Venus = Lucifer

[Mark Wagner]

Interesting...

[Francesco Meschia]

It actually had two names, Lucifer and Vesper, depending on whether it was a morning or an evening star. If that’s what you meant with the subject line.

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On Mar 5, 2026, at 20:00, Mark Wagner <itsmar...@gmail.com> wrote:



Interesting...

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[Mark Wagner]

Right.  The term Lucida popped into my head today and I wondered about the female name Lucy (actually Lucy Van Pelt) and thought ... huh, Luci-fer?  Which led to some digging tonight.  I wonder if the Ve in Vesper was a derivation of the name we know?.

[Francesco Meschia]

Yeah that’s also interesting. “Venus” is the name of the Roman goddess, but neither the Romans nor the Greeks used the name of their goddess for the planet (Phosphorus/Hesperus). I don’t know how the “modern” name came to be adopted.

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 5, 2026, at 20:29, Mark Wagner <itsmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Right.  The term Lucida popped into my head today and I wondered about the female name Lucy (actually Lucy Van Pelt) and thought ... huh, Luci-fer?  Which led to some digging tonight.  I wonder if the Ve in Vesper was a derivation of the name we know?.

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[Muriel Dulieu Holzer]

I did a bit of digging too.

Lucifer comes from the latin roots lux (light) and ferre (to carry). Lux/luc comes from the Proto-Indo-European word *lewk meaning light/brightness. 
Other words with the latin root lux/lucis (light): lucid, Lucinda, Lucy, Lucia, elucidate, translucent, lucida.

Other words with the latin root ferre (to carry): ferry, fertile, transfer, conifer, aquifer, circumference.  

The Latin word vesper comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *weksperos or *wesperos meaning evening. Wesperos also gave us in Greek Hesperos (evening star), Hesperides (nymphs of the evening/west); in English it gave us West. The evening is connected to the direction of sunset, the West, where the evening star appears.  

The planet Venus, as the brightest most beautiful thing in the sky after the sun and moon, has a long history of being associated with goddesses of love, beauty and desire. 

The oldest recorded name for the planet Venus comes from the Sumerians around 3000 BCE, they called it Inanna, their goddess of love and war. 

The Babylonians called it Ishtar, essentially the same goddess. 

The Greeks called it Phosphorus in the morning, from phos (light) and phoros (bearer), like the element phosphorus glowing in the dark. And they called it Hesperos in the evening. Once they realized it was one planet, they called it Aphrodite but all three names persisted. Phosphorus and Hesperos were the two faces of Aphrodite.

The Romans translated the three names directly and Phosphorus became Lucifer, Hesperos became Vesper and the planet became Venus.

-Muriel

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[Muriel Dulieu]

Vesper and Venus have different etymological roots. The word Venus originally comes from the Proto-Indo-European word *wenh, meaning to desire. 

-Muriel

On Mar 5, 2026, at 10:04 PM, Muriel Dulieu Holzer <mdu...@gmail.com> wrote: