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Uranus: A Planet Discovered in 1781

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Uranus: A Planet Discovered in 1781

Uranus was discovered by William Herschel on 13 March 1781 from his garden in Bath, the first planet found in recorded history; every body known before it had been visible to the unaided eye since antiquity. Herschel initially took it for a comet, and proposed to name it Georgium Sidus after George III, but the name Uranus, suggested by Johann Bode after the Greek sky god who was father of Kronos, prevailed. It takes about eighty-four years to circle the zodiac, roughly seven years to a sign, and its axis is tipped over more than ninety degrees so that it effectively rolls along its orbit, a peculiarity modern astrology has been happy to make symbolic use of. Any astrological meaning it carries is therefore less than two and a half centuries old and cannot be found in Ptolemy, in the Arabic authors or in Lilly.

Because its astrological meaning is under two and a half centuries old, Uranus appears in no source before Herschel's 1781 discovery, and the essential-dignity table most classical and traditional astrologers still use assigns it no rulership at all, keeping Aquarius under Saturn alone as it was reckoned for roughly two thousand years before the eighteenth century; the widespread modern practice of giving Uranus co-rulership or outright rulership of Aquarius is a nineteenth-century innovation layered onto, rather than replacing, the older dignity scheme. The proposed alternative name Georgium Sidus, honouring King George III, was used in Britain for decades after the discovery before the mythological name Uranus, suggested by the German astronomer Johann Bode, became the international standard, making Uranus the only planet named for a Greek rather than Roman deity, since Ouranos has no separate Roman form distinct from the sky itself.

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