Lucifer, by Gustave Doré, 1866, illustration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost
20 November 2024
Most people recognize Lucifer as a name for the devil, for Satan, but fewer know that it is also a name for the planet Venus. How did this rather odd double meaning come about?
The name is from the Latin lucifer, or light-bearer (luci- / lux-, light. + -fer, bearing). The Latin in turn comes from the Greek ϕωσϕόρος (phosphorus), φως- (phos-, light) + -φόρος (-phoros, bringer). Cf. phosphorus.
Both senses of Lucifer date to the Old English period. We can see it used for the planet in an eleventh-century astronomy manual compiled by a monk named Byrhtferth:
Seo sunne ys onmiddan þissum tacnum gesett, and heo geyrnð hyre ryne binnan eahta and twentigum wintrum. Þæræfter on þam circule Lucifer uparist, þæne sume uðwitan hatað Candidum; he yrnð nigon ger hys ryne. He ys Veneris gehaten.
(The sun is set amid these [zodiacal] signs, and it runs its course in twenty-eight winters. After that, Lucifer, which some philosophers call Candidum, rises up in the circle; it runs its course in nine years. It is called Venus.)
(The twenty-eight-year cycle of the sun is a reference to the Julian calendar, in which it takes that many years for leap year to cycle through all the days of the week.)
After the moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, and as the “morning star,” it precedes the rising of the sun, hence it is the “light-bringer.”
And we see the name used for the devil in the late tenth-century poem known as Christ and Satan:
Wæs þæt encgel-cyn ær genemned
Lucifer haten, leoht-berende,
on gear-dagum in Godes rice.
Þa he in wuldre wrohte onstalde,
þæt he ofer-hyda agan wolde.
(That angelic being was earlier, in the days of old in God’s kingdom, named Lucifer, light-bearer, that was before he instigated rebellion in heaven because he was willing to be possessed by pride.)
The melding of Venus and Satan is a result of a reanalysis of a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 14:12–15. The Vulgate version of those verses read:
quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes qui dicebas in corde tuo in caelum conscendam super astra Dei exaltabo solium meum sedebo in monte testamenti in lateribus aquilonis ascendam super altitudinem nubium ero similis Altissimo verumtamen ad infernum detraheris in profundum laci.
(How are you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, who did rise in the morning? How are you fallen to the earth, who wounded the nations? And you said in your heart, “I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high.” But you shall be brought down into hell, into the depth of the pit.)
As originally written, these verses use the planet Venus as a metaphor for the king of Babylon, but under Christianity this passage was reinterpreted so as to be about Satan, tying into the extrabiblical story of the Devil leading a rebellion against God. So that is how the name for Venus became associated with the chief of the demons.
Sources:
Byrhtferth. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds. Early English Text Society s.s. 18. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 118.
Clayton, Mary, ed. “Christ and Satan.” Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 365–69, 326. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11.
“Isaias propheta 14:12–15.” Biblia sacra vulgat, fifth edition. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1111.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Lucifer, n.
Image credit: Gustave Doré, 1866. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.