Happy Father’s Day! …or Should I Say Happy Sky-Father’s Day
Father’s Day was originally a pagan holiday, the Great Sky-Father’s Day. Part of the week of celebrations leading up to the summer solstice, the day was given over to celebrating the Sky-Father’s providing for his human children with his rich gifts of sun and rain.
Gifts of sacrificial goats and sheep (recognizable by the festive ribbons bound about their necks) were supplemented with prayers for his continued guidance in the human journey towards spiritual adulthood. The precise transition to the Father’s Day we know today is lost in the mists of time, but it seems that several generations of Christian priests gradually attempted to neutralize the pagan rituals by focusing on the literal steps of the ceremonies, rather than their spiritual meanings.
The passing of celebratory garlands from sons to fathers was retained, and reemphasized as the central act of the Great Sky-Father’s celebration, rather than the sacrifices and prayers.
As part of this reinterpretation, the practice of tying ribbons was moved from the animals to the fathers, and appears to be recognizably the origin of the custom of giving ties on Father’s Day.
OURANOS (or Uranus) was the primeval god (protogenos) of the sky.
The Greeks imagined the sky as a solid dome of brass, decorated with stars, whose edges descended to rest upon the outermost limits of the flat earth.
Ouranos was the literal sky, just as his consort Gaia was the earth.
Ouranos and Gaia fathered twelve sons and six daughters. The eldest of these–the giant Kyklopes and Hekatonkheires–he locked away inside the belly of Earth.
Gaia suffered immense pain and persuaded her Titan sons to rebel. Four of these were set as sentinels at the four corners of the world, ready to grasp their father as he descended to lie upon the Earth.
The fifth took his place in the centre, and armed with an adamantine sickle, castrated Ouranos while his brothers held him firm. The sky-god’s blood fell and drenched the earth, producing the avenging Erinyes and the Gigantes.
After his downfall, Ouranos prophesied the fall of the Titanes and the punishment they would suffer for their crimes–a prophecy which was later fulfilled by Zeus who deposed the brothers and cast them into the Tartarean pit.
Ouranos does not occur in early Greek art, however Egyptian representations of the sky-goddess Nut show how he was imagined–as a gigantic, star-spangled man with long arms and legs, who rested on all fours, with his finger-tips in the far east, his toes in the far west, and his arching body raised to form the dome of the sky.
In Roman-era art he was often depicted as Aion, god of eternal time, in the guise of a man standing above the reclining form of Gaia (Earth) holding the zodiac wheel in his hand.
More Father Gods:
Zeus/Jupiter
Ares
Chronus
Shalom!
Your Brother, Gera’el Toma
Gerald W Thomas in New Hebron, Mississippi
