Lucifera, aka Diana Lucifera, aka Diana, is the fabled Roman Goddess of nature, fertility, hunting, crossroads, and the moon. Too often Lucifera has been conflated with Hecate as the triple-goddess, among others. She was worshipped by the Greeks as Artemis. Many still conflate the birth of Aradia as being the daughter of Diana Lucifera and Lucifer. The goddess known as Aradia, the witch goddess, is the daughter of Lucifer and Hecate, not Diana Lucifera. Diana Lucifera is the Dark Virgin and does not have any offspring. Hecate herself has been conflated with Diana Lucifera, oftentimes placed into one of her triple-aspects. The fact is that Diana Lucifera, or more commonly, Lucifera, rules over the vampire underworld, and is the highest female vampire goddess, containing as she does the powers of both heaven and hell, something neither Lilith nor Satan can boast. As such, she has recently defected from Lilith, her mother, and declared war upon the entire realm in behalf of the Almighty to rebalance the powers of heaven and hell.
Lucifera is a huntress who will hunt her own kind if it suits the Almighty; a vampire huntress and rightfully titled, the Queen of the Night. Her heavenly title is The Obsidian Blood Goddess, or Obsidian Vampire Goddess. This alludes to her elemental black flame and sacred object, obsidian. This is the same blade used in ceremonial and sacrificial daggers employed by the Aztecs, among others, for human sacrifices. It is symbolic of her Almighty Father, represented by fire, in union with the black waters of pre-fallen Lilith, to produce the daughter and sister of Lucifer, Lucifera. She is the vampire hunter of human souls on every battlefield, sending them into the returning wheel of their evils, from death to life and back again. She holds the sacred torch of wisdom to the nine gates to birth, life, death, blood, and the beyond. You might know her as the Statue of Liberty. She is freedom indeed; fiery, infernal, and divine.
As Diana Lucifera, she was known to be fond of music and dance, a fact which is reflected in the overseership of the Romanian Iele (yee-lay), the most captivating of female vampires, known for their intoxicating dances and lustful interludes with any male passerby who happened upon their rites of worship deep in the woods. The Iele are known for a mesmerizing dance that enchants and seduces with a supernatural music and singing reminiscent of sirens, another female spirit family overseen by Lucifera. Any who hear their siren song are stricken deaf, a fact I bear as her mark (I am half deaf, having heard her sacred song).
Lucifera was rumored to have a benign personality and is said to often have aided the Almighty in acts of exorcism, yet this is but one side of Diana Lucifera. As the goddess of the hunt, she is symbolically the vampiric huntress of souls on every earthly battlefield, like her mother, Lilith. The difference is Lilith has been demoted as damned by the Almighty, while Lucifera has appealed to the Almighty, been promoted and empowered, having received the divine powers of both heaven and hell. She is neither a right-handed goddess nor a left-handed goddess. She is both transcended. No other goddess holds any such power. Hecate is beholden to her. Isis, Naamah, and others are under her newfound exaltation as the supreme goddess, ready and able to subdue and overpower Lilith in behalf of the Almighty.
The first major temple dedicated to Diana Lucifera was in the vicinity of Rome, known as the Temple of Diana Aventina (Diana of the Aventine Hill). According to the Roman historian Livy, the construction of this temple began in the 6th century BCE, inspired as it was by stories of the massive Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, rumored to have been built by the combined efforts of all the cities of Asia Minor. Today, a short street named the Via del Tempio di Diana and its associated plaza (shown as the background of her statue featured above), Piazza del Tempio di Diana, commemorates the previous site of the grand temple.
In Campania, Diana Lucifera had a major temple located at Mount Tifata, near Capua, where she was worshipped as Diana Tifantina. The modern Christian church of Sant’Angelo in Formis was built on the ruins of the ancient Tifantina temple.
Later, Diana Lucifera was outlawed as a pagan god by the Roman Catholic “Saint” Quin in the 7th century, who composed these admonitions against all pagans (excluding his own pagan Christianity, composed of Father, Spirit, Son, Mother of God, and Popery) in these words, “I denounce and contest, that you shall observe no sacrilegious pagan customs. ….No Christian… performs solestitia or dancing or leaping or diabolical chants. No Christian should presume to invoke the name of a demon, not Neptune or Orcus or Diana (Lucifera).”
Further conflations were made of more ephemeral stuff by psychologization of something called the “fallen animus,” which conflates Lucifer with Lucifera in the same unoriginal manner as the Catholic church. Some use images of the female satanic demoness of the Nine Gates, an older movie staring Johnnie Depp, which depicted Satan as a femme fatale. The parallel to Lucifera’s rule over the nine gates is obvious, but conflated once again, just as the medieval priests conflated succubi and incubi into one shape-shifting demon of horrid cartoon characterization, equal to or exceeding how Hitler portrayed the Jews to dehumanize them.
Elsewhere and earlier in the Roman provinces, Diana Lucifera was widely worshiped alongside local deities, with over 100 inscriptions to Diana Lucifera catalogued in the provinces, mainly from Gaul, Upper Germania, and Britannia. She was also given the high status of “Augusta” and “regina (queen) being common epithets. In his poetry, Horace deliberately contrasted the kinds of grand, elevated hymns to Diana on behalf of the entire Roman state, the kind of worship that would have been typical at her Aventine temple, with a more personal form of devotion that later spread throughout the provinces, lessening her status at times to that of a household spirit. Thus, between divine conflation, celebration, demotion, war, and revolution, Lucifera received more worship than Lilith, sparking a jealousy that ended with an open declaration of war that now divides the dark realm in two. She is and will forever remain the beloved and cherished daughter of the Almighty, sometimes lost in human history, never lost in her divine destiny. She always was, and always will be the ever-rightful Queen of the Night.
*For more information, google Diana on Wikipedia.
