well preserved it, that the face was beautiful and like life itself. At here feet burned a lamp, whose flame vanished upon opening the sepulchre. From some engraved signs it was found to have been buried for over 1,5000 years, and suppposed to have been the body of Tulliola, or Tullia, Ciceros' daughter. []

Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemist on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water...

There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naptha, pteroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and moreover can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as it is exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the 'Lord' to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. 'And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure olive-oil beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always' (Exod. xxvii. 20).

Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on page 44 of his work mentions a preparation of quicksilver filtrated seven times through white sand by fire, of which, he says, lamps were made that would burn perpetually. Both Maturanthus and Citesuis firmly believe that such a work can be done by a purely chemical process. This liquor of quicksilver was known among alchemists as Aqua mercuralis, Materia Metallorum, Perpetua Dispositio, Materia prima Artis, also Oleum Vitri. Tritenheim and Bartolomeo Korndorf both made preparations for the inextinguishable fire, and left their recipes for it. []

The most copious footnote from Blavatsky's section on the subject appears here, whose actual formulas are truncated here through the present lack of symbol fonts; they are in fact fully intact in her actual work and one formula following is intact in Manly Palmer Hall's "Secret Teachings of All Ages:.

"Sulphur Alum... sublime them into flowers... of which add crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)... upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass; this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner; gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulfur may bubble all the while, The wick being thus besmeared and annointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please'

The other is as follows:

'R. Salis tosti...affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on ffesh vinegar and macerate and distill as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. Antimonii subtilis laevigat... set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often tilll you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before'

'These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus', says Libavius, his commentator, 'which, indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naptha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphta is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel', says this learned person.

We may add that we have ourselves seen such a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiments incapable to deceive any one being himself an ardent experiment in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion."

This is all still only the beginning of what may be said on the subject...

Part Two of The Undying Lights of the Ancients

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