Consuming Greek mythology by the bookful, I realized that My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets is a far cry from the devilishly adult story that supplied the names of the planets. Here is that story, and if you haven't heard it before I hope you will find the familiar names a useful mnemonic (a word obtained from Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, by whom her nephew Zeus fathered the nine Muses, who in turn gave their name to music and museums… but we're getting ahead of ourselves).
The First Order: 3 and 7
In the Beginning there was Chaos. Out of it emerged Gaia — EARTH.
Gaia gave virgin birth to URANUS [the last asexual act in Greek myth], who governs the sky and rules the universe.
The Second Order: 6 and the Titans
Gaia and Uranus then couple [for how else could the world populate? Gaia couldn't repeat the feat of parthenogenesis forever. Besides, scruples aren't a thing yet; it'd be much, much later before maternal incest is deemed a Tragedy, as in the myth of Oedipus] and beget the first Titans, dozen in number, who sort themselves into six couples. We will remain with Titan # 11, Rhea, who gets it on with the younger Cronos (also spelt "Kronos") — or as the Romans called him, SATURN (planetary symbol: ♄, a corrupted Kappa rho).
Gaia grew to abhor her son-consort Uranus, for reasons too unspeakable even for this retelling. Cronos, for his part, envied the power of his father-half-brother Uranus. Gaia and Saturn thus conspire and, with the aid of a sickle, remove Uranus from the action. No, they do not kill him, because it cannot be done to immortals, instead they leave him deep underground writhing in pain, his explosive fury mined today as uranium.
URANUS (of symbol ⛢ for reasons rooted in alchemy) is the one planet whose satellites are not named after characters in Greek mythology, drawing instead from English literature. But it's hard to keep mythos out completely: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream may have given the moon TITANIA, but it means "daughter of Titan", and his Timon of Athens may have given CUPID, but that is a grandson of Uranus. A grandson, moreover, who owed his existence to his uncle Cronos… a tale we will catch up with.
There is a peculiarity to URANUS not entirely understood by scientists since its discovery in the late 18th century. Its spin axis is almost parallel to its plane of orbit, or in other words, the planet is tilted sideways at just about 90 degrees. (Recall that Earth's axis is tilted only by 23 degrees.) Said yet differently, its equatorial circle is always perpendicular to its orbital ellipse. When we are done with this narration we will find that there is an explanation in Greek mythology.
Now Cronos/Saturn is king of the world. But a king uneasy, for in his head rings the constant echo of his father's curse hissed through agony: "Heinous, heinous son, you shall suffer this hurt by your child." Fearful of the prophecy of one so powerful, Cronos hatches a plan. When Rhea gives birth, he… swallows the baby. Five she bears in five years, five he pops into his mouth. The sixth year, now with nothing but hate for Cronos, Rhea tricks him, so that instead of the baby he swallows a linen-swaddled stone. The baby is smuggled away to friends in Crete, where it grows into a strong, sharp, mischievous man. "You must overthrow your cruel father and become in his stead a wise, beloved ruler," his mother tells him on her frequent visits. And when the time comes, that is just what he does. With Rhea's help, he first gets himself hired as unsuspecting Cronos' cup-bearer, then hands him a potent potion both emetic and tranquilizing. Cronos vomits all the five children in his belly, now fully grown, and falls deep asleep. And that ends his rule. After a fierce, decade-long, successful clash with the Titans, the children of Rhea take over the reins and establish new headquarters on Mount Olympus, becoming thus the Olympian "gods", to distinguish themselves from the Titans. The youngest sibling who liberated them all is unanimously appointed Lord of Everything, the all-father, the new keeper of the sky. His name was Zeus — JUPITER (symbol: ♃, a corrupted zeta).
What of Cronos? Zeus consigns him to a most terrible punishment: he must travel the cosmos all alone and scrupulously measure the passage of time — unto eternity. Today we see him bent on his sickle, grey and miserable, and call him "Old Father Time". Thereby leaves Cronos his mark on chronometers, chronicles, and the chronically ill, often of disposition that is, of course, saturnine. (A good example of chronometers is a Titan watch.) When Gaia and Cronos had united to overthrow Uranus, we could've said their orbit was geosynchronous. The famous rings of SATURN depict time cycles: seasons, circadian rhythms, and Saturdays. [SATURN's rings were discovered 23 centuries after the saga of the immortals was first written down, but that's just chronology.] Many SATURNian moons, including RHEA, are named for Cronos' siblings; the biggest is, simply, TITAN.
