Vulcan

Vulcan

¹

the Roman god of fire and metalworking

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Vulcan

²

a hypothetical planet once thought to lie within the orbit of Mercury

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Vulcan

(vul -kăn) A hypothetical planet, thought during the 19th century to orbit the Sun within the orbit of Mercury. Searches for it during total solar eclipses and at suggested times of transit across the Sun were all unsuccessful. It is now known not to exist.

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006

Vulcan

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

Vulcan (related to the word volcano) is a “hypothetical planet” (sometimes referred to as the trans-Neptunian points or planets, or TNPs for short) that astronomers formerly speculated would be—and that a few astrologers still anticipate will be—found orbiting the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury. The nineteenth-century French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was the first person to hypothesize its existence and, shortly after he made his theories known, people began to claim that they had observed Vulcan. It was named after the ancient Roman god of fire, who was also blacksmith to the gods. Alice Bailey’s system of esoteric astrology makes extensive use of Vulcan, and some esoteric astrologers still utilize it. Many astrologers anticipated that Vulcan, when discovered, would be assigned the rulership of Virgo. As astronomers gradually abandoned the notion of an intermercurial planet, Vulcan slowly faded from astrological discourse. There is, for example, no entry for Vulcan in such standard references as the Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology or Eleanor Bach’s Astrology from A to Z. Thanks to the Star Trek television series, the name is still alive, although Mr. Spock’s home planet bears little resemblance to the hypothetical planet of astronomical history.

Sources:

Bach, Eleanor. Astrology from A to Z: An Illustrated Source Book. New York: Philosophical Library, 1990.

Brau, Jean-Louis, Helen Weaver, and Allan Edmands. Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology. New York: New American Library, 1980.

Corliss, William R. The Sun and Solar System Debris: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies. Glen Arm, MD: The Sourcebook Project, 1986.

DeVore, Nicholas. Encyclopedia of Astrology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.

Gettings, Fred. Dictionary of Astrology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

The Astrology Book, Second Edition © 2003 Visible Ink Press®. All rights reserved.

Vulcan

[′vəl·kən]

(astronomy)

A hypothetical planet that was supposed to have an orbit within the orbit of Mercury; its existence was considered about 1859 and in the next few years, but it is generally considered by present-day astronomers to be nonexistent.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Vulcan

god of destruction, placated by gifts of captured weapons. [Rom. Myth.: Howe, 294]

See: Destruction

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Vulcan

blacksmith of gods; personification of fire. [Art: Hall, 128]

See: Fire

Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

VULCAN

(database)

A version of JPLDIS ported to CP/M by Wayne Ratliff around 1980. VULCAN evolved into dBASE II.

VULCAN

(database)

The dBASE-like interpreter and compiler sold by RSPI with their Emerald Bay product.

VULCAN

(language)

An early string manipulation language.

["VULCAN - A String Handling Language with Dynamic Storage Control", E.P. Storm et al, Proc FJCC 37, AFIPS, Fall 1970].

VULCAN

(language)

A concurrent object-oriented logic programming language implemented as a preprocessor for FCP by Kahn et al at Xerox PARC.

["Vulcan: Logical Concurrent Objects", K. Kahn et al in Research Directions in Object- Oriented Programming, A.B. Shriver et al eds, MIT Press 1987].

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