Helel Ben Shahar

Helel ben Shahar, whose Hebrew name means «the resplendent one, son of the Dawn», designates the morning star, that is, the planet Venus shining on the horizon before dawn. The expression comes from a famous passage of the prophet Isaiah (14:12), a burlesque song against the king of Babylon to whom he is compared with the morning star fallen from the sky because of his pride: «How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the Dawn!». The image gathers a previous Canaanite mythological motif, that of the divine star Shahar (the Dawn) and his son, who aspires to be enthroned on the summit of the mountain of the gods and is cast down. In its origin, therefore, Helel is not a demon, but an astral figure linked to light, beauty and excessive pride that precedes the fall.

The passage from Isaiah puts in the mouth of the fallen star a declaration of pride: «I will ascend to heaven, on high, next to the stars of God I will raise my throne... I will be like the Most High». For that excess (hybris) he is thrown into Sheol, the kingdom of the dead. When Saint Jerome translated the passage into Latin in the Vulgate, he rendered «Helel» as Lucifer («light-bearer», the Latin name of the morning Venus), and the Church Fathers, reading the text in light of other passages (Luke 10:18, Ezekiel 28), identified that fallen star with the rebel angel who becomes Satan. Thus, a metaphor about a Babylonian king gave rise, through Christian tradition, to the myth of Lucifer: the most beautiful angel whose light is perverted by wanting to equal God.

The figure of Helel ben Shahar, transformed into Lucifer, has had an enormous influence on Western culture. John Milton immortalized it in Paradise Lost as the fallen angel of tragic grandeur who prefers «to reign in Hell rather than serve in Heaven». Romanticism, with William Blake and others, reinterpreted Lucifer as a symbol of creative rebellion and freedom against authority. Various esoteric and Luciferian currents have associated him with Prometheus, the titan who steals fire to give it to men, seeing in him a bearer of knowledge rather than an incarnation of evil. As an archetype, Helel/Lucifer condenses the human aspiration to transcendence, the price of pride and the beauty of glorious failure, and continues to be one of the most cited images in literature and art.