The Sun

The nineteenth trump changed composition between the older and newer patterns, and the change is easy to miss because both versions are cheerful.

The French pattern shows two children beneath a large sun, standing beside or in front of a low wall. Readings of the pair vary, twins, companions, two aspects of one person, a scene of children playing, and the wall is unexplained. The Rider-Waite-Smith card replaces them with a single child riding a horse beneath a banner, in front of a wall of sunflowers. The 1909 version is more triumphal; the older one is more domestic, and arguably stranger, because two small figures in an enclosure under an enormous sun is not obviously a picture of victory.

The Sun is one of three consecutive celestial cards, Star, Moon, Sun, and their grouping is stable across nearly all early orderings, which is one of the better arguments that the trump sequence was designed with some structure rather than assembled at random. What that structure meant is not recorded.

The Golden Dawn assigned the card the letter Resh, the Sun itself, and the thirtieth path from Hod to Yesod. Resh means a head, and the order read the card as consciousness fully illuminated. It is among the least controversial attributions in the system, for the obvious reason that a card called the Sun assigned to the Sun does not require much argument.

The wall is the detail worth sitting with. It appears in both the older and the newer versions, and in neither is it explained. Whatever the card promises, something in the picture is enclosed, and readers who notice it tend to get more out of the card than readers who take it as unqualified good news.

There is not much dispute about what the Sun means, and it is worth saying so, because a domain full of contested readings can give the impression that nothing is settled.

The card reads as clarity, vitality, success that is visible to others, and the specific relief of no longer having to guess. Where the Moon before it describes a situation the querent cannot see clearly, this card describes one they can. That pairing is the most reliable thing about it.

Two refinements are worth making. The first is that the Sun is not a card of achievement so much as of exposure to daylight: what it promises is that the situation is now legible, not that it is now finished. The second is that its cheerfulness is sometimes uncomfortable in a spread. Total clarity is not always welcome, and readers occasionally find this card marking the moment a querent stopped being able to avoid something they had been managing quite well by not looking at it.

The child in both versions is doing real interpretive work. Whatever the card describes is being met without defence and without sophistication, and readers frequently take it as an instruction to stop being clever.

Waite's reversed meanings are unusually mild, the same happiness in lesser degree, a slight cloud, rather than a negation, which is another example of how far his reversals depart from the simple opposite-meaning convention taught in most modern beginner books. Anyone who has been told that a reversed card means the reverse of the card should spend an hour with Waite's own lists; the convention does not survive the encounter.