Uranos

The term Uranos — archaic sky-god of Greek theogony — occupies a paradoxical position in the depth-psychology corpus. It appears in two largely non-overlapping registers. In archetypal astrology, principally through Richard Tarnas, the name serves as a foil: the mythological Ouranos (starry sky, father of Kronos) furnished only nominal justification for the planet Uranus, whose actual empirical meanings — revolution, liberation, sudden insight, individualism — point instead to the Prometheus archetype. This mismatch becomes a theoretical linchpin for Tarnas’s central argument in both Prometheus the Awakener and Cosmos and Psyche. The mythographic register treats Uranos differently: the castration of Uranos by Kronos/Saturn registers as a cosmogonic act of separation that generates Venus from the sea-froth (Hillman), releases Aphrodite’s genealogical violence (Hillman), grounds the puer-senex struggle in the Uranos-Kronos-Zeus succession (Hillman), and figures in Giegerich’s logic of the soul’s self-reflexive movement. Berry reads the myth as a parable of literalization: children buried in the earth are Gaia’s intolerable burden, and the sickle that castrates Uranos resolves that concretism. Jung invokes Uranos in a Neoplatonist-Plotinian context, identifying the One with Uranos as transcendent principle above Kronos and Zeus. The Burkert scholarly tradition records the castration strictly as ritual-mythological data. Collectively the corpus shows that Uranos is less a psychological subject in his own right than a structural hinge in narratives of cosmic succession, genealogical violence, and archetypal naming.

In the library 16 passages

the meaning they eventually attributed to the new planet was very different in character from that of the mythological Ouranos. The clear consensus among contemporary astrologers is that the planet Uranus is empirically associated with the principle of change, rebellion, freedom, liberation, reform, revolution

Tarnas establishes the foundational argument of his monograph: the mythological Ouranos provides only the planet’s name, not its archetypal meaning, which belongs instead to the Prometheus complex.

Richard Tarnas, Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus, 1995thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

unlike the planets known to the ancients, the planet Uranus does not closely correspond in its mythological name with the larger range of its observed astrological meanings. In most respects, the naming appears to have risen from the conventional logic of late eighteenth-century astronomers

Tarnas argues in Cosmos and Psyche that the name Uranus was chosen by astronomical convention rather than archetypal intuition, with the sole exception of the celestial/sky correspondence, and that the real archetype is Prometheus.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

she crafted a sickle to castrate Uranos. This motif of the child trapped in the earth suggests a way of looking at the problem of literalization. A child, a new possibility, is born but then this child is trapped in matter.

Berry reads Gaia’s castration of Uranos as a mythic resolution to the problem of psychic literalization, in which new possibilities (children) are imprisoned in merely material earth until destructive energy frees them.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The major genealogical myth of Uranos, Kronos, and Zeus the youngest son — leaving aside the Biblical patriarchs and their sons — is present in all the wrenching horror of the father-son, puer-senex struggle.

Hillman positions the Uranos-Kronos-Zeus succession as the archetypal template for the puer-senex struggle that Freud raised to a central cultural explanation and that Jungian psychology must reckon with.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The One, designated as Uranos, is transcendent; the Son (Kronos) has dominion over the visible world; and the world-soul (Zeus) is subordinate to him.

Jung, following Plotinus, locates Uranos as the transcendent One at the apex of a Neoplatonist triad above Kronos and Zeus, anticipating the Christian trinitarian formula.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

she is born out of the froth of emotions when the old man Uranos’ genitals are cut off (the repressed sexuality of any stern senex attitude); there we see her passion for revenge, her sisters Nemesis and the Furies

Hillman interprets the castration of Uranos as releasing the repressed sexuality of a stern senex attitude, making Aphrodite’s genealogy — and thus love itself — originate in violence and suppression.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

depriving her of her own inner sky, Uranos, her own luminous and celestial possibilities. As a goddess, Earth is also invisible. She generates immaterially, unnaturally.

Hillman reads Uranos as Earth’s (Gaia’s) own interior celestial dimension, such that to be deprived of Uranos is to lose one’s luminous, immaterial possibilities and be reduced to gross materiality.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

enjoys an eternal hieros gamos with itself (Uranos and Gaia), cruelly disrupts its own hieros gamos with itself (Kronos using his sharp-edged sickle upon Uranos)

Giegerich uses the Uranos-Gaia union and its violent disruption by Kronos as instances of the soul’s self-reflexive logical movement — the psyche enjoying and then negating its own unity.

supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Aphrodite, the daughter of Uranos and Hemera, is called his sister; for her, too, this parentage is meaningful. Her descent from the sky god is confirmed by another birth account in the primal-mythological style, in Hesiod.

Kerényi traces Aphrodite’s descent from Uranos and Hemera as genealogically meaningful, connecting the goddess’s luminous nature to the sky god’s light-essence and illuminating an archaic Hermes-Aphrodite kinship.

Kerényi, Karl, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

No character is assigned to him in mythology, and the only attribute suggested is his fertility which was destroyed by Saturn and reborn as Venus. Astrologically we assign to him the rulership of invention, genius, originality, individuality, and the urge for freedom.

Greene notes that the mythological Uranos is characterologically thin — his sole mythic attribute is fertility destroyed by Saturn — and that the astrological planet’s rich meanings (invention, genius, freedom) are therefore effectively independent of the myth.

Liz Greene, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, 1976supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Disgusted at the sight of his own offspring, Uranus refused to allow them to exist. Instead, as soon as they were born, he shoved them back into Gaea’s womb, the very bowels of the earth itself. Astrologically this implies that in Uranus’ house, we may conceive what we believe are some very good ideas, but when acted upon and concretized, they may not turn out so well.

Sasportas draws a direct astrological lesson from the myth: Uranos’s suppression of his offspring figures the tendency of Uranian house placement to generate brilliant ideas that disappoint upon concretization.

Sasportas, Howard, The Twelve Houses: An Introduction to the Houses in Astrological Interpretation, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the discovery of Uranus coincided with the dawn of the electrical and industrial age as well as with two great political revolutions which resulted in the birth of a new form of government.

Greene applies Jung’s synchronicity principle to the discovery of the planet Uranus, reading its historical coincidence with revolution and industrialization as evidence that the outer planets’ discovery mirrors the emergence of corresponding archetypal contents in collective consciousness.

Liz Greene, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, 1976supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Uranus rotates backward on its axis when compared with the rest of the planets, and Uranian people often set themselves in opposition to the ordinary way of doing things

Cunningham offers an astronomical-to-psychological analogy: the planet’s retrograde rotation mirrors the Uranian personality type’s habitual opposition to convention.

Donna Cunningham, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A split or schism can develop underground in your life that would be similar to a fault. Perhaps your marriage is stifling your individuality, and you begin to want your freedom. Pressure continues to build up, until a Uranus transit signals a separation

Cunningham develops a geological metaphor — tectonic fault lines — to explain how Uranus transits operate as slow-building pressure that erupts suddenly in life crises.

Donna Cunningham, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms