Lucifer

Lucifer, by Gustave Doré, 1866, illustration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost

20 November 2024

Most people recognize Lucifer as a name for the devil, for Satan, but fewer know that it is also a name for the planet Venus. How did this rather odd double meaning come about?

The name is from the Latin lucifer, or light-bearer (luci- / lux-, light. + -fer, bearing). The Latin in turn comes from the Greek ϕωσϕόρος (phosphorus), φως- (phos-, light) + -φόρος (-phoros, bringer). Cf. phosphorus.

Both senses of Lucifer date to the Old English period. We can see it used for the planet in an eleventh-century astronomy manual compiled by a monk named Byrhtferth:

Seo sunne ys onmiddan þissum tacnum gesett, and heo geyrnð hyre ryne binnan eahta and twentigum wintrum. Þæræfter on þam circule Lucifer uparist, þæne sume uðwitan hatað Candidum; he yrnð nigon ger hys ryne. He ys Veneris gehaten.

(The sun is set amid these [zodiacal] signs, and it runs its course in twenty-eight winters. After that, Lucifer, which some philosophers call Candidum, rises up in the circle; it runs its course in nine years. It is called Venus.)

(The twenty-eight-year cycle of the sun is a reference to the Julian calendar, in which it takes that many years for leap year to cycle through all the days of the week.)

After the moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, and as the “morning star,” it precedes the rising of the sun, hence it is the “light-bringer.”

And we see the name used for the devil in the late tenth-century poem known as Christ and Satan:

Wæs þæt encgel-cyn     ær genemned
Lucifer haten,    leoht-berende,
on gear-dagum     in Godes rice.
Þa he in wuldre     wrohte onstalde,
þæt he ofer-hyda     agan wolde.

(That angelic being was earlier, in the days of old in God’s kingdom, named Lucifer, light-bearer, that was before he instigated rebellion in heaven because he was willing to be possessed by pride.)

The melding of Venus and Satan is a result of a reanalysis of a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 14:12–15. The Vulgate version of those verses read:

quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes qui dicebas in corde tuo in caelum conscendam super astra Dei exaltabo solium meum sedebo in monte testamenti in lateribus aquilonis ascendam super altitudinem nubium ero similis Altissimo verumtamen ad infernum detraheris in profundum laci.

(How are you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, who did rise in the morning? How are you fallen to the earth, who wounded the nations? And you said in your heart, “I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high.” But you shall be brought down into hell, into the depth of the pit.)

As originally written, these verses use the planet Venus as a metaphor for the king of Babylon, but under Christianity this passage was reinterpreted so as to be about Satan, tying into the extrabiblical story of the Devil leading a rebellion against God. So that is how the name for Venus became associated with the chief of the demons.

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Sources:

Byrhtferth. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds. Early English Text Society s.s. 18. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 118.

Clayton, Mary, ed. “Christ and Satan.” Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 365–69, 326. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11.

“Isaias propheta 14:12–15.” Biblia sacra vulgat, fifth edition. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1111.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Lucifer, n.

Image credit: Gustave Doré, 1866. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

deer

A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

18 November 2024

Deer can be traced back to the Old English word deor, but the word’s use in Old English was somewhat different than deer’s is today. In Old English, deor was a more general term, referring to any, usually but not necessarily undomesticated, four-legged animal, including fabulous beasts of legend. The word often carried a connotation of wildness and even ferocity, not something we today associate with Bambi. Deer is a cognate (i.e., sister word) of the modern German Tier, meaning animal.

We see this more general usage in a homily by Ælfric of Eynsham, written at the close of the tenth century:

Ne teah Crist him na to on ðisum life land ne welan, swa swa he be him sylfum cwæð, “Deor habbað hola, and fugelas habbað nest hwær hi restað, and ic næbbe hwider ic ahylde min heafod.”

(Christ did not gain land nor riches for himself in this life, just as he said about himself, “Deer have holes, and birds have nests where they rest, and I do not have anywhere I can lay down my head.”)

The meaning of deer narrowed in the Middle English period to the sense that we know today. The Normans had imported words like beast and animal into English from French, and there wasn’t a need for another word with the same meaning, so deer became more specialized, referring only to the family Cervidae, the meaning we have for the word today. We see this narrower use in Laȝamon’s Brut, a fictionalized verse history of Britain, probably written c. 1200, with a manuscript witness from c. 1275. This particular passage tells of the death of the evil King Menbriz:

Twenti ȝer he heold þis lond; þa leoden al to hærme.
& seoððen him a time com; mid teonen he wes i-funden.
þat he to wode wende. to wundre him-seoluan.
To huntien after deoren; werfore he deð þolede.
In þon wode he funde; feier ane hinde
þa hunten wenden æfter; mid muchelen heora lude.
Swa swiðe heo liððeden forð; þat þe king heom for-leas.
þat nefde he næfer enne; of alle his monnen.
He bi-com in a bæch; þer he bale funde.
vppen ane weorede; of wlfan awedde.

