The Sun

The picture

A child rides a white horse out from behind a grey brick wall. Naked, a wreath of flowers and one red feather in the hair, arms spread wide, holding a large orange banner that streams back across the whole right side of the card.

The horse has no saddle, no bridle and no reins. Nothing connects the child's hands to the animal.

Four sunflowers look over the wall, and they are not turned toward the sun. They face out of the picture, in the child's direction. Above everything the sun has a face with open eyes, looking directly at whoever is holding the card, its rays alternating straight and wavy.

Upright

Plain warmth, and things turning out to be exactly what they appear to be.

The Sun is the least complicated card in the deck and gets marked down for it. There is no shadow anywhere in the picture, nothing withheld, no second meaning sitting behind the first waiting to be uncovered. After twenty cards of qualified and doubled and reversed, that is not a small thing to arrive at.

The nakedness and the missing audience do most of the work. Nobody is watching. The child is not performing the ride for anyone, is not being observed doing well, and would presumably be doing exactly this if the card had been drawn from the other side of the wall. What the card describes is the state of having nothing to hide, which most of the rest of the deck is in one way or another about the difficulty of.

No reins

The Chariot, twelve cards earlier, also has nothing connecting the driver to the animals pulling him, and there the omission is the whole problem: two sphinxes straining in different directions, held together by concentration alone.

Here the same absence means the opposite. The horse walks, the child sits easily with both arms out and neither hand on the animal, and nothing needs holding because nothing is pulling away. The same absence appears twice in the deck and means control in one card and its complete unnecessity in the other.

Anyone reading the Sun as a card of achievement should sit with that for a moment. No effort is depicted. There is no evidence the child did anything at all.

Reversed

The light behind cloud. Gladness delayed, or arriving at somebody too tired to take delivery of it.

Even reversed this is not a dark card. What it most reliably names is the peculiar flatness of a good thing that failed to land — the achievement that did not feel like one, the news everybody else was pleased about, the holiday spent waiting to start enjoying it.

What it is not

A reward. The child did nothing to earn the sun, and reading the card as payment for effort imports a transaction the picture does not contain. It also makes the card impossible to accept for exactly the people who most need it, since anyone who suspects they have not earned their good fortune will simply decline it.

Look again at the sunflowers, which have turned away from the light to face the child. Whatever is being given here is not being given on merit, and the picture is quite deliberate about that.

It is also written off as a filler card, pleasant and slight. Openness without fear is not a small condition to be in, and most people manage it for about four years.

In a reading

An outcome position holds no ambiguity at all, which happens rarely enough in this deck to be worth stating flatly. Where the spread asks for advice, the Sun's is to stop hunting for the catch — the search itself is now the thing costing something.

The Moon before it and the Sun after make a sequence in place of a contrast, and read in that order the pair is one of the more encouraging things the Major Arcana does. Alongside pentacles the good news gets specific and material.