Lucifer

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucifer begins with a line of poetry. In a modern translation of the Book of Isaiah, it reads: "How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth." Centuries of readers heard in those words the story of a rebel angel. In Christian theology, Lucifer is believed to be a fallen angel and the Devil. He is linked to the sin of pride and to an attempted usurpation of God that ended with his banishment to Earth. Yet the name did not start as a title for evil, and the story did not start with Christianity. How did a word for a bright star in the sky end up as a name for the enemy of God? Which ancient peoples told of a heavenly being who reached too high and was thrown down? Why do some theologians insist the whole identification is a mistake? And why have communities as different as Gnostics and Freemasons been accused of worshipping him?

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• 2. Light-Bringer of Rome

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  In Roman folklore, Lucifer was the name of the planet Venus, and the word means "light-bringer" in Latin. Storytellers often pictured the planet as a young man carrying a torch. The Greeks called it Phosphoros, which also means light-bringer, or Heosphoros, meaning dawn-bringer. One tradition called Lucifer the son of Aurora and Cephalus, and the father of Ceyx. Poets liked to show him announcing the arrival of the day. The same star had other names in other cultures. The Egyptians called its morning appearance Tioumoutiri, and Old English speakers called it Morgensteorra, the morning star.

  The 2nd-century Roman mythographer Hyginus described the planet as Luciferus by name, the fourth star, and the largest of them all. He noted that some tales call it Hesperus, and he explained why. Because it is visible at both dawn and sunset, he wrote, it earns both names. The poet Catullus used a different name for the evening version, Noctifer, meaning night-bringer. That matches the Greek Hesperus, the Egyptian Ouaiti, and the Old English Æfensteorra, the evening star.

  The 1st-century poet Ovid gave Lucifer a small part in his epic Metamorphoses. As Aurora throws open her crimson doors at daybreak, Lucifer arranges the stars in marching order and leaves his post last. Ovid treats Phosphorus and Hesperus as the same figure and calls him father of Daedalion. The grammarian Servius, by contrast, names him father of the Hesperides, or of Hesperis.

  Despite such poetic roles, Lucifer was not typically regarded as a god in classical Rome, and he had few, if any, myths of his own. The statesman Cicero even turned this fact into an argument. If the moon is a goddess, he said, then Lucifer must be counted a god, along with the other wandering stars and then the fixed stars too. Nothing in this Roman picture involves rebellion. That theme belongs to far older stories about how the same star moves across the sky.

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• 3. A Climb That Fails

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  Anyone watching Venus at dawn sees a drama. The morning star outshines every other point of light, then fades as the sun rises before it can reach the top of the sky. According to the source, this very motion gave rise to the idea of a heavenly being who strives for the highest seat and is cast down to the underworld.

  In Babylon, a similar story was told of Etana, and of a figure named Zu. A commentary in a Jewish reference work describes how the brilliance of the morning star, which eclipses the rest but cannot be seen at night, may have inspired such tales. Pride drove the hero to seek the highest seat among the star-gods, on the northern mountain of the gods. The supreme ruler of the Babylonian pantheon hurled him down.

  Canaanite religion offers a closer parallel. There, the morning star was personified as the god Attar, who tried to occupy the throne of Ba'al. Finding he could not manage it, he descended and ruled the underworld instead. Another reading suggests the original myth was about a lesser god, Helel, trying to dethrone El, the high god who lived on a mountain to the north. The scholar Hermann Gunkel reconstructed the tale around a mighty warrior called Hêlal. Hêlal wanted to climb higher than all the other stellar divinities, and had to descend to the depths. Gunkel read this as a battle staged for the sky itself, in which the bright star fails to reach the zenith before the sun fades it out.

  Jewish writings kept echoes of this tradition, including 2 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve. The Life of Adam and Eve in turn shaped the figure of Iblis in the Quran. The name Helel, from the Canaanite tale, would soon turn up in a Hebrew prophecy aimed at a living ruler.

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• 4. The Babylonian Taunt

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  The prophecy in Isaiah, chapter 14, opens with a promise of relief. On the day the Lord ends the suffering, turmoil and harsh forced labour of his people, they are told to take up a taunt against the king of Babylon. The mockery begins with the words "How the oppressor has come to an end! How his fury has ended!" The king is then addressed in Hebrew as Helel ben Shachar, usually understood as "shining one, son of the morning," a reference to Venus as the morning star. The word Helel appears only once in the whole Hebrew Bible.

  The passage gives the king a boast. He says in his heart that he will ascend to the heavens and raise his throne above the stars of God. He will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon, and make himself like the Most High. Instead, the prophecy says, he is brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. Onlookers stare and ask whether this is the man who made kingdoms tremble and turned the world into a wilderness.