(Twenty years he held this land, and harmed the people,
But then a time came when he came to harm,
For he went into the woods, wandering by himself,
To hunt after deer, and thereby suffered death.
In those woods he found a fair hind,
The hunt had followed after, with their great clamor.
The king so rushed forth, that hey abandoned them,
That he had not a single one of all his men.
He came to a valley where he found death,
Among a pack of ravenous wolves.)

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Quinquagesima (Sunday before Ash Wednesday).” In The Old English Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Roy M. Liuzza, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 86. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2024, 183–99 at 192–95.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. deor, n.

Laȝamon. Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 1291–1300. London, British Museum, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. der, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. deer, n.

Photo credit: Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

sodium

Morton Salt facility, Chicago

15 November 2024

Sodium is a chemical element with atomic number 11 and the symbol Na. It is a soft, silvery-white, alkali metal that is highly reactive. It’s the sixth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. Sodium has myriad uses, perhaps most familiarly in the form sodium chloride or table salt.

The name sodium comes from soda, a post-classical Latin term for a headache, and sodanum, sodium carbonate, was sometimes used to treat headaches. These Latin words appear in the sixteenth century and are borrowings of the Arabic صُدَاع (ṣudāʿ). We see soda, in the sense of headache, appearing in English in a medical text by physician Andrew Boorde from c. 1540:

And contraryly, immoderate slepe and sluggyshnes doth humecte and maketh lyght the brayne; it doth ingendre rewme and impostumes; it is euyll for the palsy, whyther it be vnyuersall or partyculer; it is euyll for the fallynge syckenes called Epilencia, Analencia, & Cathalencia, Appoplesia, Soda, with all other infyrmytyes in the heade; for it induceth and causeth oblyuyousnes; for it doth obsuske and doth obnebulate the memorye and the quyckenes of wyt.

Chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate sodium and identify it as an element. He did so alongside potassium in 1807. It was Davy who dubbed the element sodium:

On this idea, in naming the bases of potash and soda, it will be proper to adopt the termination which, by common consent, has been applied to other newly discovered metals, and which, though originally Latin, is now naturalized in our language.

Potasium and Sodium are the names by which I have ventured to call the two new substances: and whatever changes of theory, with regard to the composition of bodies, may hereafter take place, these terms can scarcely express an error; for they may be considered as implying simply the metals produced from potash and soda.

The symbol Na comes from the post-classical Latin natrium, meaning soda ash or sodium carbonate, is a variant of the classical Latin nitrum, which comes from the Greek νίτρον (nitron), which in turn probably comes from Egyptian, perhaps borrowed into Greek via a Semitic language. Egypt was a major source of soda ash in the ancient world, and it was used in purification and mummification rituals. The Old Egyptian ntrj means sacred or divine.

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Sources:

Boorde, Andrew. “A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth” (c. 1540). In The First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. F. J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 10. London: N. Trübner, 1870, 244. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Davy, Humphry. “The Bakerian Lecture, on Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies” (19 November 1807). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 1–44 at 32. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1808.0001.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2018, s.v. soda. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Du Cange), 1887, s.v. sodanum. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sodium, n., soda, n.1., soda, n.2; third edition, December 2003, nitre | nitre, n.

Photo credit: Cosmo1976, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Dreamtime / Songline

“Kangaroo Wild Cabbage, Ceremonial Spear, Possum and Bush Carrot Dreaming,” by Bessie Nakamarra Sims & Paddy Japaljarri Sims (Warlpirri People), 1992.

13 November 2024

Dreamtime and Songline are two words associated with Australian Aboriginal culture. But they are terms that have been misunderstood by Western popular culture, and the English calques are poor translations of the Aboriginal words. Tony Swain, who has studied Aboriginal religion extensively, writes:

Few topics have more allure than the Aboriginal conception of time; few have been discussed with less care. For those seeking primal wisdom, New Age englightenment or cosmic awareness, the subject has of course been irresistible. On the fringes of scholarship we encounter interpretations ranging from astounding superficiality to almost comical inventiveness.

