Saint Lucifer by Lichtluxx

Writer: Lichtluxx

Subject: Saint Lucifer

Link: Tumblr / 23.02.2025

Saint Lucifer

Much is said about Lucifer, how he fell from the heavens for rebelling. But little is known about his vast history, so I decided to make a post to comment a little. It’s not like I know everything, there’s still a lot I need to research, but research is ongoing, so I’ll probably update this post as I learn new things about him.

First of all, Lucifer was not always an “evil name”. Canonized by the Catholic Church – although many do not know him – Saint Lucifer was a bishop of the Archdiocese of Cagliari, in Sardinia. He became well known for his staunch opposition to Arianism, an anti-Trinitarian Christological view held by the followers of Arius, a Christian priest of Alexandria in the times of the early Church.

Arius denied the existence of consubstantiality between Jesus and God, conceiving Christ as a pre-existent and created being, subordinate to God and his son. For Arius and the Arians, Jesus was not God but rather a man who descended from him, like all others who walked the Earth. Therefore, for Saint Lucifer, Jesus was God-made flesh, the creator himself manifested in matter.

His name shows that Lucifer was not, at least in the 4th century, a synonym for “Adversary”. In fact, the proper name “Lucifer” was not used to refer to the “devil” in ancient times. Before, the word was used only in its common meaning, as something that announced the dawn, the morning star. Nothing more, nothing less.

His name comes from the Latin Lux (Light) and Ferre (Bearer).

The word “lucifer” is a common noun, meaning “light-bearer” or “morning star”. It is “Lucifer” with a lowercase “l”, unlike the proper name, “Lucifer”. Incidentally, this is not the only occasion in which the term “Lucifer” is used with this meaning.

The Vulgate of Saint Jerome includes, in the book of Job, the word “lucifer” (cf. Job 11:17), which is translated as “dawn” in the edition of João Ferreira de Almeida itself.

Saint Peter, when referring to the voice of God the Father confirming the mission of Jesus, asks that the words of the prophecy be held firm, “Donec dies illucescat, et lucifer oriatur in cordibus vestris – until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Pt 1:19).

“Lucifer,” as the entity we know, is not in the Bible. In Isaiah 14:12, the Hebrew word is celestial. Significantly, the “Star of man,” is clearly a reference to Venus — the planet with which Lucifer is most associated. The text itself is about the king of Babylon and does not refer to the “Adversary” of the Bible.

Jewish sources generally do not identify the figure in Isaiah as being a reference to Satan or any other kind of demonic figure, but later Christian scholars started to interpret it as a reference to Satan, who is elsewhere said to be cast down from heaven, although at first, it looks like they did not see “Lucifer” as a name, but read the passage as being a poetic comparison to the morning star itself.

These interpretations have fallen in and out of favor, but in the Renaissance, it became more popular to use Lucifer as a personal name of the devil.

“Lucifer” is the Latin term that Jerome used in the Vulgate to translate helel. Most modernists believe that Isaiah is using a well-known mythological tale as an analogy to the failure and consequences of the rebellion and king of Babylon.

According to Canaanite history, the morning star is personified as the god Attar, who attempted to occupy the throne of Baal and, finding himself unable to do so, descended and ruled the underworld. The original myth may have been about the lesser god Helel attempting to dethrone the Canaanite supreme god El, who lived on a mountain to the north.

Hermann Gunkel’s reconstruction of the myth told of a mighty warrior named Hêlal, whose ambition was to ascend higher than all the other star deities, but who had to descend into the depths; thus, he portrayed as a battle the process by which the bright morning star fails to reach the highest point in the sky before being extinguished by the rising sun.

In Greco-Roman civilization, Lucifer was the name of the planet Venus when it appeared in the morning. It corresponds to the Greek names Phosphorus (“light-bearer”) and Eosphorus (“dawn-bearer”).

The Latin name of the entity was later absorbed into Christianity as a name for the devil. Modern scholarship generally translates the term in the relevant biblical passage (Isaiah 14:12), where the Greek Septuagint reads ὁ ἑωσφόρος ὁ πρωὶ ἀνατέλλων, as “morning star” or “shining one” rather than a proper name, Lucifer, as found in the Latin Vulgate.

In LaVeyan Satanism, Lucifer is described by The Satanic Bible as one of the four crown princes of hell, particularly that of the East, the ‘lord of the air’, and is called the bringer of light, the morning star, intellectualism, and enlightenment, which it is true. He rules over those aspects and more.

As a name for the planet in its morning aspect, “Lucifer” (Light-Bearer) is a proper name. In Greco-Roman civilization, he was often personified and considered a god and in the Roman version considered the son of Aurora and Cephalus or, in his Greek counterpart, Eos and Helios. At that time, he was represented as a boy bearing a torch.

Regardless of the version, as the Lord of Light and Knowledge, Lucifer is demanding of his followers, but kind and gentle – he has a very cute epithet, which is the sweet prince. Lucifer is nothing if not charming, a protector who always works to help you become better. Growth is constant, Lucifer is the epitome of growth, direct and sweet at the same time, telling you what you need to do and letting you figure out how to do it.

How did such an entity have its image distorted to what we know today?

In the Book of Isaiah, chapter 14, the king of Babylon is condemned in a prophetic vision by the prophet Isaiah and is called הֵילֵל בֶּן-שָׁחַר (Helel ben Shachar, Hebrew for “the bright one, son of the morning”), who is addressed as הילל בן שחר (Hêlêl ben Šāḥar).

The title “Hêlêl ben Šāḥar” refers to the planet Venus as the morning star, and this is how the Hebrew word is usually interpreted. The Hebrew word transliterated as Hêlêl or Heylel occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint translates הֵילֵל in Greek as Ἑωσφόρος (Heōsphoros), “bringer of the dawn”, the ancient Greek name for the morning star.

Similarly, the Vulgate translates הֵילֵל in Latin as Lucifer, the name in that language for the morning star. According to Strong’s Concordance based on the King James Bible, the original Hebrew word means “shining one, light-bearer,” and the English translation given in the King James text is the Latin name for the planet Venus, “Lucifer,” as it was already in the Wycliffe Bible.

The morning star metaphor that Isaiah 14:12 applied to a king of Babylon gave rise to the general use of the Latin word for “morning star/lucifer”, capitalized, as the original name of the devil before his fall, linking Isaiah 14:12 with Luke 10 (“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”) and interpreting the passage in Isaiah as an allegory of Satan’s fall from heaven.

Considering pride as a grave sin that reaches its peak in self-deification, Lucifer (Hêlêl) became the model for the devil. As a result, Lucifer was identified with the devil in Christianity, but what perpetuated his image as king of demons, during the Renaissance, it became more popular to use Lucifer as the devil’s name; it used to pop up in a lot of Christian popular literature, such as Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Joost van den Vondel’s Lucifer, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Early medieval Christianity made a strong distinction between Lucifer and Satan. While Lucifer, as the devil, is fixed in Hell, Satan carries out Lucifer’s desires as his vassal. In truth, Satan is a title, derived probably from the word Shaitam, it means Adversary.