  Who was the king? The text never names him. Proposed identities include a Babylonian ruler of Isaiah's own time, Nebuchadnezzar II, under whom the Babylonian captivity of the Jews began, and Nabonidus. Others point to the Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon II and Sennacherib. Verse 20 says this king will not be buried alongside the other kings of the nations, who each sleep in glory in their own house. Herbert Wolf argued that no single ruler was meant, and that the figure represents the whole line of Babylonian rulers.

  The word Helel travelled through translation. The Septuagint, an ancient Greek version, rendered it as Heōsphoros, the Greek name for the morning star. The Vulgate, the late-4th-century Latin translation, rendered it as Lucifer. The King James Bible kept that Latin name, as had the earlier Wycliffe Bible. Modern translations have largely abandoned it. Many now say "morning star," others use "daystar" or "Day Star," and some say "shining one" or "shining star."

  Rabbinic Judaism rejects any belief in rebel or fallen angels. The Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer, from the 11th century, gives two accounts of how the fallen angel myth arose. One concerns the angel in the Garden of Eden who seduces Eve. The other concerns the benei elohim, who cohabit with the daughters of man in Genesis 6:1-4. Adherents of the King James Only movement still object to the modern wording, and they hold that the verse does refer to the Devil.

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• 5. Becoming the Devil

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  A saying in the Gospel of Luke supplied a key link: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven." Readers joined that line to Isaiah 14:12, and treated the prophet's passage as an allegory of Satan's fall. The scholar Sigve K. Tonstad argues something similar about Revelation 12, where the dragon "who is called the devil and Satan" is thrown down to the earth. In his view the War in Heaven in that chapter was derived from the taunt against the Babylonian king.

  The early church fathers moved in the same direction. Around the year 160, Tertullian twice presented the words of Isaiah 14:14 as spoken by the devil, in book 5 of his Adversus Marcionem. Origen, who lived from 184 or 185 to 253 or 254, read such Old Testament passages as describing manifestations of the devil. An opposing view credits Origen with first making the identification, and credits Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo with spreading the story of a Lucifer who fell through pride, envy of God and jealousy of humans.

  The name itself lagged behind the idea. Tertullian wrote in Latin, the language where the word was coined, yet Lucifer is not among his many names for the devil. Even in the time of Augustine, who lived from 354 to 430 and was a contemporary of the Vulgate, it was not yet a common name for the devil. Earlier, Aquila of Sinope had derived the Hebrew word hêlêl from the verb yalal, to lament. That reading made the name belong to an angel mourning his lost beauty, and Jerome, in the Vulgate, rendered it Lucifer.

  Augustine's Civitas Dei, written in the 5th century, became the leading opinion of Western demonology, including in the Catholic Church. For him, the devil's rebellion was the first and final cause of evil. He rejected the older notion that envy came first, a view found in texts such as the Cave of Treasures, where Satan falls because he envies humans and will not prostrate himself before Adam. Augustine reasoned that pride, which he defined as loving yourself more than others and God, must come before envy. Evil entered the world through Satan's free will, he argued, and his grasp at God's throne was no assault on heaven's gates. It was a turn inward, in which the Devil becomes God in a world of his own. Everyone who falls away from God, Augustine concluded, belongs to the body of Lucifer and is a devil.

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• 6. Pride and Protest

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  The Lollard manuscript called Lanterne of Light, written in 1409, tied Lucifer to the deadly sin of pride. Before and around that time, medieval Christianity drew a fair distinction between Lucifer and Satan. Lucifer, as the devil, was fixed in hell, while Satan carried out his wishes as a vassal. Later writers made the connection firmer. Counter-Reformation authors such as Albertanus of Brescia matched each of the seven deadly sins to a particular biblical demon, and both he and Peter Binsfield assigned pride to Lucifer.

  The Protestant reformers pushed back hard. John Calvin dismissed the idea that the passage referred to Satan. He wrote that this exposition "has arisen from ignorance," because the context plainly shows the statements concern the king of the Babylonians. Martin Luther likewise considered it a gross error to apply the verse to the Devil.

  Writers and poets paid little attention to the theologians' quarrel. Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Joost van den Vondel's play Lucifer, and John Milton's Paradise Lost all cast Lucifer as the devil. Through such works, the identification became firmly lodged in Christian popular literature. Pride, in this telling, peaks in self-deification, and Lucifer became the template for the devil.

