It comes from a couple of verses in the Bible: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north." (Isaiah 14:12-13).\n\nLater tradition make Lucifer the nom de guerre of the Archangel Sammael. He was followed by a whole army of angels, in his pride feeling he was too beautiful, well-liked and smart to be second to God. Gabriel defeated him in the crucial battle, and exiled to Hell he changed his name one last time to Satan.\n\nBut it all comes from those verses in the OT that were actually condemning the arrogance of the Chaldean King in Babylon.\n\nPS: Lucifer, the "light bearer," is the Hebrew version of what for the Greeks was Prometheus. Humans were like animals, with no intelligence to create moral values. According to most religions, what makes humans radically different from other creatures is their ability to say what is right and what is wrong.\n\nWithout intelligence, right and wrong cannot exist. So Lucifer, or Prometheus, are a symbol for intelligence. Lucifer rebels before God because he feels he is smarter and more beautiful than God, he puts himself above God, and seduces millions. In other words, it is human intelligence what allows us to disobey God, since we can convince ourselves that "right ir wrong and wrong is right."\n\nOf course Lucifer is right. A previous poster is correct: he is the one that, in the mythos, tells humanity to think by ourselves and stop following prescribed rules just because they are said to come from some higher power. \n\nAs George Bernard Shaw put it in his novel "Back to Methusdelah," when the Devil, in the shape of a serpent, approaches Eve, he tells her:\n\n--You see things; and you say, "Why?"\nBut I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?\n\nLucifer, hence, stands for our own capacity to think. The reason why we have been conceptually expelled from Nature: we cannot be like the other animals, we never could.