Madame Blavatsky on the Quenchless Lamps of Alchemy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 15 pages

A chapter from the first volume of Isis Unveiled on one of the strangest claims in the classical record — the perpetual lamps said to have been found still burning in sealed tombs. The example she presses is the lamp reported in the tomb of Tullia, daughter of Cicero, burning brightly when the tomb was opened after fifteen hundred and fifty years, the Romans having preserved such lights, on the old accounts, by the oiliness of gold.

What the chapter is really about is evidence. She concedes the sceptic's position openly: a fact given in 1731 testifying to something that happened under Paul III is naturally disbelieved in 1876, and scientists have a certain right to doubt until they satisfy themselves on the evidence of their own senses. The same latitude, she notes, is extended to the burial and resuscitation of fakirs after thirty days, and to lamas who inflict mortal wounds on themselves and heal them almost instantly. Her complaint is narrower and sharper than blanket accusation: what she says she will never understand is the collective stubbornness of the Academies in refusing to examine phenomena produced in their own countries before numerous witnesses. The subtitle gives the alchemical explanation offered — that the light is sublimated gold rescued by stellar attraction.

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