In order to start a fire, three elements are required: oxidizing agent, heat, and fuel. To start it, we need to have all the three elements present in the right proportions, while the removal or absence of some of them is going to result in extinguishment or prevention of the fire. When we take into consideration that the elements aren’t infinitely abundant or not always readily available than can we keep the fire burning all the time?
Eternal fires or flames exist, and human intervention can intentionally ignite them, or natural phenomena like coal or peat fires may also cause them. However, there is evidence from ancient times, which speaks about constantly-burning lamps which supposedly stayed like that for hundreds or thousands of years, without obvious sources of fuel.
How our forefathers managed to achieve this and from where they acquired this great secret knowledge is still a mystery.
Mythological records, stories, and texts related to eternal flame and fire.
A lot of ancient mythological records and texts contain evidence which refers to eternal sources of light. For instance, the divine flame was the power that gods possessed, and their ways of creating it were by using the exclusive properties which they possessed as powerful beings, which humanity should never know.
But, in the mythology of ancient Greek peoples, Prometheus was a deity that was punished as he broke the godly law and stole fire from the Mount Olympus, in order to give it to human beings.
The eternal fire and flame were even mentioned in some traditions of the ancient Romans, and Egyptians, and also the Byzantine Empire. According to the De Defectu Oraculorum of Plutarch, there was a lamp which burned at Jupiter Ammon’s temple in Egypt. The lamp has been placed over a door, and although it was standing in open space all the time, the priests at this temple claimed that rain or wind was not able to put out its light.
Some other temples of that time had similar stories of forever-burning lamps. Moreover, according to sources, Numa Pompilius, who is the second Rome’s king, had the capacity to establish a communication with some gods using a forever-burning lamp. Because of this, people speculated that he possessed knowledge of electricity and that his successor, named Tullus Hostilius died because he did not succeed to harness lightning and draw electricity from it.
Another similar lamp has been discovered in about 140 AD somewhere near Rome, precisely in the Pallas’s tomb, who was the son of Evander. The time of the burning of this lamp was over 2,000 years. It was also said that it couldn’t be extinguished with the use of methods like pouring water and blowing flame.
At the time of Justinian, the emperor of Byzantine, a group of soldiers found a forever-burning lam at the place Edessa, Syria. An inscription on the lamp said that it was burning for 550 years before it has been discovered.
One occult writer, named Eliphas Levi, told another interesting and unbelievable story about these forever-burning lamps in the book which he named “Histoire de la Magie.” In the book, he talks about one man called Jechiele, the enigmatic French rabbi that served as the advisor in the court of Louis IX, during the 13thcentury.
He had a lamp which he placed before his house and which was not possessing oil or wick. When some people asked him what the source which fueled the light of the lamp was, he decided not to tell them. A lot of people tried to do the same as he did, but they were not successful. According to speculations, he created a quite primitive electricity form, but no one absolutely proved this claim.
Conclusion
To these days, the idea related to inextinguishable and perpetual light without a source of fuel is still a polarizing and controversial topic. However, if we use logic, we may understand that the tales about these forever-burning lamps are probably some imaginative stories which cannot be real in reality, because physical evidence is still not found.
However, looking at it from another perspective, we may understand that our forefathers were probably possessing some knowledge on how they can light a perpetual flame, and information related to this simply got lost with the time.
For right now, we may not totally discredit or definitively validate the existence of such eternally-lit flames and fires; however, we may be sure that the fiery fascination of people over these lamps is probably going to endure for a lot of years that are about to come, or even forever.
