In Greek mythology, Ouranos (in ancient Greek Ouranós, "starry sky, firmament") is a deity.
The Hesiodic Myth of Ouranos
Ouranos is a primordial deity personifying Heaven. He is the son of Gaïa (the Earth) that she engenders alone, and the elder brother of Ouréa, male personification of the Mountains, and of Pontos, male personification of the Flood.
United to his own mother, he engenders the Titans and the Titanides, the Cyclops and the Hecatonchires, giants with a hundred arms. Ouranos fears and hates the Hecatonchires although they are his children, and he imprisons them in Tartarus, leaving the Cyclopes and the Titans free. Gaia then persuades her son Cronus to overthrow his father. This emasculates Ouranos and, from the blood that spurts, Gaia engenders another race of monsters, the Giants, the three avenging goddesses, the Erinyes, as well as the Meliades. As for the severed genitals, they fall into the sea where they give birth to the goddess of love, Aphrodite.
Origins and posterity of Ouranos in post-Hesiodic traditions
The post-hesiodic traditions more readily give birth to Ouranos from the Nyx (the Night) alone (which, according to Orphic tradition, would have voluntarily transmitted to him the scepter of the world, which she held from her own father Phanes (various Orphic fragments) or Hemera (the Day) and Ether (the celestial Light) (Hygin, Fables, pref.) Besides the Titans, the Cyclops and the Hecatonchires, they recognize him several other children, all born of Gaia, among which the three most ancient Muses, the three Moirai or the rural gods Pan and Aristaeus (various sources). even the whole race of the Pheacian people (fragment of Alcman) Finally, Cicero, in the (Nature of the gods) attributes successively to the loves of Ouranos and Hemera, the goddess of the Day, the birth of the celestial Aphrodite and of a first Hermes older than the son of Ze us and Maia.
Ouranos and the euhemerist tradition
A variant, of euhemerist origin, makes Ouranos the first king of the Atlanteans and the inventor of astronomy, which explains why after his death, his subjects would have deified him as god of the Sky and ancestor of all the other gods (Library of Diodorus of Sicily, book III, 14). In this tradition, he is the husband of Titeia and the father of forty-five children, including the Titans Atlas, Cronos and Hyperion. His two first-born are daughters, Rhea, also called Pandora and Basileia (the Royal), who inherits the Atlantean throne on the death of her father, marries Hyperion, begets Helios and Selene with him, but disappears from the earth's surface after the assassination of her husband and son by the other Titans and Selene's suicide. Cronos and Atlas then shared the ancient kingdom of Ouranos, the first establishing his power over Sicily, Italy and North Africa, from which he was later driven out by Dionysus (then considered the son of Ammon and Amalthea), the second on the regions located in the extreme West of the known world (Spain, Morocco and Mauritania). It was not until after the "earthly" death of Dionysus and Ammon that the Atlantean inheritance returned in its entirety to Zeus, the son of Cronus and Rhea. (Sources:Diodorus of Sicily, Historical Library, III and following).
Another legend, probably imported from Phenicia by Philo of Byblos and for which no French translation is known, also makes Ouranos a human monarch who became a god after the death of his father during a hunting trip. Driven out of power by his sons Cronos, Atlas and Dagon, he tries to reclaim his throne by sending his daughters Rhea, Dione, Aphrodite-Astarte, Hora and Duration to seduce Cronos in order to kill him treacherously. Cronos thwarts the plot, marries Rhea, makes the four other emissaries, all lovely, his concubines and ends up killing Ouranos after a fight, exactly thirty-two years after having stolen his scepter. The spirit of Ouranos is dissipated in the waters of the river on the banks of which Cronos had killed him, and his former subjects immediately raise him to the rank of gods. Years later, at the end of a new armed conflict, Cronos is deposed by his son Zeus, while the western empire of Atlas, namely the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, returns by inheritance to Hades. then, after the death without direct heir of the latter, to his nephew Hermès. (Source:Eusebius, citing Philo of Byblos, Prep. Ev., I, IV).
Worship
Ouranos has almost no role in the myths, except those of a theogonic or euhemeristic character, and the Greeks did not worship him, unlike his wife and mother Gaia.
Assimilation
It is called Uranus or Coelus among the Romans.