The Sun
The Sun signifies radiant joy, freedom, and the simple rightness of being fully and proudly yourself, a warm illumination that dissolves doubt. It acknowledges that thoughts, comparison, and societal shame can quickly blot out that light, yet emphasizes that the sun's love comes to us unconditionally and does not judge. Tarot imagery of paired figures symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites and a regained wholeness after passage through shadow. The card also holds space for complicated relationships to visibility and body, inviting acceptance, vulnerability, and the fundamental pleasure of existing in the light.
Keywords
Associations
Fire / Sun
Keywords
Freedom, joy, happiness, the wonder of life, unified mind/body/spirit, attainment, visibility, being fully and proudly yourself.
Quote
The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps. — Mary Oliver, "Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way"
Meaning — Opening
Imagine the first warm day after winter. You're in a park, or by a window, or you just stepped out onto the sidewalk, when the sun emerges from behind a cloud. You feel the sunlight as a glorious tactile heat on your skin, and you close your eyes, and the red glow is still visible through your eyelids. There is a moment there, a pause between thoughts, when you are lit up with the simple, warm pleasure of that honey-light, and everything else melts away, and you are simply, blissfully, alive. That's the Sun.
Meaning — Intrusion of Thought
But then our thoughts whir up again quickly, and we start worrying about sunscreen, and we become self-conscious of strangers observing us savoring our pie slice of joy. Life crowds in, expectations crowd in, comparison and shame crowd in, all their looming specters tall and opaque as skyscrapers, blotting out the sun. The Sun card's freedom, happiness, and rightness are hard feelings to hold on to, especially in a society that teaches so many of us to be ashamed of our bodies, our thoughts, our desires, of who we are. We learn that we are forever works-in-progress. Afraid to be seen as we are lest we be judged, we hide from the light, happiness as distant and untouchable as the sun.
Meaning — Sun Comes to Us
But we don't have to go to the sun, because the sun comes to us. Streaming its light across the empty leagues of space, the sun doesn't care about who we are or what we do, about our successes or failures, about our relative intelligence or beauty. Does a tree think itself imperfect because of its knots and burls? Does it hang its branches in shame of its height? Does it ever, ever think that it does not deserve the sun? The sun loves unconditionally, kissing everything it touches.
Tarot Imagery and Symbolism
In some older versions of the Tarot, including the Marseille decks, the Sun card shows two people in a garden, often reaching toward each other. The two people were sometimes depicted as children and sometimes adults, sometimes the same gender and sometimes different genders, but the symbolism remains the same regardless: their pairing is a unification of opposites, a rectification of separation, or, as some have called it, a marriage between the sun and the moon. Here, again, the Tarot is doing its work of undoing the seeming dualities of the conscious world. Having passed through the Moon, we are now able to bring our full selves into the Sun, wild and tame, gentle and fierce, sharp and soft, radiant and perfect and whole.
Personal Struggle with the Sun
All that being said, I have a hard time relating to the Sun. As a nonbinary person with mild gender dysphoria, less mild body dysmorphia, PTSD and high anxiety (not to mention skin that burns on a cloudy day), I look at the Sun card in bemusement every time it shows up in my readings—which in itself is a rare occurrence. For some of us, happiness and joy are complicated things, dredging up abundance or worth issues, or the suspicion of the 'too good to be true,' or the over-the-shoulder watchfulness of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. For others, that Sun-feeling of rightness in mind and body and soul is elusive at best, our bodies not matching up with our minds not matching up with our souls. And perhaps most fraught of all, the Sun is also about visibility—because it illuminates everything it touches, and so very, very many of us are afraid of being seen, being truly seen, being exposed, as ourselves.
Illustration Process
When I sat down to illustrate the Sun card for Fifth Spirit Tarot, I was at a loss. Joy, visibility, rightness—what does that look like? What does that even feel like? So I did the only thing I knew to do: I closed my eyes and imagined feeling good. What came up was a place, a spot in the park overlooking the off-leash area, where my partner and I go to sit under the trees and watch other people's dogs. We discovered the place in Portland, when we didn't have jobs yet and spent our days alternately blanketing the city in applications and bumming around with nothing to do except explore our new city and worry about the future. Sitting in the park, watching the dogs, we discovered that we were both able to forget all that for a while. The money-fear, the demoralizing job application slog, the interview anxiety, it all evaporated like dew in the sun. Surrounded by nature, watching dogs sniff each other's butts and roll in the mud, we were able to remember the easy joyful wonder of simply being, there in that moment, beside each other, alive.
Recurring Refuge
We've gone back to that spot countless times, when times are good and when they're really, really bad. Every time, I worry that it won't work, that we'll have somehow drained the happiness well, but it does. The simplicity of the happiness we're able to touch there is bottomless. It's not fleeting or dependent on exterior conditions—we've been there in the freezing cold and in the rain—but is instead just the simple joy of existing, uncomplicated and fundamental and good.
Depiction on the Card
So the people you see on this card are actually me and my partner, Aaron. It occurred to us that this might be a tad narcissistic, but it's also the most Sun-like thing we could possibly do. I illustrated Aaron shirtless because his New Year's resolution was to feel comfortable enough with his top surgery scars to be shirtless outdoors, to not care if anyone was watching, to feel the sun on his bare chest for the first time fully. As for me, I illustrated myself wearing a chest binder, which I admit I'm self-conscious about people seeing through my clothes. Since I feared the Sun's illumination, I put myself on the damn card. After all, the Sun is about being whole-heartedly and truly yourself, with ease and joy and no apologies, unconcerned with the judgements of others. The freedom of the Sun, I think, comes from the full acceptance of the self, alive with light and vulnerable with truth. The ecstasy of the Sun is the cell-deep knowledge that we are each as right and worthy and perfect as the trees, the dogs, the sky.
Wish
The image on this card is my wish, then, for Aaron and I and for all of us, that we may all be as joyful and true as a dog in mud, as a tree in spring, as a simple green-leafed thing, unselfconsciously unfurling, turning our face always toward the sun.
Trailing Punctuation
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Visual Description
Visible text on the card includes 'XIX' at the top and 'THE SUN' at the bottom; a faint watermark reads 'FIFTH SPIRIT © CLAIRE BURGESS'. The scene shows a bright yellow sun with radiating white rays and a small red kite flying across it, high in a pale blue sky. In the foreground a couple sits on a red picnic blanket: a woman in a white tank top and glasses and a shirtless man with tattoos and glasses, smiling as a brown-and-white dog stands on the man's lap licking his face. Around them are a wicker picnic basket, sunflowers, an apple, an open book, rolling green hills, trees (one with a tire swing), and small figures in the distance on a hill.
Fifth Spirit tarot
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