The Sky Castrated by His Own Son

Uranos is the starry sky personified, one of the first beings of the Greek cosmos, brought forth by Gaia the Earth and then taken by her as husband. Together they are the parents of the twelve Titans, the one-eyed Cyclopes and the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires. But Uranos hated his children and pushed them back into the body of Earth, and Gaia, in pain, fashioned a great sickle and called on her sons to act.

Only the youngest Titan, Kronos, took it up: he ambushed his father and castrated him, throwing the severed genitals into the sea. From the drops of blood that fell on the earth came the avenging Erinyes, the Giants and the ash-tree nymphs; from the foam that gathered around the genitals in the sea rose Aphrodite. The story is told in full in Hesiod's Theogony, and it opens the succession myth that runs from Uranos to Kronos to Zeus, each sky-ruler overthrown by his son. Uranos himself has almost no cult; he is a figure of cosmogony rather than of worship, the first sovereign whose fall sets the pattern for all that follow.