Ouranos

"Love then arose, most beauteous of immortals." not the winged, mischievous Cupid, the son of Aphrodite—for Aphrodite herself had not yet risen from the sea,—but Eros, Love, in the original sense of Divine Love, the "Spirit of God moving upon the faces of the waters." Nothing further is said in the Theogony of this Eros, but his creative power is suggested rather than described, for now "from Nyx arose Ether and Hemera," Light and Day, even as, according to the Ancient Word, "God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light. . . . And the evening and the morning were the first day." By the first revelation of Divine Truth from Divine Love the work of spiritual creation commenced; the first men began to be formed into a Church of God.

The Latin fable, related by Ovid, describes at length the successive days of creation, resulting finally in the creation of man and the glories of the Golden Age, but the Greek myth of Hesiod passes at once to the birth of Ouranos, the starry Heaven, first-born of Gaea and direct ancestor to all subsequent generations of gods.

It is self-evident that Ouranos personifies the first or Most Ancient Church, the Church of Adam or the Golden Age, which was a Celestial, i.e., heavenly Church. The name itself is derived from an archaic root oor, cognate to the Hebrew or and ur, signifying "Light" and "Flame," and to the Sanscrit wri, whence we have the Greek horao, to see, the Latin verus, and the German wahr, true. It was the one true Church, the Church of heavenly light, truth, insight, and perception.

But little is known of Ouranos as an individual deity, though many are the accounts of the Golden Age, depicted in glowing words by the classic poets. "We learn, however, that Ouranos finally married his own mother, Gaea, and by this union he sealed his own doom, for out of it sprang, first, a proud and wicked race, the "Titans," and later on, a generation of hideous monsters, the "Cyclops" and the "Hundred-handed," all of whom conspired together and effected the downfall of their heavenly parent.

This whole story simply describes the gradual downfall of the Most Ancient Church in the days when "the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men," that is, when the men who had been gifted with celestial perceptions and loves, deliberately went back and profaned their truths by conjoining them to the earthly affections of the sensual nature from which they had risen and advanced. This back-sliding, this profanation of the celestial state, is fitly represented by Ouranos marrying his mother Gaea. Henceforth we find Gaea, the earth, cursed as the mother of a race of monsters with whom she plans for the destruction of her heavenly son and spouse.

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