Perpetual Lamps

The "perpetual" or "eternal" lamps of the ancients were sepulchral lights. The idea is supposed by some archaeologists to have originated in the East; but it is chiefly in connection with the ancient Roman tombs that we read of the discovery of such lamps. The Romans evidently placed lights in the mausoleums of their friends and relatives which, according to legend and tradition, continued to burn, without waste and in defiance of natural laws, as long as the air was excluded from them. But upon opening the tomb, the rare and apparently supernatural flame was extinguished. This circumstance furnished the poet Cowley with a simile in describing the violent death of Ammon by the hands of Jonathan:--

It is asserted that about the middle of the sixteenth century, during the pontificate of Paul III., an ancient tomb was discovered in the Appian Way at Rome, which from the inscription upon it was supposed to be the burial place of Cicero's daughter Tullia. In this sepulchre was found the body of a woman and also a lighted lamp, which, if the story be true, must have been burning for at least 1550 years. But as soon as the air of the tomb was influenced by the exterior air, the light was extinguished and the body fell into a shapeless heap of dust.

Another tradition describes an event four or five centuries earlier, when a peasant in the neighborhood of Rome, happening to dig a little deeper than usual in a field he was cultivating, came upon the body of a man taller than the city wall, enclosed in a stone coffin, with an inscription which identified the corpse as that of Pallas, the son of Evander, mentioned by Virgil. It must have been lying there for more than 2200 years. Over the head of the corpse was a lamp, burning. William of Malmesbury, whose history contains an account of this matter, says that the lamp was "constructed by a magical art, so that no violent blast, no dripping of water could extinguish it. While many were lost in admiration, some person made an aperture beneath the flame with an iron style, which introducing the air, the light vanished."

Since there are reasonable historic doubts as to the existence of Pallas, and anatomical doubts as to the fact of a man growing taller than the city walls, it will not do to place too much confidence in this story, including the reference to the perpetual lamp.

Solinus, a Latin writer of the first century of the Christian era, tells us of a lamp which was found in a tomb after burning for more than fifteen hundred years, and which fell into dust in the hands of those who took it up. It is said that several of these lamps have been discovered in the territory of Viterbo in Italy, of which that of Olybius Maximus of Padua is the most celebrated. This had remained burning 1500 years. Two phials, one of gold and one of silver, both filled with a clear liquor, nourished, without any sensible diminution, a lamp placed between them, or, as some say, under them.

Bailey, in his English Dictionary of 1730, says that at the dissolution of Monasteries in the time of Henry VIII. (1509-1547), there was a lamp found which had burned in a tomb since about 300 A.D., or nearly 1200 years. "Two of the subterranean lamps," he adds, "are to be seen in the Museum of Rarities at Leyden in Holland." Shakespeare makes his Pericles speak of "Age-remaining lamps" in connection with funeral observances, and Spenser refers, in describing a wedding rite, to the hiding of a sacred lamp in a secret chamber,

The ancients had various quaint recipes for the preparation of these lamps. One prescribes, for filling them, "the oiliness of gold," resolved by art into a liquid form.

Trithenies, a learned German ecclesiastic of the fifteenth century, discovered by experiment a compound of flower of brimstone, borax and spirits of wine, which would burn many months without wasting. Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit of the seventeenth century, mentions a method of making lamps with indestructible asbestos wicks, and an attachment whereby the flame is reduced back into wax and reburned, so that the supply of fuel could never be exhausted. Furtunio Liceto, a Genoese physician of the same period, contended that the ancients knew a secret process for making an inconsumable oil, or for so constructing their lamps that, as they burned, the smoke condonsed automatically, and resolved itself into oil again. The old romance of "Virgilius," purporting to describe the wonderful feats of the poet Virgil, tells how the latter placed a lamp of glass on a "mighty marble pillar;" it burned constantly without going out, and nobody could put it out, but it lighted the whole city of Rome. This lamp burned for the space of 300 years or more, and then was extinguished, not by a human hand, but by the mechanical figure of an archer which the poet had set up near his lamp, and which a frivolous girl disturbed, with this disastrous result.

The effort to restore the lost art of making perpetual lamps ceased when alchemy gave place to science.

The superstition flourished greatly at the time of the founding of the secret order of Rosicrucians (q. v.), and it was firmly believed by many of his contemporaries that the founder of the society had discovered the secret; but, like the other stories which have been referred to in the foregoing lines, this lacks any evidence that would appeal to the practical mind of the severely matter-of-fact age in which we live. Could we be sure that natural gas is inexhaustible, "perpetual lamps" would no longer be impossible.