Lights in the Ancient Sepulchres—The Still Secret Alchemy of the Ever-Burning Lamps
Report Topics:
- Scattered across Europe and the Middle East were hundreds of tombs found that contained mysterious perpetual lights which had remained lit for many centuries. Who created them? And are there still such lamps yet to be discovered?
Full Report:
We have the testimony of over two hundred classical, medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who recorded the repeated discovery of what became known as “ever-burning lamps” found inside various newly opened tombs across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, some of them stretching back into unknown antiquity.
The venerable words of these historical witnesses to the existence of a lost technology often included many speculations as to how such marvelous lamps managed to stay lit and maintain a constant illumination in an enclosed space over hundreds, even thousands of years of time.
Here are a few examples.
One of the earliest Greek historians, Herodotus, told how the ancient Egyptians made elaborate use of extremely long-burning lamps in their religious festivals, dating back to the reign of Pharaoh Mycerinus or Menkhare of the Fourth Dynasty.
At the famed sanctuary of Jupiter-Ammon in Egypt, Plutarch reported the existence of a lamp which had burned a non-flickering light continuously for several centuries.
Likewise, Pausanius described a similar “gold lamp” in the Temple of Minerva Polias in Athens, which also produced a light for considerable periods. A very similar light source illumined the completely enclosed altar of the Temple of Apollo Carneus at Cyrene, which was said to have operated for centuries without end.
The medieval Arab traveler Said Ibn Batric claimed to have seen a similar lamp shining brightly in the great sanctuary of Aderbain in Armenia.
Giraldus Cambrensis reported that a perpetual flame was still aflame in the Shrine of St. Bridget in Kildare in Ireland. She had also been sacred as a goddess to the ancient Druids as the Daughter of Fire. It was from the Celtic Druids that the earliest Irish Christians had acquired the original lamp, which had been lit by them several centuries earlier.
The Venerable Bede related the story of the pilgrimage of his English compatriot Arculfus to the Holy Land in the year 670, and on his visit to the Church of the Mount of Olives (later destroyed in the eleventh century) he told of its wondrous source of lighting originating from a series of suspended lamps which shone with light continuously for hundreds of years.
None other than the leading Church authority, St. Augustine, stated in his seminal work, De Civitate Dei, that in Egypt, “There was, and still is, a temple of Venus, in which a lamp burns so strongly in the open air that no storm or rain extinguishes it.”
As to where such an unexplainable wonder came from, the early Christian Father wrote further:
“We add to that inextinguishable lamp a host of other marvels of human and or magical origin. If we choose to deny the reality of them, we shall ourselves be in conflict with the truth of the sacred books in which we believe. Thus either human ingenuity has devised in that inextinguishable lamp some contrivance based on ancient knowledge or else it was contrived by magic to give men something to marvel at in that shrine.”
Could the “temple of Venus” have been a reference to either the sacred precincts of Isis at Philae or the sanctuary of Hathor at Dendera? If the light source was still operating since either temple had functioned, then it means it had offered a constant illumination for at least one and a half millennia.
Unfortunately, St. Augustine was of the final opinion that such a lamp was very likely the product of Magic, and therefore had its source in the Devil. Another Church Father, Fortunius Licetus, described the very same enigmatic lamp but did not condemn it, while Ludivicus Vives, in his Notes to St. Augustine in 1610, also referred to a number of other ever-burning lamps, claiming instead that they must have been the creation of “men of the greatest skill and ancient wisdom.”
Licetus made several more references to stange lamps that dated back a considerable period.
He recorded that at Antioch, during the reign of Justinian, a sealed chamber discovered by soldiers in a recess in one of the city’s gates revealed the presence of a bright lamp, which had inscriptions identifying it as being five centuries old.
In another of his writings, entitled Magia Naturalis, Licetus described how in the year 600 a marble tomb had been unearthed on the volcanic island of Nesis, near Naples, that contained “a vase in which was a lamp still alight, the light of which paled and soon was extinguished when the vase was broken.”
In another of his writings, De Lucernis, he alluded to the “oldest Alchemists” and their secret knowledge of “peculiar flame and fire” as having been the ultimate source for these mystery lamps of yesteryear.
The medieval Latin scholar, Martinus, in his work Liber Chronicorum, portrayed how, in 1401, in the tomb of Pallas the Arcadian, son of Evander, located on the Tiber not far from Rome, a lamp was brought to light the fire of which could not be extinguished until the lamp itself was broken. The sepulchre was said to date back to the time when Rome had kings, which means the mystery light had been steadily burning for nearly two millennia.
In historical reports to Pope Paul III—written by Franciscus Maturantius, Hermalaus and Scardenius in 1540—a still lit lamp was found in a tomb on the Appian Way with inscriptions identifying the deceased occupant as having been Tulliola, the daughter of Cicero. She had been buried in 44 B.C.E.—which means the lamp interred with her had illuminated her sepulchre for nearly 1,600 years. The light went out only an hour after exposure to outside air.
The same chronicler, Maturantius, noted above, also wrote about a common laborer from Ateste, near Padua, who in his day had opened a forgotten local sepulchre that possessed “an urn within an urn, and in this smaller one a lamp burning brightly.” On either side of this double vase were ampullae of gold and silver filled with strange oil. Inscriptions on the outer urn indicated that the light had been dedicated to the Roman god Pluto, deity of the underworld and darkness, and that it had been made by a Roman master alchemist named Maximus Olybius, who had lived a millennia and a half before.
At the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England under Henry VIII, in 1547, there was an account preserved that an ancient Roman tomb found in Yorkshire had been opened and looted. The sepulchre purported to be that of Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine, who had been buried circa 300 A.D. Inside was found a lamp still burning after 1,200 years.
In 1484, when Christian Rosenkreuz—the founder of the modern Rosicrucian Order—died, many wonderful objects based on lost ancient sciences were buried with him in his tomb. In 1604, 120 years later, members of his Fraternity had been instructed to re-open his sepulchre in order to gain access to some of of its secrets. There they beheld one of these, a “lamp of special and peculiar construction, a lucent body burning with phosphorescence,” that still brightly illuminated the chamber. But soon after the sealed door had been breached, the light gradually grew dim and was finally extinguished.
The eminent Renaissance scholar Althanasius Kircher, writing in 1640, noted that several travelers to the land of the Nile in his day had observed “perpetual lights” still burning among the various tombs of ancient Memphis, once the capital city of the the Old Kingdom of earliest Dynastic Egypt.
If this claim is true, it means that some of the most ancient perpetual lamps may have been continuously burning for up to five thousand years.
During the early reign of Charles II, a court archaeologist named Robert Plot wrote that in an undisclosed location in Cumbria a tomb had been opened by local citizens that contained a body clothed in armor that sat upright, guarding over a wondrous lamp that lit the entire vault with a strong light. When the corpse was approached, weights hidden in the floor shifted, and the body’s upraised arm and sword swiftly descended crushing the lamp, breaking it into pieces and extinguishing its flame forever.
English annotator Nathan Bailey, in his Brittanic Dictionary of 1736, described how in the Museum of Rarities at Leyden, in Holland, there were on exhibit the broken remains of two “eternal lamps” that had been found in ancient tombs near Rome. There was also mention made of a long-ignited source of light that had been discovered in the Roman temple dedicated to the Nymph Egeria. The “eternal flame of fire that burned beneath its spherical dome” had been consecrated to her over two millennia ago.
Even as late as 1846, near Cordova, Spain a prominent Englishman from Seville named Wethersell unearthed a Roman tomb in the region of the Castellum Priscum, and inside it he reported discovering a still burning lamp that continued to shine brightly until an attempt was made to remove it.
The question is, are there even more lamps yet to be found, hidden away in lost sepulchres that are intact and burning, even today?
A survey of what has been described about the workings of these ancient lamps—from such ancient to modern sources as Plutarch, Pliny, Solinus, Philos, Pausanius, Trithemius, Libarius, Pancirollus, Baptista Porta, Joachim Fortius, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Geraldus Cambrensis, Hermolius Barbarus, Jacobus Mancius, Wolfgang Lazius, Korndorf, Khunrath, Kanealy, Wecker and Blavatsky—gave the following parallel yet enigmatic particulars:
1. The lamps appear to have had some form of wick, variously identified as linum asbestinum, amiantus, plume alum, earth flax, linum vivam, linum carpasium, lapis carystins and salamander’s wool.
Though some form of incombustible metal wire or filament was often hinted at, such materials were not fibrous or porous enough under normal conditions to allow some form of oil to continually pass upward and burn, such as with a cotton or woollen wick.
2. The very extraordinary combustant that produced the eternal flame was called bitumen, essence of sol, alchem of gold, oilness of gold, sacra residuum, inconsumabilis, caeteris paribus, prima ignituum, unctuous humor, and divina petroleum.
What was truly miraculous was that whatever this unknown oil was made from, it was never exhausted or consumed, but kept burning without needing to be replenished.
3, No doubt an important key was the fact that the tomb chamber was always described as having been completely sealed and airtight, and that only when the entrance was opened did the light gradually dim and finally failed altogether. Obviously, a vital element that kept the flame going was the inherent steady state of the tomb air, some form of chemical equilibrium that had to be kept constant. Once the door was opened, this internal atmospheric balance was somehow disrupted and the light could no longer be maintained.
4. The container for the wick and oil does not seem to have been important, as it was portrayed as being made of a wide variety of materials—marble or other stone, pottery or ceramic, glass or crystal, precious to common metals, even wood.
Its only important properties was that it was leak-proof, and large enough to maintain a certain fixed quantity of oil just necessary enough to keep the process of supplying the right amount of liquid for the flame to burn and be held in some unexplained perpetual equilibrium. Several reports specify that when the container was broken by tomb intruders and the oil gradually escaped, the glow of the fire diminished accordingly and subsequently went out.
5. In a few cases, the finding of such lamps was directly linked to alchemists in some fashion, specifically if the evidence suggested that the perpetual light sources were of particularly ancient origins. In most of the other cases, it was implied that the lamps had had something to do with alchemical processes.
There was a universal belief throughout Europe and the Middle East over many centuries that anything unearthed or discovered of an obvious sophisticated nature that exhibited remarkable qualities or performed magical feats that defied explanation in terms of the then prevailing knowledge, that such an out-of-place object with certainty had to have been the creation of the alchemical wizards of old. Such items as ever-burning lamps squarely fell into such a general category.
And it was this age-old majority of opinion that was exactly right. As Rosicrucian scholar W. Wyman Westcott observed:
“The consensus of ancient opinion must point to the broad conclusion that there formerly existed an art that has been lost in the dim light of the dark ages of the world. Old sources catalogue many other such lost arts, and modern science is flung back, baffled from the performance of many a deed which could have been freely done by the ancient sages.
“Several of our most modern discoveries have been shown to have been anticipated by men who are contemptuously regarded by modern scientists. So it has ever been.
“Earth knows but little of its greatest men, lost in the presence of time, antiquity and futurity.
“Knolwedge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