The Third & Final Order: the rest
5, the All-Father
Aside from his lightning bolts, the defining aspect of Zeus in popular imagination is his astonishing libido. His eye for attractive, ovulating women — mortality and marital status no bar — made him the indulgent papa of, among others, seven of the twelve Olympian gods, the Muses, the Graces, the Fates, Perseus [whose son Perses founded Persia], Hercules, and Helen of Troy [plus her immortal twin brother Polydeukes, who with his mortal half-brother Castor makes one half of the "Gemini", giving their name not only to the zodiacal constellation but also to NASA's second human spaceflight program Project Gemini]. I am very proud of having penned this joke many years ago:
SUEZ. A canal admitting multiple ships.
ZEUS. Evidently, the reverse of SUEZ. A ship entering multiple canals.
It is no wonder that his sister-wife Hera — one of the five returned vomitively to the world by Cronos — was endlessly jealous and spiteful. [Hercules was to the Greeks Heracles, "Hera's glory", so named by his mortal parents to appease the seething Hera.] The four largest "Galilean" moons of the largest planet are named for Zeus' lovers. EUROPA was abducted by him in the form of a bull she tried to ride; the stretch of land they covered came to be called Europe, later applied to the continent. IO was turned into a cow to hide her from Hera, who nevertheless saw through the ruse, and sent a stinging gadfly to make her roam the world mad. In that process Io crossed near Turkey the strait of Bosporus, meaning "cow passage", or put differently, "ox ford". CALLISTO was turned by Hera into a bear to be hunted; her life was saved when Zeus immortalized her in the stars ("catasterized") as the constellation Ursa Major. GANYMEDE, too, has a second place in the sky. A superlatively handsome prince of Troy, the gentle Ganymede was taken up to Olympus by Zeus to be beau and cup-bearer. Such was his love for the youth that by and by he was turned into a constellation in the Zodiac: Aquarius — "cup-bearer". Among others in the moons of JUPITER are METIS, Zeus' tutor in his teen years, whom he later impregnates — at his wedding to Hera — with the future goddess of wisdom, Athena (sometimes "Pallas Athena", hence the planetoid PALLAS); AMALTHEA, the goat that suckled baby Zeus, whose horn he accidentally breaks yet fills with an unceasing supply of unprocessed foods, the Cornucopia; and LEDA, with whom he sleeps as a swan, causing her to lay an egg from which hatches Helen. The Jovian moons are a jovial flock, for Hera is not amongst them. But in 2016 NASA did send JUNO — the Roman Hera, commemorated every twelvemonth in "June" — to circle JUPITER and peer close. And over the last two months JUNO's gaze has turned to EUROPA, IO, and GANYMEDE.
9 & 8, the Ocean and the Underworld
Who else did Cronos throw up? There's Hestia — the asteroid VESTA — goddess of domestic life, and Demeter — the dwarf planet CERES — goddess of fertility and farmers. And then there's Poseidon and Hades — NEPTUNE and PLUTO.
After the Titans were defeated (sunk Titanically), the first headache that new emperor Zeus had to confront was the allotment among his resentful brothers the chief realms of creation: sky, ocean, and underworld. By royal right he took the sky for himself, and the other two were decided by lot.
Hades got the underworld. It was at first a very quiet place, but before long it began to teem with souls of the dead, much to the delight of Hades, itching as he was to populate his kingdom. This development was the direct result of an idea that came to Zeus as he fretted restlessly in the boring, peaceful order that he himself had brought about. The idea was to create as play-things conscious, appeasing, worshipping creatures in the image of the gods themselves, only… mortal. Eons spent in the company of dead souls rendered Hades cold and distant, much as PLUTO, and much unlike Mickey Mouse's dog. Busy with subterranean affairs, he rarely surfaced to Olympus, thus technically counting himself out of the Olympian pantheon, quite as PLUTO is not a planet any more. Thanks to the fertile soils and metals in his realm (including plutonium), he is also the wealthiest of the gods. Think "plutocrat". Among the moons of PLUTO (symbolized self-explanatorily as ♇) are CHARON, who ferries souls from the living world to the dead; KERBEROS, the three-headed, serpent-tailed dog that guards Hades' gates and keeps the dead from leaving; and STYX, the underworld river whose waters bestow invincibility, into which Achilles' mother dipped her infant son almost completely — holding him by his heel.