Dreamtime is a calque of the Arrernte altjerreŋe, the Arrernte being an Aboriginal people of the Central Australia region of Northern Territory of Australia. It was originally glossed in 1896 by anthropologist Francis James Gillen as a sacred time before living memory that stretches back to creation:

The natives explain that their ancestors in the distant past (ǔlchǔrringa), which really means in the dream-times, for this is the manner in which the natives always speak of the long ago, acquired the art of “ǔrpmalla” (fire-making) from a gigantic arrunga (Macropus robustus) called Algurawarina.

The accuracy of Gillen’s translation is now generally deprecated, with the meaning of the Arrernte word being something closer to eternal or uncreated, the location of spirits and things that could be visited via a dream or vision, and it does not in its Arrernte usage denote a time period. Swain contends that the Aboriginal concept that is poorly translated as dreamtime is better understood as “abiding events” that are inextricably linked to place or location. Here is an example of dreamtime being used by an Aborigine man, recorded in 2024 by Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro:

Our spirits are still in the dreamtime, even to these days now, they still woulda. Now we could be anywhere, and that family spirit, or good spirit is with us wherever we go, they’ll look after us, protect us from evil. And I’ll tell you one time, we was in Yarka Reserve there, back in the 60s, you know. […] Well then dad just, he was walking from the road into the reserve, and he seen us, but he seen all the family there, but there was another person there, like a spirit, standing there with us and he was wondering who that was. When he got up closer, closer, closer, it just vanished. It was one of the old people, just looking after them. And that’s what he told me, he was—before he passed away.

Still, the anglophone usage of dreamtime tends to correspond to Gillen’s definition. Here is an example from a 1959 academic thesis:

According to the myth, the Wollunqua existed in the sacred time called the Wingara by Warramunga people. This seems to be equivalent to what the Arunta Tribe knew as the Alcheringa and what is sometimes translated the “Eternal Dreamtime” by writers dealing with the Australian aboriginal cultures. It is the time of creation, the realm of the spirit-people, and the home of the ancestors. It is also the place of dreams and visions.

So dreamtime is a good example of a word that has acquired a very different sense in translation than it had in the original.

Closely associated with the dreamtime is the concept of the songline, a set of traditional songs that describe one’s relationship to the land. Like the dreamtime, songlines relate to creation myths, but they are not just origin stories set in the distant past, having a relevance to the present and future and one’s positionality in the landscape. Here is a definition and description from a 1989 academic thesis:

The songlines: A song is both a map and direction-finder. Providing you know the song you can always find your way across the country. In theory, the whole of Australia can be read as a musical score. The Ancestors sang the world into existence. All their words for “country" are the same as the words for “line.” Aboriginals imagine their territory as an interlocking network of lines or ‘ways through.’ To feel “at home” in that contry [sic] depends upon on [sic] being able to leave it. Everyone hoped to have at least four “ways out,” along which he could travel in a crisis. The songlines do not have frontiers, only roads and “handover points.”

By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor’s Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song.

Both Dreamtime and Songline are good examples of terms that when translated into another language acquire a somewhat different meaning than how they are understood in the original culture.

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Sources:

Atwater, Kathryn Kellogg. The Great Wollunqua: A Study of Primitive Ritual (MA thesis). University of Chicago, 1959, 55. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Collard, Glenys and Celeste Rodriguez Louro. “From Spark to Flame: Decolonising Linguistics and the Creation of First Nations Medial Media.” In Finex Ndhlovu and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, eds. Language and Decolonisation: An Interdisciplinary Approach. London: Routledge, 2024, 207–21 at 211. DOI: 10.4324/9781003313618-14.

Gillen, Francis James. “Notes on Some Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the McDonnell Ranges Belonging to the Arunta Tribe.” In Baldwin Spencer, ed. Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, vol. 4—Anthropology. London: Dulau, 1896, 161–96 at 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hilb, Vera. Travelling: The Rotational Experience of Becoming-Nomad (MA thesis). University of Toronto, 1989, 71. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. song line, n.; September 2012, s.v. alcheringa, n.; June 2014, s.v. dreamtime, n.

Swain, Tony. A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, 14.

Image credit: Photo by dun_deagh, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Original artwork by Bessie Nakamarra Sims & Paddy Japaljarri Sims (Warlpirri People), 1992.

dismal

Cypress trees in Lake Drummond, Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia

11 November 2024 [Edit, 18 November: revised translation of the first quotation]

Originally a noun (and still a noun in some isolated uses), the adjective dismal comes into English, like many of our words, with the Normans, a compound formed from the Old French phrase dis mal, which in turn is from the Latin dies mali (evil days), a name for two days each month (which ones varied month to month) which were believed to be unlucky or inauspicious. They were also known as Egipcian daies, from the presumption that they were calculated by Egyptian astrologers.

