Lucifer

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

Lucifer is a Latin word meaning "light-bearer" (from lux, lucis, "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 Septuagint Greek heosphoros, ("dawn-bearer"); (cf. Greek phosphoros, "light-bearer") and the Hebrew Helel, ("Bright one") used by Jerome in the Vulgate, having mythologically the same meaning as Prometheus who brought fire to humanity. 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 appellation

Lucifer is a poetic name for the "morning star", a close translation of the Greek eosphoros, the "dawn-bringer" (son of Eos, "dawn"), 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:

“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