Of Poseidon in the blue ocean and NEPTUNE of blue atmosphere I have little more of relevance to say, but I will note this. As controller of the seas (by operating a trident that thence became the symbol of NEPTUNE: ♆) Poseidon made life very difficult for mortal Odysseus, with whom he had a score to settle. What should have been a straightforward voyage home to Ithaca from the shores of the just-conquered Troy becomes a protracted ten-year nightmare of unwelcome adventures and wrong turns. This epic tale inspired the term for any long-winded journey, as in Space Odyssey, a series of books by Arthur C. Clarke set all over the solar system. It also appears in NASA's spacecraft to study the Sun, Ulysses — Roman for Odysseus — as it was programmed to take a circuitous route to our star. [What NASA doesn't mention is that Odysseus also has a significant encounter with Helios, the Titan charioteer of the Sun.] One of Odysseus' tasks is to navigate the great Wandering Rocks, the "Planctae", known to smash ships. Now there is a similar Greek word, "planetai": "wanderers". Planets are called that because the corresponding specks in the sky sometimes wandered backwards with respect to the other stars, puzzling ancient astronomers. That led to the infamous "epicycles" in Ptolemy's Earth-centred model of the universe; the puzzle was trivially solved by Copernicus' Sun-centred idea. (As for the Planctae, Odysseus reroutes and chooses a different adventure. Only Jason and his brave Argonauts are known to have threaded the Wandering Rocks safely, with help from Hera.)
4, 0, 3a & 1, the progeny
Zeus had children by Hera, too. Their firstborn was Hephaestus, who we will see shortly has a curious relationship with Poseidon in the Solar System. Zeus and Hera's second child was the aggressive, quarrelsome Ares — MARS. Zeus, not one to embrace armed conflict but conceding its necessity, appointed him the god of war, his shield and spear seen in the planetary symbol ♂. Ares' sons are MARS' moons: PHOBOS and DEIMOS, fear and terror. They made quite the militant — one could say martial — trio. Speaking of that number, the third month of the calendar is named for Mars.
By the Titanide Leto, who in her final trimester had to be protected from a curse of Hera on a remote island, Zeus fathered two Olympian gods. As soon as Artemis was out of Leto's womb she turned around and helped her mother deliver her twin brother, Apollo. A favourite daughter of Zeus, Artemis asked for and received the MOON (☾), while Apollo became the first charioteer, and personification, of the SUN (☉). For this reason he is sometimes called "Phoebus Apollo", i.e. Apollo the Bright. I think total solar eclipses are Artemis' way of reminding Apollo who is elder. (In passing, it is thought the Earth in its infancy was struck by a planet called THEIA and the debris coalesced to form the Moon; Theia is one of the 12 first-generation Titans.) But the manned lunar missions were named after the brother, not the sister, by a NASA official looking at a picture in a mythology book: "Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program." A closer reading would have put Neil Armstrong and friends on Artemis 11. (Update: forthcoming Moon landings may indeed proceed under the appropriate name.) The founders of the hospital and pharmacy in Chennai seem to have been better-informed: Apollo was the father of the god of medicine, Asclepius, who carried a snake-entwined staff that we see today on clinics, prescriptions and ambulances, and whose daughters were Panacea and Hygieia — from whom we get "hygiene" and the dwarf planet HYGIEA.
It is little wonder that MERCURY is closest to the SUN. Hermes (for that was his Greek name) was born to yet another of Zeus' sexual excursions, by the Titaness Maia, whose name we borrow for the month of May. When just a few hours old, Hermes had managed to steal Apollo's cattle. And when the Sun god traced footprints and came to demand justice, his wrath was turned to bewildered admiration at the sight of an infant playing a profoundly melodious tune on a strange instrument. It was the lyre, which Hermes had just invented, and presently offered Apollo. "Keep it, improve it, and let everyone hear you. You will be hailed as the god of music." The half-brothers became instant best friends. Zeus quite liked Hermes' precocity, speed and cunning, and made him the Olympian god of thieves, tricksters, and story-tellers. And because Hermes was so swift [hence the chemical name "mercury" for quicksilver and the word "mercurial"; NASA's first human spaceflight program was named Project Mercury perhaps for this quality; MERCURY certainly makes the promptest solar orbit], he was appointed messenger of the gods [which is why NASA dubbed its Mercury probe MESSENGER], and crosser of boundaries. For instance, it is his office to escort the freshly dead to Charon in the underworld, carrying his staff entwined with two snakes (as opposed to Asclepius' solo serpent), the "herald's wand" that is the symbol ☿ for MERCURY. Among his attributes were magic, alchemy and astrology, the secret knowledge of which never escaped his lips, Hermetically sealed as they were.