We see the word in a song in Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle, written c. 1300. The Chronicle is primarily written in Anglo-Norman, but some of the songs are in Early Middle English. There are numerous manuscript witnesses of the work, but these particular lines are only found in one:

He loghe wil him liked,
His paclir es thurck piked,
          he wende e were liale;
Begkot an bride,
Rede him at ride
          in the dismale.

(He laughed when it pleased him; his pack was pinned closed; he thought he was full of prowess; [he] got a bridle; prepared himself for travel during the dismal.)

Some medieval writers reanalyzed the French dismal to mean dis (ten) + mal (bad things), or given the Egyptian connection, the ten plagues of Egypt recounted in Exodus. Geoffrey Chaucer did exactly that in The Book of the Duchess:

Ful evel rehersen hyt I kan;
And eke, as helpe me God withal,
I trowe hyt was in the dismal,
That was the ten woundes of Egipte—
For many a word I over-skipte
In my tale, for pure fere
Lest my wordes mysset were.

(Very poorly can I repeat it, and also, so help me God, I think it was during the dismal, that was the ten plagues of Egypt—for I skipped over many a word in my tale, out of pure fear, lest my words were poorly chosen.)

By the fifteenth century the association with the Latin dies, “days,” had been sufficiently forgotten that people started referring to them with the redundant dismal days, as in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421:

He hath pronounced in the parlement
Toforn the lordes and the president
His cleer conceyte in verray sikernesse,
Nat entryked with no doublenesse,
Her dysemol daies and her fatal houres,
Her aventurys and her sharpe shoures,
The froward soort and unhappy stoundys,
The compleyntes of her dedly woundys,
The wooful wrath and contrariousté
Of felle Mars in his cruelté,

(He has pronounced in the parliament
Before the lords and the president
His clear opinion with great certitude,
Not enveloped in duplicity,
Their dismal days and their fated hours,
Their vicissitudes and their sharp conflicts
The future fate and unhappy times,
The complaints of their deadly wounds,
The woeful wrath and hostility
Of fell Mars in his cruelty.)

By the end of the sixteenth century, the association with inauspicious days was largely forgotten, and dismal simply became associated with melancholy or sadness. Alexander Mongomerie’s The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart, written sometime before 1598, includes dismal, as a synonym for melancholy, in a long list of evils released from Pandora’s box:

The frencie, the fluxes, the fyk, and the felt,
The feavers, the fearcie, with the speinʒie flees,
The doyt, and the dismall, indifferently delt,
The powlings, the palsay, with pocks like pees.

And also at this time, dismal started being used adjectivally to refer to misfortune or disaster not associated with the Egyptian days. William Shakespeare uses it this way in Romeo and Juliet. In the 1597 “bad quarto” of the play, upon hearing that Romeo has killed Tybalt, Juliet says:

This torture should be roard in dismall hell.
Can heauens be so enuious?

In the 1599 quarto and in the 1623 First Folio, those lines are rendered as:

What diuell art thou that dost torment me thus?
This torture should be rored in dismall hell.

And in those later versions of the play, Juliet again uses the word in the tomb before drinking the sleeping draught:

Ile call them backe againe to comfort me.
Nurse, what should she do here?
My dismall sceane I needs must act alone.
Come Violl, what if this mixture do not worke at all?

That’s how a medieval belief in unlucky days came to mean cheerless and depressing.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. dismol, n.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Book of the Duchess.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 344–45, lines 1204–10.

Lydgate, John. The Siege of Thebes, Tercia Pars. Robert R. Edwards, ed. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Rochester: U of Rochester, 2001, lines 2889–98. Robbins Library Digital Projects.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dismal, n. & adj.

Montgomerie, Alexander. The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart (before 1598). Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1621, sig. B2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dismal, n. and adj., Egyptian, adj. & n. 

Shakespeare, William. An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (Quarto 1). London: John Danter, 1597, sig. F3.r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

———. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet (Quarto 2). London: Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby, 1599, sig. G2r, Kr. ProQuest Early English Books Online.

———. The Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623, 3.66/1, 3.72/1. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Wright, Thomas, ed. The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II. Camden Society. London: John Bowyer Nichols and son, 1839, 303. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Rebecca Wynn / US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.