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• 7. Other Faiths, Other Lucifers

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  The Gospel of the Secret Supper, a text of the Bogomils and Cathars, tells of a glorified angel named Lucifer who fell from heaven to build his own kingdom. In this account he became the Demiurge, the maker of the material world, who trapped souls from heaven inside matter. Jesus came to earth to free those captured souls. These Gnostic sects, because they saw Lucifer's sin as self-deification, identified him with the creator deity of the Old Testament. Unlike mainstream Christianity, they denounced the cross as a symbol of Lucifer and his tool in the attempt to kill Jesus.

  In the Latter Day Saint movement, Lucifer is the pre-mortal name of the Devil. Latter-day Saint teaching holds that he rebelled against the plan of God the Father in a heavenly council and was cast out. The Doctrine and Covenants speaks of an angel in authority who rebelled and was thrust down, and says that "the heavens wept over him." After his fall he became Satan, who "goeth up and down, to and fro in the earth, seeking to destroy the souls of men." Church members read Isaiah 14:12 as referring to both the king of the Babylonians and the Devil.

  Arabian legend tells of a star cast down from its place. According to Ibn Abbas, a companion of Muhammad, the star Suhail, known as Canopus, once served as an intermediary between the authority of command and the stars, who were like soldiers. He became the originator of rebellion and was degraded to the southern sky. Another legend says Suhail was a Yemenite tithe-collector, turned into a star as punishment for unjust dealings. Venus, too, was said to have been a beautiful woman who became a star after she seduced two angels.

  Some modern movements reverse the traditional judgment. Luciferianism venerates the traits attributed to Lucifer, and usually honors him as a savior, guardian or instructing spirit rather than as the Devil. In LaVeyan Satanism, The Satanic Bible calls him one of the four crown princes of hell, the one of the East and "lord of the air," and praises him as the bringer of light and enlightenment. Rudolf Steiner, whose writings underlie Anthroposophy, saw Lucifer as one of two opposing forces. Ahriman stood opposite him, and Christ stood between the two, mediating a balanced path. Steiner described Lucifer as an imaginative, delusional force linked with visions and fantasy, and believed he had incarnated in China about 3000 years before the birth of Christ.

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• 8. Inventions and Reinventions

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  Léo Taxil, who lived from 1854 to 1907, claimed that Freemasonry worshipped Lucifer. In what became known as the Taxil hoax, he alleged that the leading Freemason Albert Pike had told a body called "The 23 Supreme Confederated Councils of the World" that Lucifer was God, opposed to an evil god named Adonai. That council was Taxil's own invention. He also promoted a book by Diana Vaughan that supposedly exposed a ruling body called the Palladium. Taxil had written the book himself, and he later confessed in public. A publication called Freemasonry Disclosed described the confession in 1897. Taxil, it said, had spent twelve years preparing the hoax, and its earlier articles could now be considered as not having existed.

  Genuine mentions of Lucifer do appear in the writings of Pike and of other esoteric Masonic scholars such as Manly P. Hall, though they are far more cryptic. Supporters of Freemasonry say that talk of a "Luciferian path" meant the morning star and the search for light. In Morals and Dogma, Pike calls Lucifer the Son of the Morning, who bears the Light, and whose splendors blind feeble, sensual or selfish souls. Anti-masonic groups still quote Taxil and Pike's supposed address. Arthur Edward Waite, in Devil-Worship in France, compared Taxil's work to tabloid journalism, full of logical and factual inconsistencies.

  A stranger Lucifer appears in Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which Charles Godfrey Leland said he collected in Italy. There Lucifer is both brother and consort of the goddess Diana, and father of Aradia. Diana divides herself into light and darkness, and then longs for the light, her brother Lucifer. That longing is the dawn, but he flees, like a mouse before a cat. Leland's version mirrors the movements of the moon and Venus, yet it also borrows from Christian tradition, calling Lucifer proud of his beauty and driven from Paradise for his pride. Several modern Wiccan traditions based partly on Leland usually omit Lucifer, or replace him as Diana's consort with the Etruscan god Tagni or with Dianus.

  Popular culture has reshaped him again. Modern stories often show Lucifer as charismatic, witty, complex, and sometimes sympathetic, with a rebellious streak and a conflicted conscience. In the television series Supernatural, he is the main antagonist of the fifth season, and the war between good and evil angels is a quarrel between brothers. His evil there stems from love of God. When God orders the angels to bow before humanity, Lucifer refuses, because he could only love God. The series Lucifer, which ran from 2016 to 2021, makes him a suave nightclub owner who rebelled against his lord-father. The Sandman comics present him as a refined ruler of hell seeking independence. In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the figure of Melkor, also called Morgoth, is analogous to Lucifer.

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