The last one
Let us now pause and take stock of the solar lot. We have EARTH, who begat URANUS, who begat SATURN, who begat NEPTUNE, PLUTO and JUPITER, who begat MARS and MERCURY, besides ministers of the SUN and the MOON. So who is missing? All right, yes, VENUS. But did you really want to hear about VENUS? Perhaps I can tell you another time? Ah well, you are asking for it.
You must remember the sickle of Cronos. What did he do with it, you must have wondered, that gave his father Uranus such grief? Reader, he sliced off the genitals of Uranus. Cronos then caught the falling appendages, and flung them far across the plains of Greece. The drip of blood and fluids, upon contact with Earth, gave creation to all sorts of beings: nymphs, giants, and monsters. But this arbitrary genetic selection also hit a jackpot, for emerged from the sea a knockout beauty of the sublimest grace — Aphrodite, literally "from the foam". You can see why the Romans quietly changed her name to Venus. Aphrodite is said to have had a face lovelier than any other [the VENUSian symbol ♀ is thought by some to depict a hand-held mirror… it is after all the hottest planet]; it is only appropriate that she be appointed the Olympian goddess of love and beauty. Unsurprisingly, it is her names that we see in "aphrodisiac" and "venereal", and her son that is Cupid (Eros to the Greeks), the god of desire and attraction carrying with him those notorious wayward arrows. To imagine that we wouldn't be falling in love if not for that sickle of Father Time…
-1
So where does Hephaestus, the firstborn of Zeus and Hera, figure in the Solar System? For that we must scratch some history. For a long time in the 19th century certain irregularities in the orbit of URANUS were being reported. It took the imagination and mathematical gifts of astronomer Le Verrier to suggest that these were due to an unseen planet, and what's more, he told the Berlin Observatory exactly where to point their telescope to see it. And thus was NEPTUNE discovered. Now there was another longstanding problem Le Verrier himself had observed — irregularities in the orbit of MERCURY. Without missing a beat, Le Verrier proposed a second new planet, inside the orbit of MERCURY. It was named VULCAN, the Roman name for Hephaestus. Alas, despite extensive searches no VULCAN was discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein to resolve the MERCURY mystery, by his proposal of the general theory of relativity. The theory predicted that the Sun significantly bent the space that MERCURY occupied, lending its orbit the irregular precession observed.
So unsightly at birth was he that Hephaestus' mother Hera kicked him off Mount Olympus; the fall gave him a permanent limp. He grew to be a master blacksmith and craftsman, and is therefore the Olympian god of all who ply their trade in handiwork — god of the forge and fire. From his name do we receive vulcanized rubber and volcanoes. In an ill-proposed contest he wins the hand of his beauteous grand-aunt Aphrodite, but takes no enthusiasm in the marriage. For he knows that his brother Ares and wife Aphrodite are inseparable lovers: open secret was the conjunction of Mars and Venus, whose fruit Eros/Cupid was. At one point, even Mercury and Venus have a boy, whose adult body is fused by the gods with that of a nymph who desires his beauty. This child of Hermes and Aphrodite was called, in the style of many baby names today, Hermaphroditus, which of course gets us "hermaphrodite". But back to Hephaestus… unassuming, ever-diligent Hephaestus, cast aside by his mother, shunned by a wife who cheats on him with an unheeding band of brothers… it was as if Vulcan didn't exist.
7 down
To finish, we return to a question posed earlier: how come URANUS alone is tilted sideways? For that we must put ourselves in the wanderers' shoes. All non-Uranian planets face everybody else as they spin, their heads tilted but slightly. But URANUS spins around lying down, facing forever away from the rest of his family. And why not? You never had a father; your mother is your sole mate, then your tormentor; your son is a castrator and baby-gobbler; no daughter of yours gets a planet named after her save for the one that reminds you of the missing crown jewels; your planetary grandsons are energetic adulterers but for the one who is warden of your prison; and your great-grandsons freely copulate with your daughter. What was that mnemonic again? My Very Evil Mother Just Sent Up Nine Planets…
The stars must be a therapeutic view.
March 2022
Richmond, BC