Uranus

Also Known As: Greek Ouranos, Οὐρανός, “sky, heaven”; Latin Caelus or Caelum; called Acmonides, “son of Acmon”, by Alcman and Callimachus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the sky itself, a solid star-set dome whose rain fertilises the earth and whose voice delivers prophecy.
Role in Mythos: First ruler of the cosmos and father of the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handed, deposed when Cronus castrated him with a flint sickle.
Relation to Humans: The Greeks gave him no temple, no festival and no priesthood, and he is absent from their painted pottery. They swore by him all the same, alongside Earth and the dripping water of the Styx, and they depended on his rain for grain and pasture.

The Greeks did not picture the sky as empty. They pictured it as solid: a dome of hammered bronze, cold and set with stars, its rim coming down to rest on the outermost edge of a flat earth. Theognis, in a foul mood, wished the whole brazen weight of it would drop on him. Hesiod fixed the scale of it with a thought experiment, an anvil falling for nine nights and days before it struck the ground. That dome was not scenery. It was a person, and his name was simply the word for sky.

Where he came from depends on who is telling it. Hesiod’s version is the famous one and also the strangest: Gaia, the earth, bore him out of herself with no father at all, “starry Ouranos, equal to herself, to cover her on every side.” Other poets gave him parents. The lost Titanomachia made him a son of Aether, the upper air; Cicero and Hyginus have him born to Aether and Day. Alcman knew a father called Acmon, the Anvil, so named because the motion of the heavens never tires. The Orphic material goes further still, making him the son of Night in one fragment and, in another, the upper half of a cosmic egg that Time cracked open, the crown of the shell becoming heaven and the sunken part becoming the ground. The traditions do not agree and never tried to.

What they do agree on is what he did at nightfall. He came down. Each evening the sky lowered itself onto the earth and lay full upon her, and rain fell out of that embrace, and the smell of wet dust came up off the fields. Aeschylus put the theology in the mouth of Aphrodite in a lost play: the holy heaven longs to wound the earth, the rain from the amorous sky impregnates her, and out of that moist marriage-rite come the grain and the pasture and the blossom on the trees. Farmers understood this perfectly well.

The offspring were not grain. Gaia bore him twelve Titans, six sons and six daughters: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus and Cronus the youngest, with Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Then came the three Cyclopes, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, each with a single eye set in the forehead. Then three more, Cottus, Briareus and Gyes, with a hundred arms apiece and fifty heads on their shoulders, and a strength that Hesiod could only convey by refusing to describe it. These last were the ones their father could not stand. As each was born he pushed it back into a hidden place inside the earth and would not let it come up into the light. Hesiod’s line on this is one of the coldest in the poem: Ouranos rejoiced in his evil doing. Gaia, packed full of children she could not deliver, groaned inside.

So she made a weapon. She took grey flint, worked it into a great sickle with jagged teeth, and put the plan to her sons. Fear took all of them and none of them spoke. Then Cronus, the youngest and the most willing, said he would do it, since he had no reverence for a father of that name. Gaia hid him in ambush and set the blade in his hands. Uranus came as he always came, bringing on the night and full of longing, and spread himself over the earth. From the ambush his son reached out with his left hand, took the long serrated sickle in his right, and cut. Then he threw the pieces away behind him without looking.

Nothing about that harvest was wasted. The blood that struck the ground was received by Gaia and, as the seasons came round, produced the Erinyes, the avenging Furies; the Gigantes in gleaming armour with their long spears; and the Meliae, the ash-tree nymphs, scattered over the boundless earth. Bacchylides counted the Telchines in the same crop, and Acusilaus, an early mythographer, said the drops that ran underground produced the Phaeacians, which is why that seafaring people traced their ancestry to heaven. The severed parts thrown into the sea drifted a long while, a white foam gathered around the immortal flesh, and out of the foam grew a girl. She was Aphrodite. The loveliest figure in Greek myth begins as a wound.

Uranus had one more thing to contribute. He gave his sons the name they still carry, calling them Titanes, the Strainers, in reproach: they had strained and done a fearful thing, and vengeance for it would come later. It came. Cronus swallowed his own children to keep the throne and lost it anyway to Zeus, exactly as the mutilated sky had promised.

