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File:Lucifer.gif
Lucifer, as depicted in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal (1863).

In modern and late Medieval Christian thought, Lucifer is a fallen angel commonly associated with Satan, the embodiment of evil and enemy of God. Lucifer (who was supposed to be very beautiful) is generally considered, based on the influence of Christian literature and legend, to have been a prominent archangel in heaven (although some contexts say he was a cherub or a seraph), prior to having been motivated by pride to rebel against God. When the rebellion failed, Lucifer was cast out of heaven, along with a third of the heavenly host, and came to reside in the Hell. However, this common belief is not officially accepted by most Christian denominations, on the grounds that it exalts evil to an overly high position and is not directly supported by any passage in the Bible. Lucifer was originally a Latin word meaning "light-bearer" (from lux, "light", and ferre, "to bear, bring"), a Roman astrological term for the "Morning Star", the planet Venus. The word Lucifer was the direct translation of the Greek eosphorus ("dawn-bearer"; cf. Greek phosphorus, "light-bearer") used by Jerome in the Vulgate. In that passage, Isaiah 14:12, it referred to one of the popular honorific titles of a Babylonian king; however, later interpretations of the text, and the influence of embelishments in works such as Dante's The Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, led to the common idea in Christian mythology and folklore that Lucifer was a poetic appellation of Satan.

Roman poetic appellation

A 2nd-century sculpture of the moon goddess Selene accompanied by Eosphorus and Phosphorus, the Greek personifications of Venus later Latinized as "Lucifer".

Lucifer is a poetic name for the "morning star", a close translation of the Greek eosphoros, the "dawn-bringer", which appears in the Odyssey and in Hesiod's Theogony.

A classic Roman use of "Lucifer" appears in Virgil's Georgics (III, 324-5):

Luciferi primo cum sidere frigida rura i'm bsergi
carpamus, dum mane novum, dum gramina canent"
"Let us hasten, when first the Morning Star appears,
To the cool pastures, while the day is new, while the grass is dewy"

And similarly, in Ovid's Metamorphoses:

"Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls; the Stars took flight, in marshalled order set by Lucifer, who left his station last."

A more effusive poet, like Statius, can expand this trope into a brief but profuse allegory, though still this is a poetical personification of the Light-Bearer, not a mythology:

"And now Aurora, rising from her Mygdonian resting-place, had scattered the cold shadows from the high heaven, and, shaking the dew-drops from her hair, blushed deep in the sun's pursuing beams; toward her through the clouds, rosy Lucifer turns his late fires, and with slow steed leaves an alien world, until the fiery father's orb be full replenished and he forbid his sister to usurp his rays."
Statius, Thebaid 2.134

Biblical origins

Statue of one of twelve lucifers at the Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc.

In the Vulgate, an early-5th-century translation of the Bible into Latin by Jerome, Lucifer occurs in Isaiah 14:12-14 as a translation of the Greek word heosphorus ("dawn-bearer"), an epithet of Venus. The original Hebrew text of this verse was הילל בן שחר (heilel ben-schahar), meaning "Venus, son of the morning" or "Venus, the brilliant one", a poetic epithet of the king of Babylon, comparable to many other titles used by kings throughout history, such as Louis XIV of France being called Le Roi Soleil ("The Sun King"). In Isaiah, this title is specifically used, in a prophetic vision, to reference the king of Babylon's pride and to illustrate his eventual fate by referencing mythological accounts of the planet Venus:

14:4 And you shall bear this parable against the king of Babylon, and you shall say, "How has the dominator ceased, has ceased the haughty one!
14:10 All of them shall speak up and say to you, 'Have you too become weak like us? Have you become like us?'
14:11 Your pride has been lowered into Gehinnom, the stirring of your psalteries. Maggots are spread under you, and worms cover you.
14:12 How have you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, the morning star? You have been cut down to earth, You who cast lots on nations.
(Isaiah, Judaica Press Tanakh)

The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that "it is obvious that the prophet in attributing to the Babylonian king boastful pride, followed by a fall, borrowed the idea from a popular legend connected with the morning star". However, this metaphorical "falling from the heavens" was later interpreted as a literal fall from heaven when the passage's original meaning was made opaque by retranslations and eventually forgotten.

Later Jewish tradition, influenced by Babylonian mythology acquired during the Babylonian captivity, elaborates on the fall of the angels under the leadership of Samhazai ("the heaven-seizer") and Azael (Enoch, book vi.6f). Another legend, in the midrash, represents the repentant Samhazai suspended star-like between heaven and earth instead of being hurled down to Sheol.

The Helel-Lucifer (i.e. Venus) myth was later transferred to Satan, as evidenced by the 1st-century pseudepigraphical text Vita Adae et Evae (12), where the Adversary gives Adam an account of his early career, and the Slavonic Book of Enoch (xxix. 4, xxxi. 4), where Satan-Sataniel (Samael?) is also described as a former archangel. Because he contrived "to make his throne higher than the clouds over the earth and resemble 'My power' on high", Satan-Sataniel was hurled down, with his hosts of angels, to fly in the air continually above the abyss.

Christian tradition

The fall of Lucifer, Gustave Doré's illustration for the Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Jerome, with the Septuagint close at hand and a general familiarity with the pagan poetic traditions, translated Heylel as Lucifer. This may also have been done as a pointed jab at a bishop named Lucifer, a contemporary of Jerome who argued to forgive those condemned of the Arian heresy. Much of Christian tradition also draws on interpretations of Revelation 12:9 ("He was thrown down, that ancient serpent"; see also 12:4 and 12:7) in equating the ancient serpent with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the fallen star, Lucifer, with Satan. Accordingly, Tertullian (Contra Marrionem, v. 11, 17), Origen (Ezekiel Opera, iii. 356), and others, identify Lucifer with Satan.

