The Planets: “Uranus, the Magician,” Part 7 (of 10)

Maureen's Musings - Friday, September 12th, 2008

Though its name has been Latinized, Uranus is the only planet in the solar system named for a Greek, rather than Roman, deity. And the name is only the beginning of Uranus’s peculiarities.

Although considered part of a team of four gas giant planets, Uranus’s “higher proportion of ‘ices’ such as water, ammonia and methane” sometimes causes astronomers to categorize it (along with Neptune) as an ice giant. These ices contribute toward giving Uranus the coldest planetary atmosphere in the solar system. Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus is surrounded by a belt of cosmic dust. However, the planet’s axis of rotation is tilted so as to be nearly vertical, making Uranus’s rings appear as a bull’s-eye and its moons rotate like the “hands of a clock.” While “other planets can be visualized to rotate like tilted spinning tops relative to the plane of the solar system…Uranus rotates more like a tilted rolling ball.”

Millennia passed between the discovery of the classical planets and that of Uranus. In 1781, Sir Frederick William Herschel announced the finding of Uranus, making it the first of the “modern planets.” Astrologically, Uranus presides over such concepts as revolution, invention, and ground-breaking ideas.

At the time of the discovery democracy, progress, and human rights were at the forefront of Western culture. Detection of the planet took place two years prior to the conclusion of the American Revolution and eight years prior to the beginning of the French Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was already well underway; and in a few years, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and other British abolitionists would begin pressuring Parliament for the abolishment of the slave trade. Occurring alongside these radical changes, Romanticism in art and literature advocated personal freedom and individual identity.

As inspiring as Uranus’s astrological associations appear, it is worth noting that in medicine, the planet is connected to such maladies as “mental disorders, breakdowns and hysteria, spasms and cramps.” I suppose revolution could have those affects.

Every era has its revoultionaries. Jesus was revolutionary for his time and culture. One need only look at the people he interacted with to see that. He counted women among his disciples and he engaged with the ostrisized, such as lepers, Samaritans, the demon-possessed, prostitutes, and tax collectors. This wasn’t the exact behavior people expected of the King of Kings.

In Isaiah 46, God declares, “To whom will you compare me or count me equal? To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?” He goes on to remind us, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.” Specifically, he contrasts Babylonian idols with himself. The idols created by men out of gold and silver are “a burden for the weary” and cannot respond to the cries of those who bow down to them. YHWH, on the other hand, hears prayer and alleviates burdens. He says,

Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

Like the convention-breaking planet he created, the God of the Bible defies humanity’s limited imagination.

Listen to Holst’s “Uranus, the Magician” here.