Major Arcana · 19
The Sun
Le Soleil · Il Sole
The The Sun tarot card meaning runs through both orientations: upright, joy, vitality, success; reversed, dimmed light, burnout, overconfidence. Below, its imagery across the Rider–Waite–Smith, Thoth, and Marseille decks, and what the tradition’s writers said about it.
- Element
- Fire
- Planet
- Sun
- Zodiac
- Leo (sun ruled)
- Hebrew
- Resh
- Numerology
- 19
- Timing
- Summer; Leo season (July–August); Sundays; high noon; the brightest stretch of the year.
Upright
- joy
- vitality
- success
- clarity
- celebration
- the radiant self
Reversed
- dimmed light
- burnout
- overconfidence
- false brightness
- delayed joy
The Sun Tarot Card Meaning
Upright
[object Object]
Reversed
[object Object]
The image, three ways
Rider–Waite–Smith
A great smiling sun fills the sky, rays of straight and wavy alternating. A naked child, crowned with flowers, rides a white horse holding a red banner. Sunflowers bloom over a stone wall behind.
Thoth
A radiant sun above two dancing children inside a hill of green; the new aeon imagery, with the children embodying liberated humanity.
Marseille
Le Soleil — a sun with face, two naked children embracing or playing beneath, often with a wall behind them.
Four ways a reversal speaks
After Mary K. Greer, Tarot Reversals (2002)
01 · blocked
Joy denied; the sun obscured by depression or burnout; the inner child shamed quiet.
02 · delayed
Success postponed; recognition that doesn't arrive on schedule.
03 · excessive
Toxic positivity; manic overconfidence; brightness used to deny shadow.
04 · internalized
Joy held privately; the celebration kept interior because it isn't yet survivable to announce.
What the tradition says
A.E. Waite · 1910
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
Material happiness, fortunate marriage, contentment. Waite's least ambivalent card.
Aleister Crowley · 1944
The Book of Thoth
The Sun as the lord of the new aeon — childlike, joyous, free. The straight and wavy rays are the masculine and feminine principles unified in liberated being.
Rachel Pollack · 1980
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
The Sun is the moment after the Moon's dark night — the recovery of the lost self in its essential brightness.
Sallie Nichols · 1980
Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
Nichols reads the Sun as the Self-realized — the divine child of Jungian individuation, the integration of opposites that returns the psyche to wholeness without naivety. The naked child is innocence that has been through the Moon and survived; this is not the Fool's untested innocence but its mature counterpart.
Mary K. Greer · 1984
Tarot for Your Self
Greer asks the Sun's querent to recall an hour of unguarded happiness from childhood — and to schedule something this week that resembles it. The card forbids the postponement of joy; the Sun rises whether or not the seeker has gotten everything in order first.
Shadow
The toxic positivity person; the success-addict; the spiritual narcissist who calls his ego enlightenment.
Archetypal role
The Divine Child / The Hero in Glory / The Sun God / The Realized Self
Historical notes
The Sun is one of the oldest tarot images, drawn from solar deity iconography across cultures. The figure of children playing under the sun reflects Renaissance Hermeticism's image of liberated, innocent humanity. Crowley's two dancing children embody the new aeon — the era of the Crowned and Conquering Child (Horus).
Neighbouring arcana
The Sun combinations
Bring this card into a question
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