Chapter 2. Uranus and Cronus

Gaia, goddess of the Earth, gave birth to Uranus, god of the sky, and Pontus, god of the sea. Gaia created the beauties of nature upon the Earth, and Uranus let the rains fall from the sky to allow plants and animals to thrive. This also created the oceans and the lakes. Through the workings of Eros, the god of love, Gaia had 12 children with her son Uranus, of whom six were sons and six were daughters. These children are referred to as the Titans (origin of the word titanium), and they were a tremendously powerful group of gods. Eight of the children paired off and married each other, leading to numerous other gods we will get to later. The male gods born of this union were Oceanus (god of the sea, origin of the word ocean), Coeus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Crius, and Cronus (god of time, origin of the word chronic), and the goddesses were Tethys, Phoebe, Theia, Rhea, Themis, and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory, origin of the word anamnesis, meaning “medical history,” and amnesia).

With Uranus, Gaia birthed three giants called the Cyclops (origin of the word cyclopia), and another set of three giants called the Hecatoncheires. The Cyclops were giants with a single large eye in the middle of their forehead, and they were the gods of thunder and lightning. The Hecatoncheires (meaning “the Hundred-Handed Ones”) were giants with one hundred hands and fifty heads.

Uranus took no interest in the children he had with Gaia. In fact, he despised his offspring and banished them to Tartarus, the lowest level of the Underworld. Gaia was angry and hurt by this, and urged her banished children to take revenge, but none were willing to rise up due to their fear of their father. Only the youngest, Cronus, agreed with his mother, and she provided him with an adamantine sickle called a harpe to aid him.

That night, when Uranus came to lay with Gaia, Cronus took up the harpe and castrated his father. Uranus, in his shame, was never seen again. Cronus then cast the severed genitals of Uranus into the sea. This created a foam (aphros) in the sea, from which sprang Aphrodite (origin of the word aphrodisiac), the goddess of beauty. Aphrodite is also known by her Roman equivalent, Venus.

Cronus took his sister Rhea as his wife, and they had six children together. Cronus governed as king of the gods in place of his father Uranus, but was troubled by prophecy made by Uranus that, just like his father, Cronus would be overthrown by one of his children. To prevent this, he made sure to swallow each of his five children: Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera.

This dismayed his wife Rhea, and when she became pregnant with their next son Zeus, she fled to the isle of Crete, hid the newborn Zeus in a cave, and presented her husband with a stone wrapped up in swaddling clothes. Cronus, believing the stone to be a child of his, swallowed it whole. This allowed Zeus to live, leading to a great turning point in Greek mythology.

Mythological Etymologies

Uranus

On March 13th, 1781, German-born English astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) discovered a new planet. This planet would later be named after Uranus, god of the sky.

The radioactive element uranium also gets its name from Uranus. It was discovered from uraninite ore as a new element by German chemist Martin H. Klaproth (1743-1817) in 1789. At that time, newly discovered metals were traditionally named after heavenly bodies, and this new element was named uranium after the planet Uranus. This element was later found to be the heaviest naturally occurring element.

The Italian nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), while teaching physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, was successful in analyzing the fission products resulting when uranium is bombarded with neutrons and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work. Later, Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980) succeeded in demonstrating nuclear fission with uranium. Immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize, Fermi fled the dictatorship of Mussolini and went to America. After a stay at Columbia University, Fermi went on to the University of Chicago, where he used nuclear fission to create the first atomic bomb, thereby ushering in the Atomic Age. The nuclear fission of a single kilogram of uranium releases energy equivalent to 3,000 tons of coal.

There are also several medical terms derived from Uranus. Uranism was used to refer to any kind of sexual perversion, due to the relationship between Uranus and his mother. Eventually, Uranism came to mean something similar to homosexuality. In medical terms, uranus refers to the palate of the mouth, and reconstructive surgery to fix a cleft palate is thus called uranoplasty.

Cronus

The medical term chronic, meaning “persistent, continuous,” comes from the mythological Cronus. A possible reason why Cronus was considered the god of time was that Cronus’ sequential eating of his children acted as a metaphor for the passage of time, which is how the word chronic came to be used in the medical field. Another related medical term is chronological symptoms, which refers to a series of symptoms exhibited over time. An example of this is Murphy’s Five Chronological Symptoms of Appendicitis: loss of appetite, upper abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and pain in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. These symptoms were first presented in the beginning of the 20th century by John Benjamin Murphy (1857-1916), a surgeon from Chicago.

There are numerous words with the prefix chron-. A chronometer was used to refer to a type of clock with exceptionally high accuracy. Since the advent of quartz technology, however, all clocks could now be considered chronometers. A chronicle is a set of records, histories, newspapers, etc. Mazda also had a car called the Chronos in Japan that was popular with the younger crowd, with the name no doubt an attempt to emphasize the car as a cutting-edge vehicle for the time.

Titans

The clan of giants called the Titans derive their name from the word tito, meaning “sun.” Titanium, a metal element commonly used in tennis rackets and golf clubs, gets its name from the Titans.

Klaproth, who also discovered the element uranium, coined the name titanium for this element in 1795. However, the actual discoverer of titanium was one William Gregor (1761-1817), an English clergyman. Gregor discovered the element four years earlier than Klaproth in 1791 and named the metal manaccanite after the Manaccan region of England where he found the metal from which he isolated titanium.

Because titanium is lightweight yet strong, and highly resistant to corrosion, it is ideal for a variety of applications and is commonly used as an anticorrosive material/alloy component for medical and aerospace equipment. Titanium dioxide has superior coloring power and high opacity, making it a common ingredient in a variety of pigmented products like cosmetics, paints, printing inks, and plastics. Titanium is found in compounds in rock and sand, and after potassium and calcium, is the ninth-most abundant metal on Earth. Historically, however, it was extremely difficult to isolate.

In 1910, the American chemist M. A. Hunter was successful in isolating titanium but was unable to develop a practical process for doing so. Wilhelm Kroll (1869-1939) later used this method and succeeded in isolating large quantities of titanium in 1946, and thanks to his work, titanium production is now considerably easier. Because titanium-based metals do not interfere with MRI scans, they are commonly used in vascular repair stents, orthopedic surgery materials, gastroenterostomy, and ligating clips.

Titan is the name of the sixth moon of Saturn, and is also where the Titanic, the 46,000-ton ship that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sunk in April 1912, got its name.

Oceanus

Oceanus, a member of the Titan clan, is the origin of the word ocean.

Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory, is the origin of the prefix mnen-, which is used in medical terms to indicate things related to memory. Mnemonic devices used to make things easier to remember, the now obsolete word anamnesis (medical record), and amnesia all come from Mnemosyne. In immunology, an anamnestic response is the type of immune response that occurs when a first immunization to stimulate immunity is made, and the immunity responses to further immunizations are more rapid due to the body remembering the mechanism for that specific immune response. This type of reaction can also be more generally applied to how people learn and relearn information skills.

Now I’d like to talk a little bit about mnemonics. A mnemonic is a useful method for remembering a series of words or facts. A famous example is ROY G BIV, used to remember the colors of the rainbow, or “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” for the planets (and Pluto). Japanese also has its own unique style of mnemonics useful for remembering dates and other numbers. Most of the characters in the basic Japanese kana alphabet are similar in pronunciation to a number (Japanese have multiple ways to count things, e.g., the number “one” can be expressed as ichi or hitotsu, among others, depending on the situation). An example of this is the mnemonic device to remember the height of Mt. Aso, the active volcano in the prefecture of Kumamoto. The height, 1,592 meters, can be (loosely) read as...