Uranus

In the beginning, before gods or men, there was only Chaos, the yawning abyss. From Chaos came Gaia, the broad-bosomed Earth, and she was the first solid thing in all existence. But Gaia was alone, and she longed for a partner to cover her and shelter her children. So she gave birth to Uranus, the starry sky, making him equal to herself so that he might arch over her on every side and become an ever-sure dwelling place for the blessed gods. He was the dome of heaven itself, a solid vault of brass decorated with stars, whose edges rested upon the outermost limits of the flat earth. Gaia and Uranus became the first divine couple, and upon her body they produced a vast brood of children. First came the twelve Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus, the youngest and most cunning. Then came the three Cyclopes, one-eyed giants named Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, master craftsmen of terrible power. And finally came the three Hecatoncheires, monstrous beings named Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, each with a hundred arms branching from their shoulders and fifty heads upon their necks, the most terrible of all Gaia's children.

But Uranus was not a loving father. As soon as each child was born, he seized the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires and hid them away in a secret place deep within the earth, returning them to the womb of their mother Gaia. He bound them in cruel chains and made them dwell beneath the wide-pathed earth at its farthest borders, in bitter anguish. He allowed only the twelve Titans to remain free, though even they he treated with contempt. Gaia groaned within herself, straitened and in pain, for her children were imprisoned inside her own body and she could not free them. She fashioned a great sickle from grey flint, or adamantine stone, and went to her sons the Titans with a desperate plan. She asked them to punish their father for his cruelty, to strike him down and free their brothers from the darkness. But the Titans were afraid. All of them hesitated, all except the youngest, Cronus, who was ambitious and bold and hungry for power. Cronus agreed to his mother's plan.

Gaia hid Cronus in ambush, placing him in the bedchamber where Uranus came to lie with her. When Uranus descended upon the earth, spreading himself across her in the act of love, Cronus reached out from his hiding place with his left hand and with his right hand swung the long and jagged sickle. In one terrible stroke he cut off the genitals of his own father and cast them behind him. The blood that fell from Uranus upon the earth gave birth to new beings: the Erinyes, the avenging Furies who pursue those who break oaths and commit crimes against kin; the Giants, armored beings of immense strength; and the Meliae, the ash-tree nymphs who dwell in the mountain forests. The severed genitals themselves were thrown into the sea, and as they floated upon the waves they produced a white foam. From this foam arose Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, who stepped upon the shore of Cyprus and was greeted by the Hours, the goddesses of the seasons, who clothed her in immortal garments.

As Uranus fell, wounded and dethroned, he uttered a curse upon his children. He called them Titans in reproach, for the Greek word means "strainers," and he said that they had strained and done presumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards. He prophesied that Cronus would one day be overthrown by his own son, just as Uranus had been overthrown by Cronus. This prophecy haunted Cronus throughout his reign, driving him to swallow each of his own children as they were born, until Rhea, his sister-wife, saved Zeus by hiding him in a cave on Crete. Uranus himself faded from the myths after his castration. Some say he withdrew entirely from the earth, leaving the sky as a passive dome without a conscious will. Others say he was driven from power and simply ceased to be a ruling force. But his blood and his curse continued to shape the cosmos. The Giants born from his blood would one day rise against the Olympian gods in the Gigantomachy, the war of the Giants. The Erinyes would pursue Orestes for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. And the prophecy he uttered would come true when Zeus, the son of Cronus, led the war against the Titans and cast them into Tartarus, completing the cycle of divine succession.

Centuries later, the image of Uranus as the sky-god evolved. In Roman times he was identified with Caelum, the Roman sky god, and in later art he was sometimes depicted as Aion, the god of eternal time, holding the wheel of the zodiac above the reclining figure of Gaia. The Greeks imagined him as a gigantic, star-spangled man with long arms and legs, resting on all fours with his fingertips in the far east and his toes in the far west, his arching body forming the very dome of the sky. When the sun god Apollo drove his chariot across the heavens each day, he was racing across the body of his great-grandfather Uranus. In the 18th century, the astronomer William Herschel discovered the seventh planet from the sun and named it Uranus, connecting the distant ice giant to the ancient god of the heavens. The planet sits in the outer solar system alongside Saturn, named for Cronus, in an ironic cosmic echo of the father and son who once warred for control of the sky.