Homer's description of the supernatural fall

"the whole day long I was carried headlong, and at sunset I fell in Lemnos, and but little life was in me"

relates the fall of Hephaestus from Olympus in the Iliad I:591ff, and the fall of the Titans was similarly described by Hesiod; through popular epitomes these traditions were drawn upon by Christian authors embellishing the fall of Lucifer.

In the fully-developed Christian interpretation, Jerome's Vulgate translation of Isaiah 14:12 has made Lucifer the name of the principal fallen angel, who must lament the loss of his original glory as the morning star. This image at last defines the character of Satan; where the Church Fathers had maintained that lucifer was not the proper name of the Devil, and that it referred rather to the state from which he had fallen; St. Jerome gave it Biblical authority when he transformed it into Satan's proper name.

It is noteworthy that the Old Testament itself does not at any point actually mention the rebellion and fall of Satan. This non-Scriptural belief assembled from interpretations of different passages, would fall under the heading Christian mythology, that is, Christian traditions that are derived from outside of church teachings and scripture. For detailed discussion of the "War in Heaven" theme, see Fallen angel.

In the Vulgate, the word lucifer is used elsewhere: it describes the Morning Star (the planet Venus), the "light of the morning" (Job 11:17); the constellations (Job 38:32) and "the aurora" (Psalms 109:3). In the New Testament, "Jesus Christ" (in II Peter 1:19) is associated with the "morning star" (phosphoros).

Not all references in the New Testament to the morning star refer to phosphoros, however; in Revelation:

Rev 2:28 And I will give him the morning star (aster proinos).

Rev 22:16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star (aster orthrinos).

In the Eastern Empire, where Greek was the language, "morning star" (heosphorus) retained these earlier connotations. When Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, attended the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus II in 968, he reported to his master Otto I the greeting sung to the emperor arriving in Hagia Sophia:

"Behold the morning star approaches, Eos rises; he reflects in his glances the rays of the sun— he the pale death of the Saracens, Nicephorus the ruler."

The Four Crown Princes of Hell

Lucifer has been acknowledged by the Satanic Bible as one of the Four Crown Princes of Hell, particularly that of the East. Lord of the Air, Lucifer has been named "Bringer of light, The morning star, Intellectualism, Enlightenment."

New Age beliefs

In a little known tome, The Urantia Book, published in 1955, Lucifer was a brilliant spirit personality, a "son of God" who at one time ruled this constellation of 607 inhabited planets. He fell into an iniquitous rebellion against the ordained universe governmental regime in a denial of God's existence saying he was God. "There was war in Heaven" but, according to The Urantia Book, the story has become convoluted over time.

Lucifer recruited Satan, another brilliant being of the same order, to represent his cause to the universe authorities on earth. The then planetary prince of earth, Caligastia - one and the same as "the devil", believed Lucifer's cause and subsequently aligned himself, along with 37 other planetary princes in the system, with the rebels. They all attempted to take their entire populations of their planets under the assertion of a false doctrine, a "Declaration of Liberty" which would have driven them to darkness, evil, sin and iniquity.

When Jesus of Nazareth went up to Mt. Hermon for the "temptation", it was really to settle this iniquitous rebellion for the triumph of the entire system. "Said Jesus of Caligastia: "Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast down." Subsequently, Lucifer, Satan, Caligastia and all the personalities who followed them, figuratively "fell from Heaven". They were actually and literally all "dethroned and shorn of their governing powers" by the appropriate universe authorities and most have been replaced. Subsequent to their efforts to corrupt Jesus while incarnated in the flesh on earth, any and all sympathy for them or their cause, outside the worlds of sin and rebellion, has ceased.

See: Paper 53 - The Lucifer Rebellion and Paper 54 - Problems of the Lucifer Rebellion.

Astronomical significance

Because the planet Venus (Lucifer) is an inferior planet, meaning that its orbit lies between the orbit of the Earth and the Sun, it can never rise high in the sky at night as seen from Earth. It can be seen in the eastern morning sky for an hour or so before the Sun rises, and in the western evening sky for an hour or so after the Sun sets, but never during the dark of midnight.

Venus (Lucifer) is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. As bright and as brilliant as it is, ancient people couldn't understand why they couldn't see it at midnight like the outer planets, or during midday, like the Sun and Moon. Some believe they invented myths about Lucifer being cast out from Heaven to explain this. Lucifer was supposed to shine so bright because it wanted to take over the thrones or status of Saturn and Jupiter, both of which were considered most important by the worshippers of planetary deities at the time.

In Romanian mythology, Lucifer (Romanian: Luceafăr) means the planet Venus and some other stars. It is also linked with Hyperion, a figure who animates bad spirits (but is not the Devil himself).

In literature

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n." —Paradise Lost, Book I, 263

Lucifer is a key protagonist in John Milton's (1667) Protestant epic, Paradise Lost. Milton presents Lucifer almost sympathetically, an ambitious and prideful angel who defies God and wages war on heaven, only to be defeated and cast down. Lucifer must then employ his rhetorical ability to organize hell; he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. Later, Lucifer enters the Garden of Eden, where he successfully tempts Eve, wife of Adam, to eat fruit from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Lucifer naturally makes appearances in fiction offering a suggestion of esoterica.

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In film, music and games

The symphonic black metal band Cradle of Filth devoted an entire album ("Damnation and a Day") to telling the story of creation and mankind's progression through Lucifer's eyes

External links

  1. Jewish Encyclopedia: Lucifer; also Fall of Angels
  2. Vita Adae et Evae: Text from R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament
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