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 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 on the world.

Lucifer is 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 embellishments 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
• Origins in Isaiah
• Christian tradition
• Other instances of the Morning Star in the New Testament

• For the Catholic Interpretation of Lucifer read here

Roman Poetic

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

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:

Origins in Isaiah

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 "Helel son of Shahar." Helel was a Babylonian / Canaanite god who was the son of another Babylonian / Canaanite god named Shahar.

Helel was the god of the morning star and his father was Shahar, god of the dawn. Some translations of Isaiah 14:12 "How art thou fallen from heaven, O day-star, son of the morning!" American Standard Version translating Hebrew Helel as "day-star" and the Hebrew word Ben as son and the Hebrew word Shahar as "of the morning." Others translate it as "Lucifer, son of the morning" 21st Century King James.

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 You will recite this parable about the king of Babylonia: How has the oppressor come to an end, the arrogance been ended?

14:10 They will all proclaim and say to you, "You also have been stricken as we were; you are compared to us.

14:11 Brought down to the nether-world were your pride and the tumult of your stringed instruments; maggots are spread out under you, and worms are your covers.

14:12 How have you fallen from the heavens, O glowing morning star; been cut down to the ground O conqueror of nations?

(Isaiah, Artscroll 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".

In modern Jewish theology, Helel in Isaiah 14 is not equated with the Jewish concept of HaSatan (the adversary). Instead, the prophet is speaking of the fall of Babylon and along with it the fall of her false gods Helel and Shahar. There is satan which is a Hebrew word meaning "adversary" and in the Tanakh one will find many instances of the word used to describe human and angelic adversaries to man.

Later Jewish tradition, influenced by Babylonian mythology acquired during the Babylonian captivity, elaborated 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 (Sataniel/Satanel "The Keeper of Hell") (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

Christian tradition of a literal fall from heaven drew upon the Homeric tradition, familiar to every educated Gentile Christian. Homer's description of the parallel 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; 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.

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.

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.

Other instances of the Morning Star in the New Testament

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, [and] 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."