That prophecy is the clearest sign of what he still was after the sickle. He kept speaking. Cronus learned from Gaia and starry Uranus that his own son was destined to overcome him, and when Zeus needed to know what to do about Metis and the child she carried, it was Gaia and starry Uranus who advised him to swallow her. The sky heard everything and remembered it. He was also the standing witness to divine oaths, invoked with Earth and the dripping water of the Styx in the most terrible oath the immortals had; Zeus swore by him, Leto swore by him, and so did Medea when her sister came asking for a promise. He remained the rain. He remained the bronze ceiling of the world, and the roof of the house the Olympians would eventually move into.

His limits were built into the same arrangement. To father anything he had to come down, which meant the act that made him a patriarch was also the act that put him within arm’s reach. He never fought. Four of his sons took the corners of the world and held him in one telling while the fifth worked in the middle, and his reign ended inside a single night. Once severed he could not do it again, and the marriage of sky and earth thinned into weather. Then there is the emptiest thing about him. No Greek city gave him a temple, a festival or a priesthood; he is missing from painted pottery altogether; and the only hymn addressed to him, the Orphic one with its frankincense smoke, comes out of a much later mystery tradition. Aeschylus said it flatly in the Agamemnon, that the one who was mighty before shall not even be named as having existed.

He was old before Greece got hold of him. Tablets written in Hittite between roughly 1400 and 1200 BC preserve a Hurrian succession myth in which Alalu rules heaven, Anu drives him out, and Kumarbi drags Anu down and bites off his genitals, swallowing them and becoming pregnant with the storm god who will finish him. Change the teeth to a flint sickle and the shape is Hesiod’s, several centuries early. The Greeks kept the pattern and mislaid the reason for it, and by Cicero’s day the Stoics were rescuing the story as physics: the fable meant that the highest fiery element of heaven generates all things by itself and so has no use for the bodily part that requires a partner.

The blade outlived him better than he did. Apollonius set it under an island that nursed the Phaeacians, and the sickle gave the place its name. Pausanias was shown a headland in Achaea called Drepanon, the Sickle, where Cronus was said to have thrown it into the water. Callimachus knew of a cave beneath Sicilian Zancle where it lay buried, and the builders raised their wooden towers around the spot. Three coastlines claimed the weapon. Not one of them built him a shrine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Uranus in Greek mythology?

Uranus, Ouranos in Greek, is the primordial god of the sky and the first ruler of the cosmos. In Hesiod’s account the earth goddess Gaia bore him by herself, and he then fathered the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes and the three hundred-handed brothers on her. His name is simply the Greek word for sky, and the Greeks understood him as the literal solid dome of heaven rather than a god who lived in it.

Why did Cronus castrate Uranus?

Uranus forced his most fearsome children back inside the earth as they were born and would not let them into the light, which left Gaia in constant pain. She shaped a jagged sickle out of grey flint and asked her sons to punish him; only Cronus, the youngest Titan, was willing. Cronus ambushed his father as the sky came down at nightfall, cut off his genitals and threw them behind him into the sea.

What was born from the blood of Uranus?

The blood that fell on the ground produced the Erinyes, the Gigantes and the ash-tree nymphs called the Meliae. Bacchylides added the Telchines to that list, and the mythographer Acusilaus held that drops running underground produced the Phaeacian people. The severed parts thrown into the sea generated a white foam, and Aphrodite grew out of it.

Was Uranus worshipped by the ancient Greeks?

Effectively not. No Greek city is known to have given Uranus a temple, a festival or a priesthood, and he does not appear on Greek painted pottery; the single hymn addressed to him belongs to the much later Orphic collection. He was still invoked constantly as a witness, named with Earth and the water of the Styx in the most binding oath the gods could swear.

Is the story of Uranus older than Greece?

The pattern is. Tablets written in Hittite between roughly 1400 and 1200 BC preserve a Hurrian myth in which Alalu is driven from heaven by Anu, and Anu is then dragged down by Kumarbi, who bites off his genitals and becomes pregnant with the storm god destined to depose him. The succession of sky kings and the castration of the sky are the same, several centuries before Hesiod wrote them in Greek.