The word Uranian alludes to
Plato's
Symposium, a discussion on
Eros (love). In this dialog,
Pausanias distinguishes between two types of love, symbolised by two different accounts of the birth of
Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In one, she was born of
Uranus (the heavens), a birth in which "the female has no part". This Uranian Aphrodite is associated with a noble love for male youths, and is the source of Ulrichs's term
urning. Another account has Aphrodite as the daughter of
Zeus and
Dione, and this Aphrodite is associated with a common love which "is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul". After Dione, Ulrichs gave the name
dioning to men who are sexually attracted to women. However, unlike Plato's account of male love, Ulrichs understood male urnings to be essentially feminine, and male dionings to be masculine in nature.
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