Lucifer

In a conversation the other day a friend mentioned Lucifer and the fallen angel story from the Bible. I asked if that was really in the Bible or did it really come from Milton. Since I was raised Jewish, I don't know very much about the New Testament at all. I was pretty certain that the Old Testament doesn't really mention the devil at all (I guess the Old Testament God was vengeful enough). So I turned to wikipedia and found the answer pretty fascinating. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"Traditionally, Lucifer is a name that in English generally refers to the devil before being cast from heaven, although this is not the original meaning of the term. In Latin, from which the English word is derived, Lucifer means "light-bearer" (from the words lucem ferre). It was the name given to the dawn appearance of the planet Venus, which heralds daylight. For this meaning, English generally uses the names "Morning Star" or "Day Star", and rarely "Lucifer".

The Bible does not name the devil as Lucifer. The use of this name in reference to the devil stems from an interpretation of Isaiah 14:3-20, a passage that does not speak of any fallen angel but of the defeat of a particular Babylonian King, to whom it gives a title that refers to what in English is called the Day Star or Morning Star (in Latin, lucifer). In 2 Peter 1:19 and elsewhere, the same Latin word lucifer is used to refer to the Morning Star, with no relation to the devil. It is only in post-New Testament times that the Latin word Lucifer was often used as a name for the devil, both in religious writing and in fiction, especially when referring to him prior to his fall from Heaven."

I never read much fiction that talked about the devil, but I think it was in Neil Gaiman's Sandman that I first saw "Morning Star" used with "Lucifer", thought I never knew why.

This led me to reading about fallen angels. The concept isn't in the old Testament, but is in the Book of Enoch which is believed to have been written by Noah's grandfather but didn't make it into the canon of the Old Testament. The New Testament has a few oblique references to "angels that sinned" and that "left their own habitation" and a fall of Satan, though it apparently never states that Satan was an angel (there are a few references to that in the Old Testament as Satan is a Hebrew word meaning obstruct or oppose and there are references to a Ha-Satan in a couple of places including Job). The Book of Revelation has the most on it but its pretty vague too.

But whether explicitly in the Bible or not, the notion of fallen angels and Satan and Lucifer in early Jewish and Christian and Islamic stories. The part I found fascinating was the relation to Venus. After the Sun and the Moon, Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky. Ancient people knew it as a planet but it behaved differently from the others (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars). They all came out at night and reached a peak in the sky late at night (though that varies with their orbits). Venus is visible at dusk and dawn but never in the middle of the night and it doesn't climb very high in the sky (like just about every other object in the sky does at some point).

We of course now know the reason for this. Venus' orbit is inside Earth's. At midnight wherever you are, the Earth is rotated so that you're pointed exactly away from the Sun so you can see the outer planets but not the inner ones. But it seems, early man interpreted this bright star as not being allowed to be all the way up in heaven.

So you get a powerful angel (the third brightest thing in the sky) as being cast down from heaven. It must have been God that this did, since God did everything, and it must have been something serious to get this punishment. I think that's about as much detail as the Bible describes the story, everything else came later.

And of course the most remarkable thing to me is that people still believe these stories as true.

(Mercury behaves similarly to Venus and was known to the Greeks and Egyptians, but I'm not sure how it fits into things. It seems paradoxical that Judeo-Christian myths associate the planet Venus with the devil and Greco-Roman ones associate it with love. I would think that meteors or falling stars would somehow fit into this too but the only myths I can find about them are Romanian. Apparently they were viewed as atmospheric phenomenon like lightening and not connected with meteoroids which are the rocks themselves.)