The Discovery of Uranus
DIScoverer:
sir william herschel
YEAR of discovery:
1781
LOCATION:
bath, england
MYTHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:
Ouranos, god of the sky
Astronomical Attributes of Uranus
Uranus is the only planet among the other outer planets (Neptune and Pluto) within the range of our eyesight, dimly visible on a clear night and when viewed from a dark site. Its gentle yet electric blue-green hue, for some a pale turquoise, is revealed when using a small telescope. Unlike most other planets, which rotate roughly parallel to their orbit around the Sun, Uranus stands out due to its idiosyncratic tilt. The potential result of an enormous collision, this tilt has pushed Uranus off the beaten path, rotating at 98° to the plane of its orbit. The tilt also causes extreme seasons and alternating decades of sunlight or darkness around the planet’s polar regions. This offbeat, anti-social feature gives Uranus an air of idiosyncrasy, capriciousness and iconoclasm — a true maverick and accurate representation of its astrological associations.
The Discovery of Uranus
Uranus was discovered on Tuesday 13 March 1781 by German court musician and hobby astronomer William Herschel. As Saturn had been considered the boundary of the universe since the dawn of astronomy and astrology, Uranus’s arrival as the first transpersonal planet had a profoundly disruptive effect on the established concept of an orderly arranged solar system and heralded humanity’s shift into a greater collective awareness. The first sighting of Uranus took place in Herschel’s back garden in Bath, England — a rather underwhelming location for such a momentous astronomical discovery. Herschel built his own telescopes and had dedicated himself to a rather ambitious project: counting and recording all the stars in the sky. His sister Caroline, an avid amateur astronomer alike, lived with Herschel and participated in his project by independently, scanning the night-time sky. While not personally present at the time of discovery, her efforts are considered to have played an implicit role in the process of Uranus’s discovery and align with the associations of Uranus as the ‘progressive innovator’, transgressing the boundaries of social conventions at the time.
Historical Backdrop
In a broader historical context, Uranus’s first sighting and its disruptive effects on the order of our solar system coincided with a period of turbulent social transition. The planet’s discovery coincided with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England, five years after the Declaration of Independence in America and eight years before the French Revolution. Many Western countries saw cracks appear in their long-established hierarchical systems, the foundations of which began to disintegrate under the force of ideological waves of unrest from within every rank of society. Uranus’s association with technological progress was also reflected in the advancing Industrial Revolution. The development of new machines revolutionised the workforce, workers’ rights, as well as political and economic forces. As ordinary people demanded to have their voices heard, Uranus’s discovery marked the dawn of a new societal awareness in which technology and the rights of ‘commoners’ featured prominently. As above, so below: from an astronomical perspective, Uranus’s strange tilt and its appearance of having been ‘knocked’ into a slanted position also seemed to mirror the unsettled power dynamics and hierarchies in the Western world that were forced to radically reassemble during this time.
Uranus’s Mythological Meaning
The planet’s name ‘Uranus’ only achieved unanimous consensus after several tugs-of-war. While Herschel himself wished to name the planet after his benefactor, King George III, astronomers on the continent preferred to adopt Herschel’s name given his role as the discoverer. Finally, German astronomer Johann Bode suggested the name Uranus, which was adopted during the 1790s and swiftly secured the planet a prominent position in creation myth. In Greek mythology, Ouranos is the son and husband of Earth goddess Gaia, who resides on Mount Olympus and governs a family of brutal immortals. Ouranos fathered many children, all of which he hated and stuffed back into Gaia’s womb as soon as she had given birth to them, burying his children deep down into the earth. Gaia suffered and conspired with her youngest son Cronos (Saturn) to end her husband’s cruelty. She equipped Cronos with a diamond sickle, who castrated his father and flung the severed genitals into the sea. The blood yielded hereby created furies, giants and ash tree nymphs, and from the foam in the sea emerged Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Ouranos’s brutal fate, a symbolic severance of sky from earth, male from female, conscious from unconscious and intellect from instinct, encouraged the planet’s association with both disruption and connection. Uranus is said to have the ability to “open the door to the collective unconscious” — as a sky deity, he instantly summons a sense of infinite space. Perhaps only the sky itself is boundless enough to hold the erratic spirit of this volatile, eccentric god: turbulent as the wind, unforeseeable as a lightning flash, extravagant as a rainbow.
What Does Uranus’s Symbol Mean?
Uranus’s more popularly adopted glyph features the cross, representative of matter, placed over the circle symbolising spirit. The two semi-circles on the sides hint at the planet’s receptivity — it reacts rather than develops. This glyph is also strangely reminiscent of an early television antennae, suggesting the transmission of signals from one place to another and the planet’s association with networks, technology, and electricity.
Uranus’s Higher Wisdom
As the ‘higher octave’ of Mercury, Uranus’s connection with this inner planet quickly evokes ideas of rapid, unpredictable change, flexibility and unconventionality, all of which take center stage within the realm of the mind. As the first of the outer planets, Uranus departs from inner landscapes and allows us to enter a transpersonal space: Chevalier & Gheerbrant’s A Dictionary of Symbols position Uranus as “patron of whatever raises mankind from the ground and lifts him skywards to his mythological domain in the upward surge of effort to attain the absolute”. Uranus takes us to places we have never been to before, with little consideration for our personal comfort. This maverick challenges us to integrate outlandishly new views and experiences in ways that deeply unsettle but also undeniably enrich our lives.
