Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"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 a want of food. Alchemist, on the other hand, deny [...]

"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 extinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles", the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and [...]

"T. Livius, Burattinus, and Michael Schatta, in their letters to Kircher, affirm that they found many lamps in the subterranean caves of old Memphis. Pausanias 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 [...]

"Among the many well-known personages who firmly believed and strenuously asserted that such sepulchral lamps burned for several hundreds of years, and would have continued to burn maybe forever, had they not been extinguished, or the vessels broken by some accident, we may reckon the following names: Clemens Alexandrinus, Hermolaus Barbarus, Appian, Burattinus, Citesius, Coelius, [...]

"Among the ridiculed claims 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 questioned - how we can tell that the lamps we have observed are perpetual, as the period [...]

"But what matters if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travelers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and [...]

"It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such [...]

"It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others. Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the [...]

"At the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association, in 1871, Sir William Thomson said: "Science is bound by the everlasting law of honor to face fearlessly every problem which can fairly be presented to it." In his turn, Professor Huxley remarks: "With regard to the miracle-question, I can only say that the word 'impossible' is [...]

"In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers [...]