The Morning Star

Your goal in this lesson: to understand the real star behind the name, and how ancient people saw it.

How Venus moves

Historical Venus orbits the Sun inside Earth’s orbit, so from Earth it never strays far from the Sun in the sky, about 45 to 47 degrees at most. It is never seen at midnight. It shines either in the east before sunrise or in the west after sunset.

Its cycle, the synodic period, lasts about 584 days. For roughly eight and a half months Venus is a morning star. Then it passes behind the Sun and disappears for several weeks, returns in the evening sky for another eight and a half months or so, passes between Earth and the Sun and vanishes again, this time for only a few days, before coming back in the morning. Five of these cycles take almost exactly eight years, so the pattern repeats, with small shifts, every eight years. Ancient astronomers knew this.

Greek light-bringers

Historical The Greeks called the Morning Star Eosphoros, “dawn-bringer”, or Phosphoros, “light-bringer”. Hesiod’s Theogony, from around 700 BCE, gives the oldest genealogy: Eos, the Dawn, bore to Astraios the star Eosphoros and the gleaming stars (lines 381 to 382). Homer’s Iliad has Heosphoros coming to herald light over the earth (23.226) and calls Hesperos, the Evening Star, the fairest star in heaven (22.317 to 318).

Greeks at first may have thought the morning and evening stars were two different bodies. Later writers say they are one, and by Cicero’s time it was common knowledge.

A star, not a great god

Historical Phosphoros was not a major god with temples and festivals. He is a personified star who appears in genealogies, poems and art. On vases and Roman reliefs, the Morning Star sometimes appears as a youth with a torch, running ahead of the Sun’s chariot. Myths give him children. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 11), his son Ceyx is a king whose wife Alcyone loves him so much that, after he drowns, the two are turned into kingfishers.

This matters for modern practice. If you read that Lucifer was “an ancient god of light worshipped in temples”, you now know the evidence shows a beloved star and a poetic figure, not a cult.

Romans and the dawn

Historical In Latin poetry, lucifer is the star that ends the night. Poets use it to mark the hour: lovers part when Lucifer rises, travelers set out. It is a word full of morning, not menace.

Try this

Today’s exercise: open an astronomy app or an almanac and find out whether Venus is a morning star or an evening star this month. Write down the date when it next changes. You will use this in lesson 7.

Quick recap

• Venus is seen only before sunrise or after sunset, never at midnight.
• Its pattern repeats about every eight years.
• The Greeks called the Morning Star Eosphoros or Phosphoros.
• Phosphoros was a personified star in poems and art, not a temple god.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Isaiah 14 and the fallen angel.

Need a refresher? Go back to Who or what is Lucifer? or see the whole course.

Sources

• Hesiod, Theogony 381 to 382.
• Homer, Iliad 22.317 to 318 and 23.226.
• Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.53.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11.

Go deeper: the Lucifer pages on this site

Mark as done