MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP XIX
The Sun
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Joy, success, vitality, clarity.
REVERSED
Temporary gloom, overconfidence, delayed success.
The card
A child rides a white horse beneath a radiant sun, holding a red banner, before a wall of sunflowers.
The Sun is trump XIX of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Resh (ר), “head”, and the Sun. On the Tree of Life it is path 30, joining Hod and Yesod.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Sun, XIX.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
DIVINATORY MEANINGS Material happiness, fortunate marriage, contentment.
REVERSED The same in a lesser sense.
The picture and its symbolism
The naked child mounted on a white horse and displaying a red standard has been mentioned already as the better symbolism connected with this card. It is the destiny of the Supernatural East and the great and holy light which goes before the endless procession of humanity, coming out from the walled garden of the sensitive life and passing on the journey home. The card signifies, therefore, the transit from the manifest light of this world, represented by the glorious sun of earth, to the light of the world to come, which goes before aspiration and is typified by the heart of a child.
But the last allusion is again the key to a different form or aspect of the symbolism. The sun is that of consciousness in the spirit—the direct as the antithesis of the reflected light. The characteristic type of humanity has become a little child therein—a child in the sense of simplicity and innocence in the
sense of wisdom. In that simplicity, he bears the seal of Nature and of Art; in that innocence, he signifies the restored world. When the self-knowing spirit has dawned in the consciousness above the natural mind, that mind in its renewal leads forth the animal nature in a state of perfect conformity.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part II § 2 and Part III § 3. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The numbered cards it governs
Three of Wands: a decan ruled by Sun · Six of Cups: a decan ruled by Sun · Ten of Swords: a decan ruled by Sun · Four of Pentacles: a decan ruled by Sun · Eight of Pentacles: a decan ruled by Sun
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Le Soleil, XIX.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Twenty-Two Paths & the Tarot · 18 min
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.