The Eighth Wonder, by an Unpopular Philosopher

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 10 pages

Written in 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, and published in Lucifer in October 1891. It is the funniest thing in the section. Just back, she begins, from under the far-reaching shadow of the eighth wonder of the world — the gigantic iron carrot that goes by the name of the Eiffel Tower. Child of its country, wondrous in size, useless in object, and as shaky and vacillating as the Republican soil on which it stands.

The comparison she presses is with the seven wonders it claims to join: it has not one moral feature of its ancestors, not one trait of atavism to boast of. Nor, on the question of usefulness, is the architectural Leviathan of 1889 even on a par with the Statue of Liberty, that would-be rival of the ancient Pharos. What it is instead, she says, is one of the latest fungi of modern commercial enterprise, grown on the soil of cunning speculation to attract numberless flies in the shape of tourists — a job it does very conscientiously. Even the engineering, which she does not dispute is splendid, only draws from her the tag Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behind the comedy is the serious question the piece ends on, about what a civilisation chooses to build.

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