Uranus (mythology) castrated Uranus, from Uranus' blood, which splattered onto the earth, came the Erinyes (Furies), the Giants, and the Meliae. Also, according to the "Theogony", Cronus threw the severed genitals into the sea, around which "a white foam spread" and "grew" into the goddess Aphrodite, although according to Homer, Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In the Olympian creation myth, as Hesiod tells it in the "Theogony", Uranus came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia, but he hated the children she bore him. Hesiod named their first six sons and six daughters the Titans, the
Moons of Uranus the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air. Subsequent names, rather than continuing the airy spirits theme (only Puck and Mab continued the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material. In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer Gerard Kuiper after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest". The current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays