Thanks ockham for the suggestions.

Pulling the 70% intensity, 0.500 shadow "Point" lights down below the lanterns does warm up the scene, allow the intensity to be adjusted without wigging out the flame in the lantern, and does produce more realistic shadows on the floor.

However, on the down side it eliminates the intense flame in the lanterns I thought added to the scene and kind of removed the dapple lighting effect caused from those lights on the ceiling.

I guess the next attempt should be to add three more points of lights inside of each of the ceiling lanterns and try lowing the "Dist End" values to get the flame back but not cast light much farther past the lantern as possible.

The frustrating thing is that these Point lights don't illuminate anything in the preview mode and it takes several hours to render the scene before I know anything about the effects of any adjustments made to the lights.