Lucifer

Lucifer is the clearest case in this collection of a name created by a translation, and the whole of it can be traced in one verse.

Isaiah 14:12 in Hebrew reads: how you have fallen from heaven, helel ben shachar, shining one, son of the dawn. The chapter is explicitly framed: verse 4 says this is a taunt to be taken up against the king of Babylon. It mocks a specific human ruler for imperial arrogance, says he will be brought down to Sheol, and taunts him that he will not even get a decent burial. It is a political poem.

The Greek Septuagint rendered helel as heosphoros, dawn-bringer. Jerome, translating into Latin around 400, used lucifer, light-bearer, which was the ordinary Latin word for the morning star, the planet Venus seen before sunrise. It was not a name. Latin writers used it of the planet, and early Christians used it approvingly: there was a fourth-century bishop of Cagliari called Lucifer, venerated in some quarters as a saint, and the term is applied to Christ in the Latin of Second Peter 1:19 and in the Easter Exsultet, which sings of Christ as the true morning star.

Between roughly the second and fifth centuries, Christian writers, Origen and Tertullian among them, read the Isaiah passage as describing the fall of Satan behind the figure of the king. Once that reading held, the Latin common noun in the verse was available to be taken as the fallen angel's personal name, and English translations in the Wycliffe and King James tradition capitalised it.

Jewish interpretation has never read Isaiah 14 as being about a fallen angel.

Once established, the name acquired a career the mistranslation could not have predicted.

Milton used it in Paradise Lost as the angel's name before the fall, with Satan as the name after, which is a poetic invention and not a doctrine, and it fixed for English readers the idea that they are two stages of one person. The nineteenth century read Milton's character against the poem's intention and made him a Romantic hero of rebellion, a reading Blake gestured at when he said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.

The nineteenth century also produced a straightforwardly confused strand. Theosophy used the name approvingly for a principle of intellectual light and rebellion against ignorance, taking the etymology at face value. From roughly the same period comes the Taxil hoax: Leo Taxil, a French writer, spent twelve years publishing fabricated revelations about a Luciferian cult supposedly at the heart of Freemasonry, complete with invented rituals and an invented high priestess, and confessed the whole thing publicly in 1897. The material he made up is still in circulation and is still cited.

Modern religious movements using the name divide into groups that treat it as a symbol of enquiry and autonomy without believing in a personal being, and much smaller groups that treat it theistically. Neither is continuous with anything ancient.

The scholarly point remains simple and is not seriously contested by anyone who reads Hebrew: the verse is about a Mesopotamian king, and the name is a Latin word for a planet.